What a difference a decade makes? Ten years ago, Microsoft was fighting a U.S. district judge's ruling to break the company apart for violating federal antitrust laws. Now, a New York think tank has named it one of the world's 110 most ethical companies.

The Ethisphere Institute released its annual list of corporate good guys based on "real and sustained ethical leadership within their industries." The 2011 list, which makes no attempt to rank the companies, includes some well-known do-gooders such as outdoor apparel maker Patagonia and the Whole Foods Market grocery chain. From techdom, Ethisphere includes Adobe Systems, Salesforce.com, and eBay, among others.

The Ethisphere Institute, which produces an annual list of the world's most ethical companies, has created its "WME Index" that shows the publicly traded companies among 2011 World's Most Ethical Company honorees outperformed the S&P 500 since 2007. (Click image for larger version.)

(Credit: Ethisphere Institute)

As longtime Microsoft watcher Todd Bishop notes, it's an honor that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Back then, Microsoft was arguing before a federal appeals court to overturn U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling that the company should be split in two, an argument Microsoft eventually won. Jackson wanted Microsoft cleaved to further prevent it from leveraging its PC operating system hegemony into new markets at the expense of rivals.

Much has changed in the intervening decade. Microsoft is still the dominant purveyor of PC operating systems. But the power derived from that business is much less, as Web services replace packaged software. The modus operandi may have changed at Microsoft over the years. But so too have the circumstances.

To be fair, Microsoft has improved its corporate governance guidelines since its eventual settlement with the Justice Department over the antitrust suit. And as far as do-gooding goes, the software company has long been a model corporate philanthropist.

For its part, Ethisphere says it chose Microsoft and the other companies on the list based on four categories--ethics and compliance; reputation, leadership and innovation; governance; and corporate citizenship and responsibility. The fact that regulators haven't bothered Microsoft for years surely helped, just as it likely hindered Google, which is facing an investigation by the European Union. In fact, Google did not make this year's Ethisphere list even though it had in the past.

2. iPad 2's weight loss secrets bared

When Apple put the original iPad under the knife, it yielded a fetchingly slimmer iPad 2. IHS iSuppli shows how they did it.

"Thinner is better" is an Apple mantra. And the popularity of the MacBook Air, iPhone, and iPod proves that consumers agree. The iPad is no exception.

iPad 1, iPad 2 thickness comparison.

(Credit: IHS iSuppli)

By shaving off a sizable 34 percent of the original iPad's body fat--to 8.8 millimeters from 13.4 millimeters--Apple got the weight down to 600 grams, down 15 percent from 700 grams for the iPad 1.

How did it do it? The biggest reduction in thickness came in the iPad 2's battery subsystem, wrote Kevin Keller, a teardown analyst at IHS iSuppli, in a research note today. This part of the iPad 2 is 2.5 millimeters thick, a 59 percent reduction from the 6.1 millimeters of the original iPad, according to Keller.

"The iPad 2 battery design represents a major shift from the iPad 1," Keller said. "Apple moved from two thicker cells to three thinner ones, flattening out the entire battery structure. The new design also allowed Apple to eliminate an injection-molded plastic support frame from the battery subsystem, further cutting down its thickness."

This refinement yielded a 10 to 15 percent increase in the iPad 2's power density, a measure of battery life relative to the mass of the battery, according to Keller.

Other weight-loss factors include the elimination of a stamped sheet metal frame from the display--slashing the size of the display 17 percent from the iPad 1--and new glass technology that reduces thickness but maintains durability.

"Apple has particularly focused on thickness as a point of differentiation for the iPad 2. Other new tablets coming to market, all of which are about as thick as the iPad 1, now look fat in comparison to the iPad 2. This is likely to cause a scramble as competitors rush to slim down to match Apple," Keller wrote.

3. Twitter adds option to always use HTTPS

Twitter has tweaked its security settings to offer an option to always enable Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, or HTTPS.

Although the more secure setting has always been available, in the past Twitter users had to browse specifically to https://twitter.com to take advantage of it. Now, the tighter security is a new option found in the Twitter settings page.

Clicking on your account name in Twitter and then selecting Settings brings up the appropriate page. From there, you'll see the new option at the bottom of the page. Checking "always use https" ensures that each Twitter session will now encrypt your username, password, and any other personal data.

The capability to use HTTPS is already the default option for Twitter's mobile iPhone app, according to a Twitter blog posted yesterday, but not for Twitter's mobile site. To enable the tighter security when browsing the mobile version, you'll still have to specify the address as https://mobile.twitter.com. Twitter also said that people who use a third-party mobile Twitter app will need to check to see if it allows for HTTPS.

Twitter added that it plans at some point to set up HTTPS as the default option on its Web site so that users won't need to manually enable it.

Offering stronger security than the standard HTTP, HTTPS uses SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt and decrypt information passed back and forth over the Internet. Twitter sees the tighter security as a much-needed option for people who tweet over unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

The new option also follows a recent push by New York Sen. Charles Schumer who wrote to Amazon, Yahoo, and Twitter asking them to switch their default pages from HTTP to HTTPS to better protect people using public Wi-Fi connections.

4. Acquisition to improve YouTube image quality

Google has acquired a Dublin, Ireland, company called Green Parrot Pictures to help improve the quality of videos posted on YouTube.

The company's technology "helps make videos look better while at the same time using less bandwidth and improving playback speed," said Jeremy Doig, director of Google video technology, in a post on Google's YouTube blog yesterday. It's been used in "Lord of the Rings," "X-Men," and "Spider-Man" films and apparently Google now wants to benefit from it as well.

Doig said the acquisition will help improve video marred by shortcomings of equipment or the person shooting the video:

Some of YouTube's most popular or moving videos are shot using low-quality mobile phones and video cameras. Take, for example, videos of recent protests in Libya. Although emotionally captivating, they can be jerky, blurry or unsteady. What if there was a technology that could improve the quality of such videos--sharpening the image, reducing visual noise and rendering a higher-quality, steadier video--all while your video is simply being uploaded to the site? You can imagine how excited we were when we discovered a small, ambitious company based in Ireland that can do exactly this.

Google didn't disclose terms of the acquisition or how and when the technology would be incorporated. One thing is certain, though: such post-processing tends to be computationally taxing, and adding it has the potential to suck up a lot of processor power. Right now, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute.

5. Deal with it: SXSW has changed

Believe it or not, this was a relatively calm scene compared with what the Austin Convention Center looked like during most of SXSWi.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--The first time Steve Jang came to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (historically known as SXSWi), it was 2006. He had come to the then-tiny geek-culture fest to help launch a music social-networking service called Imeem. Though SXSWi was known as a wacky gathering of party-friendly dot-commers and digital futurists, making a splash as a start-up was a pretty routine procedure.

"Back then, it was a very concerted thing," Jang told CNET. "You got a booth, you put together a team, and everyone wore the t-shirts, and you hired a PR firm, and you really wanted to do a big product debut. It was a big tent-pole effort."

Flash forward five years: Imeem got bigger but never big enough, and fizzled after a sale to MySpace. But some of the other companies that were tiny start-ups in 2006 (if they existed at all) have gotten huge. The iPhone debuted. So did the iPad. Social media went from geek curiosity to marketing-world obsession. And Steve Jang, in town to launch a mobile music app called Soundtracking, is one of many who's observed that SXSWi--now with possibly as many as 20,000 attendees--is a totally different event.

"This really is sort of the new CES for Internet and mobile, and that's on many levels," said Jang, comparing the sponsor- and party-filled SXSWi to the notoriously glitzy annual Las Vegas-based electronics trade show. "CES is kind of irrelevant unless you're selling hardware. I think for mobile developers, social app developers, this has become the new CES and it's sort of a mix of testing, launch, marketing, business development, boondoggle, socializing, sort of all the same things."

Brands on the run at SXSW

    

Complaints about the massive size and scope of SXSWi, which has been growing pretty much exponentially since it was the semi-official launch pad for Twitter in 2007, are all over the place. Hotel rooms seemed to be booked up months in advance. The selection of conference panels was so packed and convoluted that, for example, many attendees didn't know that comedian Rainn Wilson was speaking on a panel until photos of Wilson onstage in a cartoonish superhero costume popped up all over Twitter after the fact. A New York Observer writer published an angry editorial about the event, declaring, "Let's destroy this sham of a technological confabulation once and for all." A commenter snarked in response: "Looks like someone couldn't find a hotel."

Let's get real: Barring extreme circumstances or a violent rupturing of the current does-it-or-doesn't-it-exist venture capital bubble, this festival is not going away. In fact, it'll probably be back in 2012 with more big-ticket sponsors following the lead of PepsiCo and General Motors, more social-media start-ups attempting to use SXSWi as a launch pad, and yes, more open-bar parties. Maybe some of those who have been griping about never wanting to return to SXSWi will make good on their promises. But, without a doubt, their spaces will be filled up by new attendees with new reasons for showing up at the Austin Convention Center or environs.

So what can be done? Griping won't do anything productive. If marketers want to pump money into an annual weeklong nerd party in Austin, they'll do it whether bloggers are whining about it or not. Start-ups hoping to launch at the festival will have to realize that they'll be surrounded not only by the presences of huge brands both tech- and non-tech but also by other start-ups looking to do exactly the same thing that they are. They'll have to change their tactics accordingly.

"The way that we look at big marketing dollars is we understand that we don't have the budgets to go up against a Foursquare or a Pepsi," said Ryan Kuder, vice president of marketing at local recommendations start-up Bizzy, which rolled into Austin with "five people and a bag of t-shirts" in terms of promotion. "One option was 'go big.' Another option was 'go small.' We went with 'go small' because placing really large bets at this point in a start-up's life cycle--if you lose the pain is a lot greater."

In the new, bigger, noiser SXSWi, a small start-up's trade show booth will probably go ignored. Attempting to get on the packed party circuit will probably just look like a waste of venture dollars. Spending too much time at loud parties where it's impossible to hold a conversation will probably just result in an overworked larynx and a hangover. But doing some advance planning to seek out like-minded people and companies, start-ups say, can make life easier at a festival where it's still worth showing up just to test out a new product and see how people react.

"For us, it's been like a giant Petri dish," Kuder told CNET. "Through the hallway conversations, through not a lot of panels but through just the conversations and talking to folks and seeing what's happening, I think that we're coming home with a much more developed sense of the direction that we hope to be going in when we get out of here."

As organizer Hugh Forrest said before he introduced the first SXSWi keynote speech this year, "If you don't like a panel, move on." In other words, there's a lot to do at SXSWi; if you don't like what you're doing, find something else that can be more productive. Many 2011 attendees even found that for what they wanted to get done, they didn't need an official SXSWi pass, and they set up shop elsewhere in town.

That's not to say that SXSWi's organizers couldn't do a few things to help alleviate the stress that comes with attending a massive conference that sprawls across Austin's entire downtown. Among the festival's attendees are literally thousands of developers, designers, hackers, and other creative problem-solvers--why not get them involved? Some aspects of SXSWi, like badge pick-up (those lines!) and the labyrinthine online schedule, haven't been able to scale with the size of the conference. A proposal to the people behind SXSWi: Crowdsource. Hold a contest in which you challenge people and start-ups to design and build a new way of making SXSWi logistically top-notch. Offer some prize money (or even just free attendance and a comped suite at the Hilton). Whoever wins, the solution will almost undoubtedly offer some improvements over the current system. You have a festival full of brilliant people who will be thrilled to pitch in--take advantage of this.

In spite of the growing numbers of SXSWi haters, and in spite of the fact that completely dominating the festival's zeitgeist the way Twitter did four years ago seems difficult, there's still no substitute for an industry gathering in the Web and mobile development sectors. The tech world still needs and wants this. SXSWi 2011 was less a conference than a much-needed test bed for new promotions like the partnership between Foursquare and American Express, edgy marketing initiatives, and fresh habits of mobile behavior like the much-hyped showdown between a handful of similar "group messaging" applications, which permitted attendees to communicate and travel in packs as Twitter has grown too overwhelmingly popular to use as a fine-tuned way to navigate the festival. (The "group messaging wars," by the way, did not have a clear winner.)

And attendees should keep in mind that with a bigger and more diverse festival, there are a wider array of possibilities for making a name for oneself. For one, in addition to launching a new start-up, Steve Jang can boast that he won a barbecue sauce recipe contest at a tech start-up's rooftop pool party. That probably wouldn't have been an option back in 2006.