Squawk Box - September 10, 2008 - MessageSling, Apple's new announcements and Google's impact on United's stock Conference call organized by Dan York

Out at DEMO in San Diego, Alec saw a demo from MessageSling - http://messagesling.com/ - a company that offers a new take on telephony all based out in the cloud. He said to me that it involved Asterisk and FreeSWITCH all running on Amazon EC2 systems and more... they just launched yesterday so there's not much info on their site, but we'll have one of the founders, Scot Junkin, on the call to talk about what they are doing.

Next - yesterday, Sept 9th, Apple had their "Let's Rock" keynote where Steve Jobs introduced iTunes 8.0, a new form factor for the iPod Nano, new release of the iPod Touch (including a direct challenge for it to be a game controller), their new "Genius" playlist creation tool and much more.

We'll talk about this latest buzz from Cupertino - what do you all think of it? what stood out the most from the announcements? Can Apple try to push this "Genius" thing any harder? Initial impressions of iTunes 8.0? (I'm told Alec's picture looks great in the podcast Coverflow!)

If we still have time, we'll leave Apple aside and also talk the case recently where Google News pulled up an item from 2002 about United Airlines entering bankruptcy and posted that as new news, causing United's stock to drop by 11%! Does this speak to larger issues about our reliance on automated results?

Given that I'll be hosting and Alec is not on the call, there will be NO discussion of that sport that all those Canadians like to watch of extremely-high-paid men chasing a small object around a sheet of ice... ;-)