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U.S. researchers closer to creating new solar cells

2008-12-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have taken one step closer to creating high-efficiency solar cells using cheap plastic with a dash of silicon, it was announced on Saturday.

The solar cells, being developed by researchers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), have significantly greater sunlight absorption and conversation than previous polymers, the university said in a press release on its website.

The researchers want these easy-to-use plastic solar energy cells to be sold at local hardware stores, and then hung like posters on the wall, said the release.

"We hope that solar cells will one day be as thin as paper and be attached to the surface of your choice," said co-author Hsiang-Yu Chen, a UCLA graduate student in engineering. "We'll also be able to create different colors to match different applications."

The research team found that substituting a silicon atom for carbon atom in the backbone of the plastic markedly improved the material's photovoltaic properties, said the release.

The new polymer solar cells use organic compounds to produce electricity from sunlight, are much easier to produce than traditional silicon-based solar cells and are also environmentally friendly, the release said.

"Previously, the synthesizing process for the polymer was very complicated. We've been able to simplify the process and make it much easier to mass produce," said Jianhui Hou, UCLA postdoctoral researcher and co-author of the study.

"Though this is a milestone achievement, we will continue to work on improving the materials," he said.

"Ideally, we'd like to push the performance of the solar cell to higher than 10 percent efficiency. We know the potential is there," he added.

Resource - xinhuanet

China to launch new remote sensing satellite

2008-12-06T20:42:00.000-08:00

JIUQUAN, Gansu Province, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- China will launch a new remote sensing satellite "Yaogan " on Monday at the northwestern Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the northwestern province of Gansu, an official with the center said on Sunday.

The satellite was to be aboard a Long March-2D carrier rocket into the space "at an appropriate time", the official said.

At present, both the rocket and the satellite were in good condition and the preparation went on well.

The satellite would be used for scientific research, land resources surveying, crop yield estimate and disaster prevention and relief. "It will play a positive role in the country's economic development," he said.

Its predecessor "Yaogan III" was launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China's Shanxi Province on Nov. 12, 2007.

The "Yaogan I" satellite was launched from Taiyuan on April 27,2006, and the "Yaogan II" was launched on May 25, 2007 from Jiuquan.

Resource - xinhuanet

Vodafone Eying €2.8 Billion Take-Over of German Cable TV Operator

2008-12-03T02:44:00.000-08:00

Vodafone is reported to be in talks which could lead to a €2.8 billion take-over of the German cable TV operator, Kabel Deutschland (KDG). The company is currently owned by the private equity group, Providence - which brought the company three years ago.

KDG has around 11 million customers in Germany and would be a good fit with Vodafone's local landline subsidiary, Arcor which controls about 14% of the broadband market.

KDG announced increased second quarter revenues last week, by 15.4% to €339.3 million while EBITDA increased 30% to €142.9 million. The higher numbers are partly attributable to the networks acquired earlier this year from the Orion Cable Group.

The firm recently confirmed that it was taking another look at trying to acquire some smaller regional operators. In 2004 KDG tried to buy two cable operators serving regional areas, which would have given the company nationwide coverage, but the deal was blocked by the cartel office amid fears of the company gaining a dominant market position. Changes in the market place with the emergence of telcos providing TV services should make cartel fears easier to overcome.

“A nationwide cable operator would enhance competition vis-à-vis the large telephone incumbents which would also be in the best consumer interest. We want to play a leading role in any such market consolidation,” KDG's CEO, Adrian v. Hammerstein said when the company announced its financial results last week.

Kabel Deutschland was founded in January 1999 by Deutsche Telekom, after it was ordered to spin off its entire cable TV business as required by regulatory terms.

For historic reasons, Kabel Deutschland cannot offer its products directly to all are connected via Kabel Deutschland's network, since only one third of all viewers are direct customers. In the early 1980s, when the cable network was originally established, Kabel Deutschland's predecessor Deutsche Bundespost had to leave in-house cables to other companies or the house owners. This turned out to be a significant obstacle since Kabel Deutschland now has to make single contracts with hundreds of small cable operators.

Resource - cellular-news

Bangladeshi Confirms 3G Licenses by Next March

2008-12-03T02:41:00.000-08:00

Bangladesh's telecoms regulator, the BTRC has confirmed that it plans to award 3G licenses in the country by March 2009 - a delay on earlier promises to offer the licenses by the end of this year. During the launch of a trial 3G network by Ericsson in August, BTRC chairman Maj Gen (retd.) Manzurul Alam put a valuation of US$200 million on the licenses.

"The 3G licences will be issued by March next year ... the licences would be awarded through an open auction," Alam told the Reuters news agency.

A couple of months ago, the regulator sold a tranch of additional radio spectrum for US$204 million. Three incumbent operators brought the spectrum which the regulator said was necessary to cope with their increasing subscriber base.

Grameenphone, Banglalink and Aktel bought 7.5, 5 and 5 megahertz frequency respectively, at the rate of Tk 80 crore per MHz - giving them 21.9MHz, 17.5MHz and 17.8MHz respectively. Three other operators did not bid for the spectrum. Teletalk has 15.2MHz, Warid has 15MHz and Citycell has 10MHz.

A report by the GSMA last year had called on the regulator to issue the licenses by the 3rd quarter of this year. The spectrum should be licensed in a way that reflects its economic value and ensures it is efficiently used, the GSMA report argued.

The launch of 3G services could also assist in closing the "digital divide" which results in Bangladesh being poorly served by broadband internet services. A recent ITU report on telecoms in the Asia-Pacific region found that the minimum advertised broadband speed in countries such as Hong Kong and Japan is faster than the maximum broadband speed available in Bangladesh.

The country currently has six operators - and according to figures from the Mobile World, ended the first half of this year with just under 43.7 million mobile subscribers - which is still a population penetration level of 28.5%. Also worth noting is that while the country has six operators, only four of them are of any significant scale, Grameenphone (20.3m), Banglalink (9.5m) and Aktel (7.8m) and finally, Warid Telecom (3.3m). The two remaining long term incumbents, Citycell and Teletalk add up to 2.7 million customers between them.

Resource - cellular-news

O2 UK Launches Low-Energy Phone Charger

2008-12-03T02:39:00.000-08:00

UK mobile operator, Telefónica O2 has announced the launch of an energy efficient universal mobile phone charger, which the company says is amongst the most energy efficient in the UK cutting energy consumption by as much as 70 per cent compared to standard mobile phone chargers.

The O2 Universal Charger, which meets the strict energy efficient guidelines of the US Energy Star rating, contains a power control system. This system considerably reduces charge to the mobile phone once the battery is fully charged even if the charger is left switched on in a plug socket. O2 estimates that phones left on charge costs Brits over £30 million in wasted energy every year. Heat loss from the charger has also been eliminated, another source of significant energy loss from standard mobile chargers.

Recent research conducted by O2 has revealed that a typical mobile phone charger wastes over 2.8 KWh of energy per year. O2 estimates that by cutting off the unneeded charge to mobile phones, the Universal Charger could save the equivalent carbon emissions of over 36,000 cars per annum. In addition to being energy efficient, the base unit of the Universal Charger will be accompanied by an inter-changeable leads making the charger compatible with most leading brands of mobile phones and eliminating the need to use a different charger with each mobile.

Ronan Dunne, CEO, Telefónica O2 UK, comments: “People are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact products are having on the environment and with mobile the single biggest impact is the energy used in charging. The O2 Universal Charger offers customers a simple yet effective way of reducing the environmental impact of their phones and reduces the waste associated with charger disposal.”

Resource - cellular-news

Iraq to Fine All Three Mobile Networks Over License Breaches

2008-12-03T02:38:00.000-08:00

Iraq's three mobile phone networks all face fines from the government for apparently failing to meet conditions in their network licenses - reports Middle East Economic Digest (MEED). All three networks have failed to meet QoS requirements, while Korek Telecom has been censured for failing to meet coverage requirements.

The smallest operator, Korek Telecom has a national license, but coverage which is limited to mainly the Northern region of the country. An expansion to national coverage would need the financial muscle of an outside partner - which has lead to recent rumours that Etisalat is in talks to take a stake in the firm.

"Asiacell is bad and Zain is very bad," Hayam al-Yasiri, an adviser to the Telecommunications Ministry told MEED. "Korek is breaching the licence because of the coverage and the service. Korek up to this moment does not cover many cities, although according to the licence they should cover them."

The decision on the fines is expected before the end of the year
Resource - cellular-news

Romania Grants WiMAX License

2008-12-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

Romania's new telecoms regulator, ANC (which recently replaced ANRCTI) says that it has awarded a WiMAX 3.6Mhz license to Radiocommunications National Society (SNR) for a payment of €2 million.

SNR was granted the right to use the 3657-3685 MHz and 3757-3785 MHz frequency bands under the terms of the Government Emergency Ordinance no.18/2008. By observing the provisions of this Ordinance, SNR released the 3600–3657 MHz and 3700–3757 MHz radio frequency bands it held, thus receiving the right to implement BWA systems in the two remaining sub-bands. As regards the released bands, ANC is currently conducting a comparative selection procedure in view of granting two licences.

The minimum license conditions require the coverage of at least 50 cities and at least 20 towns. The coverage is defined in relation to the number of base stations installed and in operation in a certain locality, within a certain deadline.

The amount of the licence fee to be paid by SNR was calculated proportionally to the validity period of the right to use the radio spectrum. SNR is entitled to use these radio frequencies until 24 July, 2011.

Resource - cellular-news

"Dawning 6000" to use Chinese-made Loongson processor

2008-12-03T02:33:00.000-08:00

The high-performance computer "Dawning 6000," which will have a computing speed over 1,000 trillion operations per second, will adopt the Chinese-made general processor Loongson for the first time as its core component. This is according to the Dawning Information Industry Company.

"Dawning 6000" is currently jointly developed by the Institute of Computing Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Dawning Information Industry Company.

Li Guojie, chairman of Dawning Information Industry Company and director and academician of the Institute of Computing Technology, said research and development of the Dawning 6000 is expected to be completed in two years. By then, Chinese-made high-performance computers will achieve two major breakthroughs: first, adopting domestic-made central processing units (CPUs) will be technically obstacle-free; second, the existing cluster-based system structure of high-performance computers will be changed once the computing speed reaches 1,000 trillion operations per second.
Resource - People’s Daily Online

In Courtroom Showdown, Bush Demands Amnesty for Spying Telecoms

2008-12-03T02:32:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO — The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation's telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans' private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants.

At issue in the high-stakes showdown — set to begin at 10:00 a.m. PST — are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program in the years following the Sept. 11 terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution.

In July, as part of a wider domestic spying bill, Congress voted to kill the lawsuits and grant retroactive amnesty to any phone companies that helped with the surveillance; President-elect Barack Obama was among those who voted for the law in the Senate. On Tuesday, lawyers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation are set to urge the federal judge overseeing those lawsuits to reject immunity as unconstitutional. At stake, they say, is the very principle of the rule of law in America.

"I think it does set a very frightening precedent that it's okay for people to break the law because they can just have Congress bail them out later," says EFF legal director Cindy Cohn. "It's very troubling."

The judge presiding over the case, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco, announced late Monday he wanted to discuss 11 questions (.pdf) at Tuesday's hearing, one of which goes directly to the heart of the immunity legislation.

"Is there any precedent for this type of enactment that is analogous in all of these respects: retroactivity; immunity for constitutional violations; and delegation of broad discretion to the executive branch to determine whether to invoke the provision?," the judge asked.

Carl Tobias, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, says the immunity legislation, if upheld, "makes it possible to extend immunity to other areas of the law."

He agreed, for example, that it would not be far-fetched to imagine Congress immunizing ExxonMobil for the 1989 Valdez oil spill "for national security reasons." A jury awarded about $5 billion in punitive damages in that case, an amount the courts reduced to $500 million.

In the telecom immunity challenge, the government argues that the telecoms should not be punished, or suffer the threat of punishment, for a surveillance program that the Bush administration claims was designed only to fight terrorism. The government also denies the lawsuits' allegations that the surveillance was a broad dragnet that sucked down Americans' communications on a wholesale basis.

The administration also says the immunity is warranted because the lawsuits threaten to expose government secrets.

The EFF brought the original spying lawsuit in 2006 against AT&T, and has since been joined by dozens of others targeting the nation's telecommunications companies.

The EFF's case, which has been consolidated with the others in the U.S. District Court of San Francisco, includes so-called whistle-blower documents from a former AT&T technician. The EFF claims the documents describe a secret room in an AT&T building in San Francisco that is wired to share raw internet traffic with the NSA.

The government sought to dismiss the original EFF case, and others that followed, on the grounds that they threatened to expose state secrets. Judge Walker has ruled against the government, saying the case could proceed.

The government appealed. But before the appeal was decided, Congress on July 9 gave the president the power to grant immunity to the carriers.

The EFF is now challenging the immunity legislation on the grounds that it seeks to circumvent the Constitution's separation of powers clause, as well as Americans' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.

"The legislation is an attempt to give the president the authority to terminate claims that the president has violated the people's Fourth Amendment rights," the EFF's Cohn says. "You can't do that."

Two weeks ago, the administration told Walker in a court filing (.pdf) that the immunity legislation "represents the considered judgment of our nation's political branches that, in the unique historical circumstances following the 9/11 attacks, telecommunications companies should not bear the burden of defending against claims that those companies assisted the government in its efforts to detect and prevent further terrorist attacks."

Congress, the government continued, "concluded that those companies should not face further litigation if they provided such assistance pursuant to a court order or a written certification, directive or request from a senior government official, or did not provide the alleged assistance."

The immunity law allows the government to file a classified brief with Judge Walker activating immunity for a particular communication company. Walker then has little power to deny the request, unless the judge finds the immunity legislation is itself unconstitutional.

Oral arguments in Walker's courtroom are scheduled for 10 a.m. PST on Tuesday. Threat Level will cover the proceedings live.

Resource - Wired

More Rumours of a Nokia Laptop Computer

2008-12-03T02:31:00.000-08:00

Rumours that Nokia may start production of its own brand laptop computers have resurfaced after UBS analyst Maynard Um issued a research note saying that it was increasingly likely to happen

Nokia MikroMikko 1 (credit Mika Ojutkangas)

Ericsson Portable PC (credit Datasalen)

"Given the rise of net-books/dongles sales, convergence between high-end mobile phones and laptops, and forays by computer manufacturers (Apple, HP) into smartphones, we think it is only a matter of time before Nokia launches notebook type devices,” Um wrote in the note - warning that they he does not expect a product to hit the shops until Q3 2009 at the earliest.

"Our checks indicate Nokia may be working on a 9”-10” notebook/tablet PC with a second OLED display, touchpad, near field communication (NFC) capability, HDMI out, and Linux OS. Given its seemingly higher end functionality, we do not think it will compete in the traditional netbook (~US$400) market."

There were rumours around April this year that Nokia was looking at launching a range of computers - but this was firmly refuted at the time by Nokia’s global marketing VP, Anssi Vanjoki.

Vanjoki said: "I have heard the rumours and I can categorically say Nokia is not entering the laptop market." Although Apple is known for selling laptop computers, Vanjoki said: "They sell some Notebooks, but the growth is from iPods. I don’t think they’re having commercial success with Notebooks."

It is worth noting though that Nokia sold computers in the past.

In the mid 1980's Nokia had a PC division, and merged it with Ericsson Information Systems, whose origins lay in the purchase by Ericsson of the computer business of Saab. The merged company, Nokia Data was later sold to UK based ICL in 1991 - and later became part of the larger Fujitsu group.

Nokia Data's most notable computer was the MikroMikko 1 - which was sold around the world.

Ericsson for its part sold mainly IBM compatible computers - and even launched a laptop (by the standards of the time) in 1985.

Resource - cellular-news

Amazon's database service enters public testing

2008-12-03T02:30:00.000-08:00

SimpleDB, one of Amazon.com's suite of online services that people can use to build Web sites or other computing operations, is out of private beta testing.

The service lets programmers store database records at Amazon and extract specific data from them. Along with the shift to public beta testing, Amazon cut the price for storing data from $1.50 to 25 cents per gigabyte per month.

SimpleDB, introduced nearly a year ago, is a newer arrival into the Amazon Web Services suite. Other services let customers process data, store raw data, distribute content, and store messages sent among different computers.

The company also announced basic level of use is free for at least six months--the first time the company has done so with one of its Web services. After various thresholds are met in data transfer and computer processing, customers must pay according to usage.

"We've made the business decision to go with SimpleDB even simpler than it was before. You can now get started for free. For at least the next six months, you can consume up to 500MB of storage, and you can use up to 25 machine-hours each month. You can transfer 1GB of data in, and another 1GB out," said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog posting Monday.

Among those using SimpleDB are Pluribo, Issuu, and MyMiniLife.com, Amazon said.

To make SimpleDB easier to use, Amazon said it plans to release a new interface similar to the SQL (Structured Query Language) widely used in databases today. It also plans a mechanism to let people more easily upload multiple items.

Resource - CNET

BenQ Joybook U101 launches, gives almost no joy

2008-12-03T02:29:00.001-08:00

M
The BenQ Joybook Lite U101 we spied back when it was announced in September has just launched, and though there's nothing incredibly exciting here, we thought we'd give you a quick rundown, because we're just cool like that. The U101 boasts completely standard netbook fair -- an Atom N270 CPU, Intel 945GSE chipset, 1GB of DDR2 memory, with 80-160GB mechanical drives and 4-16GB SSD options. It's also got a 16:9 display with a 1024 x 576 resolution (rare for a netbook), a 1.3 megapixel webcam, and three USB 2.0 ports. The sassy little number comes in blue, pink, white and black, and it can be yours for €398 ($503) in Taiwan right now, but we've got no word on when it will be available elsewhere. Dip this puppy in gold or something and then maybe, just maybe we'll bite.
Resource - Engadget

Firefox Surpassing 50% Market Share in More Regions

2008-12-03T02:27:00.000-08:00

On top of today’s exceptional news about Firefox surpassing 20% worldwide market share during the month of November, we have further good news to share. After Firefox reached the 50% market share milestone in Indonesia back in July, we can now say the same about two more regions: Slovenia and Macedonia. Below you’ll find the November 2008 numbers according to Net Applications.

What’s the key takeaway here?

Our market share in the regions above has been growing like crazy. For example, since our July announcement about Indonesia, we’ve seen Firefox’s share in Indonesia pick up another 7%, Slovenia 4%, Slovakia 5%, and the Philippines an astounding 13%!

A tremendous amount of credit here goes to the Mozilla community. John Lilly summed it up best: “The open web is more vibrant than ever, and the thousands of Mozilla contributors around the world have played a major role in making it that way.”

Resource - Blog of Metrics

Obama-Biden transition site Change.gov now under a Creative Commons license

2008-12-03T02:26:00.000-08:00

Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, has undergone some important and exciting changes over the past few days. Among them is the site’s new copyright notice, which expresses that the bulk of Change.gov is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC BY.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Content includes all materials posted by the Obama-Biden Transition project. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Change.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

This is great news and a encouraging sign that the new administration has a clear sense of the importance of openness in government and on the web (there’s a bit more on this over at Lessig’s blog). The embrace of Creative Commons licensing on Change.gov is consistent with earlier support by both Obama and McCain for the idea of “open debates.” (It’s also in line with Obama’s decision to publish the pictures in his Flickr Photostream under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license - pretty cool!)

Tim O’Reilly has written a smart post (which has elicited some very thoughtful reader comments) recommending that Change.gov use revision control as a way to further improve transparency and make it possible for the public to review any changes that occur on the site. Of course, licensing is just one component of openness, but getting licensing right is necessary for enabling people to truly take advantage of technologies that facilitate collaboration.

Update: Several people have pointed out that “works created by an agency of the United States government are public domain at the moment of creation” (see Wikipedia for more on this). Change.gov is not currently the project of a government agency, but a 501(c)(4) that has been set up to manage the Obama-Biden transition. Also, the public is being invited to contribute their own comments and works to the site, and it is important to have a clear marking of the permissions that other people have to this material.

Resource - Creative Commons

SixApart Hires Pownce Founders, Closes Service

2008-12-03T02:25:00.000-08:00

The team behind microblogging service Pownce announced on the company blog today that it is joining blog software company SixApart and closing Pownce in two weeks. Pownce left private beta with a big launch just 11 months ago but the service never grew beyond a core group of fans.

The Pownce team says it plans to "come back with something much better in 2009." We're excited to see what Pownce co-founders Leah Culver and Mike Malone do at SixApart; it should be a very good environment for them to innovate in.

This is the second move where well known innovators have taken their technology and brains to a bigger company and shuttered their startup that we've reported on in a week. Last week open source star Rael Dornfest sold his personal assistant startup Sandy to Twitter.

Though these startups were inspiring, we also think it quite noteworthy that even at a down time economically there are still jobs for super smart people. We covered the Pownce/SixApart deal in greater depth at our hire-tracking site Jobwire. See that coverage for more details about the technology that Pownce will bring to SixApart.

Resource - Pownce Blog

Beta release: 0.4.154.25

2008-12-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

Google Chrome version 0.4.154.25 has been released. You will automatically get updated in the next few days. You can open About Google Chrome (from the wrench menu) to get the update at any time.

This is a roll up of fixes that have previously been released to our Dev channel users. See http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes for details on the changes that have been made since 0.3.154.9.

Note: Please use the excellent Google Chrome Help Center or file a bug to report problems. There are a lot of people watching those sites and ready to help.

New Features

Bookmark manager with import/export.

Use the 'Customize and control Google Chrome' (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager's Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.

Privacy section in Options.

We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.

New blocked pop-up notification.

The pop-up blocker formerly just minimized pop-up windows to the lower right corner of the browser window, create one 'constrained' window for each pop-up. Now, Google Chrome displays one small notification in the corner that shows the number of blocked pop-ups. A menu on the notification lets you open a specific pop-up, if needed.

Security Issues

This release fixes an issue with downloaded HTML files being able to read other files on your computer and send them to sites on the Internet. We now prevent local files from connecting to the network with XMLHttpRequest() and also prompt you to confirm a download if it is an HTML file.

Severity: Moderate. If a user could be enticed to open a downloaded HTML file, this flaw could be exploited to send arbitrary files to an attacker.
[Originally fixed in 154.18]

Other Updates

Bug-fix updates (no new features) to major components:

Gears is updated to version 0.5.4.0 (from 0.4.24.0).
V8 (JavaScript engine) is updated to 0.3.9.2 (from 0.3.5.0).

--Mark Larson, Google Chrome Program Manager

Resource - Google Chrome Beta release: 0.4.154.25

Open source hardware 2008 - The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008

2008-12-03T02:22:00.001-08:00

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.

This is one of the new and emerging trends we've seen really take off over the last few years. Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 60 projects/kits - it's incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (now shipping over 60,000 units) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we've captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it's open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, everything is available.

You can also call this guide... "The Open source hardware gift guide - The one and only, 3rd annual celebration of open source hardware!" - we think these are some of the best things to consider for the holidays and it supports an exciting development in hardware design.

So sit back and get ready to scroll through the list! Here we go!

Arduino Duemilanove - The new classic
Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. "Duemilanove" means 2009 in Italian and is named after the year of its release. The Duemilanove is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards.

Features:

Microcontroller ATmega168
Operating Voltage 5V
Input Voltage (recommended) 7-12V
Input Voltage (limits) 6-20V
Digital I/O Pins 14 (of which 6 provide PWM output)
Analog Input Pins 6
DC Current per I/O Pin 40 mA
DC Current for 3.3V Pin 50 mA
Flash Memory 16 KB (of which 2 KB used by bootloader)
SRAM 1 KB
EEPROM 512 bytes
Clock Speed 16 MHz

Resource - MAKE

Windows 7 allows DirectX 10 acceleration on the CPU

2008-12-03T02:22:00.000-08:00

Windows 7’s new WARP system can run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU, doing away with the need for a hardware 3D accelerator in some circumstances

It turns out that Intel isn’t the only company that’s looking at performing Direct3D in software; Microsoft has just announced that it’s also planning to introduce a new feature called WARP in Windows 7 that allows you to run Direct3D 10 and 10.1 on the CPU.

In what could be seen as an easy answer to the Vista-capable debacle, where there was some confusion as to what 3D graphics hardware you specifically needed to run Windows Vista’s Aero interface, Microsoft has introduced what it calls a ‘fully conformant software rasterizer’ called WARP (Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform) 10, which does away with the need for a dedicated hardware 3D accelerator altogether.

Microsoft details the new feature in this document on MSDN, in which the company says that WARP 10 will support all the features and precision requirements of Direct3D 10 and 10.1. The feature also supports up to 8x multi-sampled anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and all optional texture formats. The minimum CPU spec needed is just a simple 800MHz CPU, and it doesn’t even need MMX or SSE, although Microsoft says that WARP 10 will work much quicker on multi-core CPUs with SSE 4.1.

Of course, software rendering on a single desktop CPU isn’t going to be able to compete with decent dedicated 3D graphics cards when it comes to high-end games, but Microsoft has released some interesting benchmarks that show the system to be quicker than Intel’s current integrated DirectX 10 graphics. Running Crysis at 800 x 600 with the lowest quality settings, an eight-core Core i7 system managed an average frame rate of 7.36fps, compared with 5.17fps from Intel’s DirectX 10 integrated graphics.

Of course, this low level of performance isn’t going to threaten ATI and Nvidia in the world of PC gaming, but it could mean that Windows 7’s 3D desktop interface will now be accessible to everyone, whatever graphics card they own.

Microsoft says that the technology is also targeted at casual games, explaining that ‘the majority of the best selling game titles for Windows are either simulations or casual games, neither of which requires high performance graphics, but both styles of games greatly benefit from modern shader based graphics and the ability to scale on hardware if present.’ Microsoft also points out that the technology could be useful for ‘emulators and virtual environments that are attempting to display advanced 3D graphics.’
Resource - Custom PC

Intel launches new online dev magazine

2008-11-30T09:19:00.000-08:00

Visual Adrenaline offers tips on multi-threading and code optimisation for games devs
Leading component and software vendor Intel has launched a brand new digital magazine targeting the games development sector.

Entitled Intel Visual Adrenaline, the mag is free to those who sign up to the Intel Software Dispatch news service. The digital publication covers the use of multi-threading and code optimisation in the rendering of games and apps, as well as information on the latest tools and development products.

The mag will be released once per quarter and takes the form of a downloadable PDF.

Resource - Develop

Three Reasons Why Netbooks Just Aren’t Good Enough

2008-11-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

The debate about Netbooks, which are very small and very cheap laptop devices, is beginning to heat up. The category is only about a year old but sales are expected to top 5 million this year.

Lots of people think Netbooks are the next big volume market because they allow people who previously couldn’t afford computers to own one. People got so bullish on the devices that sales projections reached 50 million units by 2012.

I’ve had a chance to test many of the units, though, and I can say that the promise is much bigger than the payoff. Perhaps that’s why Intel is rethinking whether the devices are as great as everyone’s expectations.

A typical Netbook has a 7 inch screen, an Intel Atom or Via Nano processor, a solid state (flash) hard drive and a keyboard that’s 80-85% standard size. Most have Wifi. Some have other bells and whistles like bluetooth, a camera, etc.

I find Netbooks unusable for three reasons: they’re underpowered as PCs, the screen is too small for web surfing, and the keyboard is so small that effective typing is impossible.

The basic problem as I see it: Netbooks are designed to appeal to two very different markets - the price sensitive and the size sensitive. The two are really mutually exclusive.

Too Little Horsepower

Netbooks use Intel Celeron, Intel Atom, or Via Nano CPUs. All are x86 compatible, and they have great power usage. At best the devices have 1 GB of memory, and some make do with as little as 256 MB.

Most of these machines are running Windows XP or Vista. A few have some flavor of Linux. Combining that UI, even the lower end XP and Linux, with normal computing is a heavy chore for these machines. If you have an email application open and a couple of tabs in a browser, there’s a lot of slow down. One Vista machine I’ve been testing tends to crash after a few minutes of use.

This is not the computing experience that most people are familiar with. The Atom just can’t compare to a dual-core laptop when it comes to performance Anyone with an alternative will quickly be unhappy at how sluggish these machines are.

Then There’s The Screen

These machines have screens ranging from 7 inches on up. The worst thing about the screens is vertical resolution, which is generally 600 pixels. Even if you aren’t using a lot of toolbars and plugins on the browser that take up vertical space, they annoyance factor is high. This is, at best, how much of a web page you’ll see on the screen:

You are constantly scrolling down on these devices. You have to scroll down just to see the title of the first article on the NYTimes, for example. And unlike the iPhone, you can’t just swipe your finger. You have to use the keyboard or trackpad to scroll down, and it means taking your eyes off the screen. It’s annoying and, again, if you have a different device, you are going to stop using your Netbook.

Remember that the iPhone has 480 vertical resolution, and you can resize text to fit a lot of it on the screen. The image above shows 8 lines of text in the post (net of title, etc.). The iPhone shows 22 lines of text.

In other words, the iPhone or iPod Touch, with a tiny 3.5 inch screen, has a vastly better browsing experience than any Netbook (it’s faster too).

The Keyboard

Then there’s the keyboard. It’s tiny - most of them are just 80% of regular size. Any normal adult can’t type fast on it without constantly hitting the wrong keys because there is no space between them. It isn’t much better than a Blackberry-type mobile keyboard when it comes to speed and accuracy of input.

Convergence Of Mobile And Laptop

There is a big fat hole in the market between mobile devices like the iPhone and regular laptops. But smaller, underpowered laptops aren’t the answer for the mass market. Most of the Netbooks aren’t much cheaper than very low end laptops (and those laptops have normal keyboard and much bigger screens).

The problem with Netbooks is they are trying to address two markets at once: emerging markets where price is very important, and developed markets where people want a second computer. The emerging markets don’t care about size, they just want it at a low cost - so offer them something that’s bigger and works better at the same price (remember, bigger = cheaper for most computer parts except the screen). Developed markets don’t care about price as much as performance, and Netbooks cut too many corners. Perhaps that’s why Netbook screens are starting to inch up to 10 and 11 inches. Which doesn’t really make them much different from normal laptops (and the prices are about the same).

So what’s the answer? Well, we have our own ideas. When you ditch the operating system and all it’s weight and focus on a device that runs a browser only (a true netbook), you can make do with mobile phone level hardware. Give people a big screen to really experience the Internet. Make it a touch screen or add a normal keyboard. And keep it really inexpensive. That’s a device people will want.

The sub notebooks can get bigger and more useful without sacrificing cost, which is great for emerging markets and students. Tiny notebooks that perform well will be higher cost, and there’s a market for those, too.

Resource - TechCrunch

FreeBSD 6.4 Released

2008-11-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

Even though FreeBSD 7.x is already out and updated, the FreeBSD team keeps working on the FreeBSD 6.x branch, now designated the legacy branch. They released FreeBSD 6.4 today, with lots of new features, fixes, and updates. They are expecting FreeBSD 6.4 to be the last release in the 6.x branch.

The highlights of the release are listed as follows:

New and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client
Support for the Camellia cipher
boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices with GPT-enabled BIOSes
DVD install ISO images for amd64/i386
KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3
Updates for BIND, sendmail, OpenPAM, and others

The complete release notes are of course also available, as is the errata list. This release is supposed to be supported by the security team until November 30th, 2010. Using torrents for downloading this release is usually preferred, but you can of course also check your local mirror.

Resource - OSNews

Aonuma can't quit Zelda until he beats Ocarina of Time

2008-11-30T09:12:00.000-08:00

As co-director of a game that many consider the greatest of all time, you'd think Eiji Aonuma would be content to put his feet up and soak up the praise. It's what we would do, but that's probably why we'll never create anything as awe-inspiring as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

Speaking to Nintendo Power about his past work on most of the Zeldas since Ocarina of Time, Aonuma insists that he can't stop making the games, because he's yet to beat what he achieved with Ocarina. "I'm happy that a title I worked on some time ago remains highly praised to this day," he says, "but that also shows how none of the subsequent games in the series have surpassed it."

He adds that this alone may be what motivates him to make more Zelda and keep putting more happy in our heads. A revealing insight into the perfectionist mindset of a top game designer!
Resource - Wii Fanboy

Pixel Qi conjuring up black magic technology for 40-hour laptops

2008-11-30T09:11:00.001-08:00

Sure, you can go out and get yourself a laptop right now that'll go 12.5-hours strong, but what if your portable computer could nearly outlast your Aigo A215? While L's mythical quad core lappie came close in theory, Mary Lou Jepsen's (the former CTO at OLPC) startup is hoping to eventually create a machine that can last between 20 and 40-hours between charges. Pixel Qi is being pretty closelipped right now (and understandably so) about what exactly it has going on, but we get the idea the secret sauce is in a highly efficient display that will require far less power than traditional LCDs. The best part? We could see one of these longevous notebooks in the pipeline as early as 2H 2009, so we'd probably start stocking up on Red Bull right about now.
Resource - Engadget

Linux hits the iPhone

2008-11-30T09:07:00.000-08:00

We knew this day would eventually come, but somehow we're still misting up a little -- Linux has been ported to the iPhone and iPod touch. Dev Team member planetbeing is the mastermind in charge of bringing everyone's favorite open-source OS to Apple's handhelds, and while it's a little rough around the edges (read: no touchscreen drivers, sound, or WiFi / cell radio support), it's definitely the first step on the road to hacking nirvana. The team is hard at work, and it even sounds like they're thinking about porting Android in the near future (!), so hit the read link to try it out and lend a hand if you can -- or just head on past the break for a quick vid of the port in all its text-scrolling glory.

Resource - Engadget

Nokia Quake III gains on-phone server, Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support

2008-11-30T09:05:00.000-08:00

Remember when playing Quake III at a decent resolution required a $5,000 Alienware? Man, those were the days. Now, we can't help but be thankful for a few special Nokia handsets (the N95 8GB, E90 and N82 in particular) that can all handle the game by their lonesome. In fact, the latest version of the software adds a few remarkably awesome extras. For starters, users can now take advantage of on-phone server support, meaning that your handset can actually host a Quake III multiplayer battle (and may we recommend the server name "trashaccident?"). Also of note, the devs have tossed in support for Bluetooth mice and keyboards. We know, right? Tap the read link for all the juicy installation instructions.
Resource - Engadget

Intel evaluating new netbook concepts, form factors

2008-11-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

Netbooks have been one of the major success stories of 2008, but recent comments from Intel indicate that the company isn't satisfied with current device form factors. Speaking at a Raymond James IT Supply Chain conference last week, Stu Pann, an Intel VP of sales and marketing, admitted that Intel initially miscalculated the market segments that netbooks would appeal to.

"We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids... It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market."

Pann also noted (his comments can be streamed here) that netbook screen sizes don't lend themselves to long-term use, saying, "if you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size, it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

Consumer interest in netbooks definitely caught Intel off-guard, and it took the company months to ramp Atom production in order to satisfy demand. I agree with Pann, when he portrays netbooks as providing an "incremental" increase to Intel's total market, but I'm not sure he's right when he states that consumers won't use a netbook on a daily basis. It's true that the majority of us would have a massive headache after trying to work on a 10" LCD all day, but why assume that a netbook user is perpetually limited to the device's display?

A typical Western netbook user will have access to a much larger secondary display, as well as a keyboard and mouse at both work and home. Combined, these three simple devices negate the unfortunate physical aspects of netbook use. Mobile users, meanwhile, are more likely to use a netbook for short spans of time, which would fit within Pann's "fine for an hour" distinction.

Given how popular they've become, it's easy to forget that netbooks are only a year old, while the Atom itself has only been on the market for approximately six months. The device manufacturers themselves are still experimenting with features, sizes, and price points; it would be downright short-sighted for Intel to bring down the gates on experimentation and categorically lock the definition of the netbook form factor. What Pann failed to address—and it's a significant point—is that the sudden jump in netbook sales might be indicative of a long-term purchasing shift.

It's been posited that one reason netbook sales spiked in 2008 is because consumers were concerned about the economy and opted to purchase a cheaper, more portable system, which would fit Pann's "grab and go with a notebook," theory. But the continuing popularity of these smaller systems indicates that consumers like them, and have generally found that they provide an adequate amount of horsepower. Ultimately, yes, a netbook is just a smaller notebook, but a significant number of shoppers appear to want a smaller, cheaper, notebook.

Full-size notebooks aren't going to go away, anymore than full-size desktops are; there will always be a group of buyers who want more computing power and will trade portability for it. Nevertheless, I think the rise of netbook sales in 2008 is the beginning of a buying pattern rather than a trendy spike.

Second-generation netbooks, including hypothetical models with larger screens, will cast a wider net and capture groups of buyers that weren't interested in earlier models. Meanwhile, existing netbook owners already seem to be using these devices "day in and day out." If you're a current netbook owner, or are interested in buying one, what's your take on this? Are you buying it as a device you intend to use on a daily basis (even if it isn't your only system) or will it be confined to occasional portable use?

Resource - Ars Technica

Renesas to Announce Full HD Video Processor for Mobile Phones

2008-11-30T09:01:00.000-08:00

Renesas Technology Corp will announce an application processor that enables mobile phones to process 1920 x 1080 (1080p) resolution 30fps full HDTV video at ISSCC 2009, which will take place in San Francisco, California, from Feb 8 to 12, 2009 (session code 8.7).

Renesas announced in May 2008 that it was developing a full HDTV video processor (See related article).

The session is titled "A 342mW Mobile Application Processor with Full HDTV Multi-Standard Video Codec." The processor's CPU core has the maximum operating frequency of 500MHz. It supports MPEG-4AVC/H.264, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video formats.

The 6.4 x 6.5mm chip was manufactured using 65nm CMOS technology. Its power consumption is 342mW when it is processing full HDTV video in real time via 166MHz 64-bit DDR-SDRAM.

Some overseas semiconductor manufacturers have already started sample shipments of their HDTV-compatible application processors. Broadcom Corp announced its HDTV-compatible processor in October 2007, while Nvidia Corp and Texas Instruments Inc announced theirs in February 2008. All these processors can encode and decode 1280 x 720 resolution 30fps HDTV video but are not compliant with full HD video.

Resource - Tech-On

Ubuntu launches Free Culture Showcase

2008-11-30T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Ubuntu project has announced the launch of its second Free Culture Showcase initiative. The developers behind the popular Linux distribution are giving artists in the free culture community a unique opportunity to have their creative works included in the next major version of Ubuntu.

Participants can submit music, video clips, or images, which will be evaluated by a panel of judges. The winning items will be included on the Ubuntu 9.04 Live CD and in the default installation. In order to qualify, all creative works submitted to the contest must be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which permits modification and redistribution of content.

"The Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is an opportunity to bring the best of two great worlds together by showing off high quality Free Culture content in Ubuntu," wrote Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon in a blog entry. "The winning submissions will be made available on the shipped CDs and download images of the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Every user will be able to find the content in the Examples/ folder in a home directory."

The showcase will be accepting submissions until February 6. A panel of judges will choose an assortment of the best submissions and then the Ubuntu Community Council will select the actual winners from among those finalists. There is a limited amount of space on the installation CD for including free culture art, so submissions must stay within the size constraints dictated by the contest rules. For more details, see the Free Culture Showcase page at the Ubuntu wiki and the announcement at the official Creative Commons blog.

Resource - Ars Technica

Mobile Browser Battlemodo: Which Phones Deliver The Real Web

2008-11-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

Before 2007, using the internet on your phone would make you want to kill yourself, if you were dumb enough to believe the crap splattered across that tiny screen even was the "internet." But the combination of increased bandwidth and better mobile software means that more phones really are promising to deliver the real internet, in living color. We tested eight different browsers, and while some put smiles on our faces, others proved that rendering HTML correctly is a far cry from actually giving you an awesome web experience. And what about 3G vs. Wi-Fi? Everything the carriers have told you is a lie. This is the true state of mobile web.

Before we give you the rundown of each of the most prevalent mobile browsers, here's how they all stacked up in a timed test of how fast (and how well) they could render websites, chosen for their diversity and particular challenges:

CHART KEY: Number value is time for complete page load in seconds; page rendering is rated from "Fail" to "Excellent" for each; and the color (red, yellow, green) indicates overall performance taking into account both speed and rendering accuracy: Green = good overall, Red = fail overall.

This second chart runs through the same procedure with all of the phones that had Wi-Fi options:

It's a pretty daunting pile of numbers, so let's break it down into standard prose, rating each browser as we go:
Android
A fast, smart mobile browser based on WebKit. It tackles most sites with (almost) unrivaled grace and speed. Panning and zooming could be smoother and more responsive, but with a ton of options for getting around a page—various touch methods and the trackball—few sites will be challenging to zip around. The only thing we really miss is multitouch for zoom. Buttons just aren't a very elegant or precise solution, and while the whole-page magnifying glass technique is nice, we'd love something a bit more refined. Overall though, we're happy campers on Android's browser. Grade: B+

BlackBerry Bold
Leaps and bounds ahead of the browser BlackBerry users have put up with for years, it renders most pages correctly, even if scripts give it a conniption fit (hence its long load times for Wikipedia and the WSJ). It uses the standard "click to zoom" metaphor, which works well enough, though getting around a page with the trackball can be kind of a work out for you thumb. The Column View, which squeezes a whole page into a single column, is fairly convenient and makes it easier to get around wider pages, even if it doesn't work equally as well on every site (nice on Wikipedia, ugly on Giz). Hopefully they fix the script performance in the Storm, which is using an updated version of the Bold's browser. We humbly suggest they ditch their home-baked browser for one based on WebKit, which would help out there. Grade: B-/C+

iPhone
What can we say? It's still got the best mobile browser around. It crushes basically everything but Android's browser—which is also based on WebKit—in speed and outclasses its still classy brother-from-another-mother (and everyone else) with the ease and elegance of its multitouch zooming. Some pages still give it fits, and it's missing Flash support, but it really does deliver an unrivaled mobile web experience. We love it, but make no mistake we're eagerly waiting for something better. (Mobile Firefox? Is it you?) Grade: A-

Nokia E71 Symbian S60
Hey look, another web browser with WebKit guts! It doesn't perform quite as well as Android's or iPhone's iteration where speed or render accuracy are concerned (can any Symbian nuts explain why?), but it does a serviceable job. The big thing it has going for it is Flash Lite 3 support, though performance there is kinda assy and memory intensive. Navigation is tougher with the E71's d-pad than with a trackball, but the whole page magnifying approach makes it easy enough to get around (too bad you have to dig through a menu or two to get to it). Not bad, but short of excellent. Grade: B-

Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile
Jesus Christ. This is a joke, right Microsoft? Hahaha. No really, this is the worst smartphone browser on the planet. It couldn't render its way out of an ASCII-art paper bag. It totally screwed up every single test page, except for Wikipedia, which it only mostly screwed up. Good luck navigating a page if you're granted the miraculous occurrence of it being rendered in a state that's usable. Grade: F-

Opera Mobile on Windows Mobile
Microsoft's own intentions notwithstanding, you can use the internet on a Windows Mobile phone. You just need Opera Mobile. It's kind of hobbled by Windows Mobile's assy performance, but it usually gets the job done. Not as quickly or always as accurately as its WebKit rivals, but it's definitely usable. Interestingly, it benefits more from the extra bandwidth offered by Wi-Fi than the WebKit browsers do. Menu-based zoom is annoying and imprecise. Touch-based panning worked okay, though a little laggy. We mostly navigated with the Samsung Epix's optical cursor, which worked pretty well, somewhere in between a d-pad and a trackball. Grade: C

Sprint Instinct
Holy CRAP. This is not the painfully lousy browser the Instinct shipped with not by a long shot. The original was slow and fairly feeble, even if it was the head of its (dumbphone) class. The new 1.1 browser really is a life-changing upgrade. It suffers in the chart because it's much slower than most other browsers, and zooming is still clumsy, but once the page loads, it's much smoother to pan and actually move around. I got a bit annoyed that it lied about pageload time, hanging at the last 2 percent of the status bar for half the load, but it usually gets things right. This is the best non-smartphone browser you can get. Grade: C+

LG Dare
Like the Instinct, the Dare proves you can actually get a usable browsing experience on a feature phone. It's a little nimbler at loading pages than its Korean blood rival, but the reason it ultimately posts lower marks than the Instinct is that it buckles way more easily under a moderate to heavy pageload, turning it into an unresponsive picture of the website you were trying to look at. Still, it renders most pages fairly accurately, and we like the sliding zoom scroll bar, at least in theory, since it seems like an intuitive way to deal with the zoom issue. Unfortunately, it works more like a glorified pair of buttons. (Note: I don't think the speed was actually a piddly 300 Kbps—I think it just had a problem dealing with DSL Reports' mobile speedtest, even though it's text-based for the dumbest of phones.) Grade: C

Methodology
We tested every browser only using the full—not mobile—versions of selected sites, over 3G and, whenever possible, Wi-Fi. All scripts were turned on, and the cache was cleared before each round of testing. We took the average of a series of five sequential speedtests to give us an idea of the bandwidth we're dealing with, and timed how long it took to completely load a site according to each browser's progress bar. We assessed whether or not it rendered the page correctly, on a scale ranging from "excellent" to "good" (a couple things out of place) to "utter fail" (I've seen prettier train wrecks).

A few additional issues to note: Internet Explorer would not work on Wi-Fi. Opera yes, our Skyfire install, yes, Internet Exploder, no. (Samsung suggested it might be because of Opera.) We didn't pursue the matter because of how IE did in the 3G tests: A page that looks like a pile of blended dog poo is going to look like that no matter how much faster it loads. Sprint's updated Instinct and Verizon's Dare, which we included as best-of-class examples of feature phones, don't have Wi-Fi capabilities. We left out Opera Mini and Skyfire, since they both leave most of the hard work to servers which essentially spit out a kind of image file—besides, we don't think this kind of internet-by-proxy browser will be around for much longer.

The Big Gulp
Remember our mantra it's code that counts? It's true for mobile internet too. An awesome browser can make up for a mediocre network, but a terrible browser delivers a crappy experience no matter how great the network is. It's all about the browser. As it stands, WebKit is clearly the best thing going, but even then, software implementation matters, or Nokia would deliver as good a performance as Android and iPhone. Proving the point, it's striking how little Wi-Fi actually boosted speed beyond 3G—hell, WebKit browsers on 3G slid past some of the others that were running on Wi-Fi.

Another thing to note is that the zoom metaphor is a tricky thing to nail. Buttons are too brutish, the magnifying glass is imprecise. Multitouch seems to be the best way to handle zooming in and out in a way that's intuitive and precise. Hopefully we'll see other developers start to use multitouch interfaces in touchscreen phones (*cough*ANDROID!*cough*).

As much as this blow-by-blow battlemodo shows you all the problems we encountered, the big picture is that really, mobile web is pretty dandy right now, and getting dandier. It could be more reliable, faster, maybe a little more versatile, but for the most part, yes, you can access the internet on your phone. Compared to just two years ago, that's really saying something. We can't wait to see what it'll look like in two years. Maybe Internet Exploder will actually work. Nah, that's a little too sci-fi.

Resource - Gizmodo

Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic goes on sale somewhere in the world

2008-11-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

If you've been gritting your teeth and letting the PR onslaught of the iPhone 3G, Storm, and G1 knock you around as you waited for Nokia's entry into the widescreen, touchscreen superphone market -- that wait appears to be nearing it's end. Nokia has gone and gotten all official and release-y with it's anticipated (if somewhat disappointing) 5800 XpressMusic... or as we know it, the Tube. According to the company's PR, the device "is now, or will be soon" available in Russia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Finland, "among others." If you'll recall, the phone boasts a 3.2-inch, 16:9 resistive touchscreen (hey, they throw in a guitar pick stylus), a 3.2-megapixel camera, 8GB of on-board storage, and the constant assurance that you're using a phone once called the Tube. No word on price or plans, but we expect cheap, and lots.
Resource - Engadget

350 Open-Source-Lösungen für Unternehmen Meldung vorlesen und MP3-Download

2008-11-30T08:54:00.000-08:00

Das Schweizer System- und Baratungshaus Optaros hat seinen Open Source Katalog 2009 vorgestellt. Das 64-seitige Verzeichnis liefert zu über 350 Open-Source-Anwendungen vom Betriebssystem über Entwicklerlösungen bis zu Geschäftsanwendungen eine kurze Beschreibung und bewertet die Unternehmenstauglichkeit. Daneben finden sich Informationen zum Reifegrad, den Funktionen, der Aktivität der hinter dem Projekt stehenden Community, dem verfügbaren Support und der Lizenz.
Die Inhalte des Open Source Katalog 2009 basieren auf Optaros' Enterprise Open Source Directory, einem Online-Verzeichnis von Open-Source-Lösungen für Unternehmen. Der Katalog ist als PDF-Datei zum freien Download oder in gedruckter Version für 8 Euro erhältlich. (odi/c't)
Resource - heise-online

Free Software We're Most Thankful For

2008-11-30T08:53:00.000-08:00

Dear free software developers: Before we American nerds sit down to our turkey and mashed potatoes today, know that your creations are at the top of the list of things we're most thankful for. Whether you're an indie hacker putting out the occasional script or an employee at a giant internet company building out a webapp with millions of users or a voluntary coder contributing to an open source project, we salute you this Thanksgiving in gratitude for all the things your work enables us to do every day. Short of covering you in candied yam kisses and cranberry sauce hugs, please accept our hearty thanks for your work. We like you. We really, really like you.

While our thanks goes out to ALL developers of ALL the free software we've featured on these pages, a few projects deserve special mention. On Monday we asked exactly what free software you're most thankful for, and thousands of votes later, we've boiled down the list to the top 40 or so. While we're offline for the day, feast your eyes and mouse on this prodigious list of some of the best free software we're most grateful for. Happy Thanksgiving! (Back to a more regular posting schedule tomorrow.)

The 46 Free Desktop Software Applications, Webapps, and Projects We're Most Thankful For

Firefox (see also: The Power User's Guide to Firefox 3)
VLC Media Player (see also: Master Your Digital Media with VLC)
Ubuntu (see also: Hardy Heron Makes Linux Worth Another Look)
Open Office (see also: A First Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0)
Pidgin (see also: Ten Must-Have Plug-ins to Power Up Pidgin)
Launchy (see also: Take Launchy beyond application launching)
Digsby (see also: Digsby Improves Performance, Supports LinkedIn)
Gmail (see also: Our full Gmail coverage)
Adium (see also: Adium Chat Improves Menu Bar Item, Corrects Your IM Grammar )
CCleaner (see also: CCleaner 2.0 Decrapifies Your PC)
Picasa (see also: Organize your digital photos with Picasa)
AutoHotKey (see also: Turn Any Action into a Keyboard Shortcut)
Google
Quicksilver (see also: A beginner's guide to Quicksilver)
GIMP
Foobar 2000 (see also: Roll your own killer audio player with foobar2000)
Thunderbird (see also: Eight killer Thunderbird extensions)
7-Zip (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #10: 7-Zip (file archive manager) )
DropBox (see also: Dropbox Syncs and Backs Up Files Between Computers Instantaneously)
uTorrent (see also: Our complete uTorrent coverage )
Winamp (see also: Our complete Winamp coverage)
Google Apps
AVG Antivirus (see also: AVG Free Anti-Virus 2008 Released, Much Improved)
Evernote (see also: Expand Your Brain with Evernote)
IrfanView (see also: Download of the Day: IrfanView (Windows) )
Opera (see also: Opera Updates to Version 9.6, Gets Faster, Adds Features)
Chrome (see also: The Power User's Guide to Google Chrome)
Google Calendar (see also: Black-belt scheduling with Google Calendar)
HandBrake (see also: HandBrake Media Converter Gets Even Better)
Skype (see also: Our complete Skype coverage)
Linux (see also: Our complete Linux coverage)
Paint.NET (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #3: Paint.NET )
Ad-Aware (see also: Cleanse thy PC with Ad-Aware)
Avast Antivirus (see also: Download of the Day: Avast anti-virus)
Google Docs (see also: Our complete Google Docs coverage)
LogMeIn (see also: Use LogMeIn for remote tech support)
Transmission (see also: Manage Your BitTorrent Downloads with Transmission)
TrueCrypt (see also: Secure your data with TrueCrypt)
Amarok (see also: An Early Look at Amarok 2)
FileZilla (see also: FTP File Transfer Across Platforms with Filezilla 3.0)
Notepad++ (see also: Top 10 Windows Downloads, #6: Notepad++)
PortableApps.com (see also: Download of the Day: PortableApps Suite 1.0 (Windows))
Rocket Dock (see also: Download of the Day: RocketDock (Windows))
Spybot Search & Destroy (see also: Spybot Search and Destroy crushes evil)
UltraVNC (see also: Tech support with UltraVNC SingleClick)
VirtualBox (see also: VirtualBox 2.0 Adds 64-bit Support, Updated Interface)

A note on the numbers: Mozilla Firefox took first place in this exercise in gratitude with an insanely commanding lead; in fact, Firefox got more than three times the amount of votes the second-place mention (VLC) did. Here's a chart of the top eight on the list so you can see how the votes were spread out relative to one another.

About our vote count: We (ok, I) grossly underestimated how many votes we would get on this particular post. Almost 800 comments in total—many of which contained more than half a dozen free software projects—made finishing the total count (36 pages of comments) before Thanksgiving 2011 impossible. So, this represents just over 1,100 votes, only one third of the total comments we received. This list of 40 contains all the apps that received 10 or more votes. As almost 200 mentions got only a single vote, we think that even though it's incomplete, it's closely representative of the general consensus. (You can check out our complete vote count spreadsheet here.) Our apologies for the incomplete count—lesson learned. Next time, we'll use a proper survey tool.

Resource - Lifehacker

Internet worm exploits Windows vulnerability

2008-11-30T08:52:00.001-08:00

A worm dubbed Win32/Conficker.A is making the rounds on Windows machines, exploiting a security hole that Microsoft released a patch for in October, Microsoft said on Wednesday.

The number of attacks have increased over the past couple of days, exploiting a critical vulnerability that was addressed by security update MS08-067.

The malware mostly was spreading inside corporations, but also hit several hundred home PCs, Microsoft said in a posting on the Microsoft Malware Protection Center Blog.

"It opens a random port between port 1024 and 10000 and acts like a Web server. It propagates to random computers on the network by exploiting MS08-067. Once the remote computer is exploited, that computer will download a copy of the worm via HTTP using the random port opened by the worm. The worm often uses a .JPG extension when copied over and then it is saved to the local system folder as a random named dll," the posting said.

"It is also interesting to note that the worm patches the vulnerable API in memory so the machine will not be vulnerable anymore. It is not that the malware authors care so much about the computer as they want to make sure that other malware will not take it over too," Microsoft said.

Most of the infections are in U.S. PCs, but there have been reports from Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, Turkey, China, Mexico, Canada, Argentina, and Chile. The worm avoids infecting Ukrainian computers, for some reason, Microsoft said.

Several bots, under the generic name Backdoor:Win32/IRCbot.BH, also are exploiting the security hole. They drop a backdoor Trojan that connects to an IRC server to receive commands.

Resource - C|Net

WordPress 2.6.5

2008-11-30T08:51:00.000-08:00

WordPress 2.6.5 is immediately available and fixes one security problem and three bugs. We recommend everyone upgrade to this release.

The security issue is an XSS exploit discovered by Jeremias Reith that fortunately only affects IP-based virtual servers running on Apache 2.x. If you are interested only in the security fix, copy wp-includes/feed.php and wp-includes/version.php from the 2.6.5 release package.

2.6.5 contains three other small fixes in addition to the XSS fix. The first prevents accidentally saving post meta information to a revision. The second prevents XML-RPC from fetching incorrect post types. The third adds some user ID sanitization during bulk delete requests. For a list of changed files, consult the full changeset between 2.6.3 and 2.6.5.

Note that we are skipping version 2.6.4 and jumping from 2.6.3 to 2.6.5 to avoid confusion with a fake 2.6.4 release that made the rounds. There is not and never will be a version 2.6.4.

Get WordPress 2.6.5.

Resource - Wordpress 2.6.5

Nokia to cease sales in Japan (Reuters)

2008-11-30T08:50:00.000-08:00

TOKYO (Reuters) - Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, said on Thursday it will stop selling mobile phones in Japan except for its luxury Vertu brand after struggling to expand its presence.

Finnish Nokia has previously said it will cut costs 'decisively', expecting global mobile phone sales to shrink next year amid an economic downturn.

Japan is the world's fourth largest mobile phone market after the United States, China and India. But it makes up only a tiny part of sales at Nokia, whose products have failed to lure customers away from more sophisticated Japanese ones.

Mobile phone companies also see limited scope for growth in Japan, where 109 million subscribers, or some 85 percent of the population, already own a mobile phone. In addition, a new sales model based on higher handset prices is expected to slash annual mobile phone sales in Japan by some 20 percent.

"In the current global economic climate, we have concluded that the continuation of our investment in Japan-specific localized products is no longer sustainable," Nokia executive vice president Timo Ihamuotila said in a statement.

He added that Nokia's Japanese business would concentrate on research, development and sourcing for the global market as well as specific projects such as the Vertu brand.

The quirks of Japan's mobile phone market have prevented foreign companies, including Nokia's rivals such as Samsung Electronics and LG, from successfully targeting Japanese consumers.

Most of the mobile phones used in Japan are part of third-generation networks and boast features such as TV broadcasting and electronic payment functions.

This makes it tough for foreign manufacturers to compete with domestic handsets.

Foreign companies, excluding Sony Ericsson, only occupy around 5 percent of Japan's mobile phone market, according to IDC Japan, a research firm. Japanese manufacturers, in turn, have only a small presence outside their home market.

"Nokia is facing global earnings problems and many other issues, and this shows Japan was a low-priority market at a time when they are shoring up global operations, even though it may still be attractive," IDC Japan analyst Michito Kimura said.

"I'm not very surprised by the decision."

The move was still rather abrupt as NTT DoCoMo Inc, Japan's biggest mobile phone operator, said just this month that it would sell a new Nokia smartphone as part of its product line-up for the winter shopping season.

Third-ranked Japanese operator Softbank Corp also sells Nokia phones.

Nokia, which has a nearly 40 percent global market share, had originally said it aimed to increase its market share in Japan to a double-digit figure. It took only around 0.3 percent of the Japanese market last business year, according to the Nikkei newspaper.

Instead of a broad expansion, it will now focus on Vertu, its luxury unit.

The Yomiuri newspaper reported on Saturday that Nokia plans to launch mobile phone services for Vertu customers in Japan, using DoCoMo's network.

Vertu, founded in 1998, sells gem-encrusted, hand-built mobile phones with prices ranging from 3,500 euros to over 100,000 euros.

Resource - Yahoo! Tech

Elpida Develops 50nm DDR3 SDRAM

2008-11-30T08:49:00.002-08:00

Elpida Memory Inc has completed development of a 50nm process DDR3 SDRAM. The DRAM product features what it said is the lowest power consumption in the industry, 2.5Gbps ultra high speed and a 1.2V low voltage operation based on the industry's smallest chip size.

Developed using 193nm (ArF) immersion lithography technology and copper interconnect technology, the 50nm process DDR3 SDRAM has a chip size of less than 40mm².

In addition, the eco-friendly SDRAM operates on not only DDR3 standard 1.5V supply voltage but even lower voltages of 1.35V and 1.2V. It contributes to the low-power operations of high-density memory systems such as servers and data centers.

The DDR3 SDRAM will initially find applications in high-end desktop PCs. The company said applications are possible elsewhere based on the current shift away from DDR2 SDRAMs in notebook PCs and server equipment.

Mass production of the 50nm DDR3 SDRAM is scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2009.

Resource - Tech-On

Toshiba to Launch 16GB microSDHC

2008-11-30T08:49:00.001-08:00

Toshiba's 16GB microSDHC, and 8GB, 16GB SDHC Cards

Toshiba Corp has reinforced its memory card line-up with the launch of a 16GB microSDHC card, offering what it said is the largest capacity available in the market. The company also extended its range of memory card solutions by adding ultra fast read write 8GB and 16GB SDHC cards to its line-up.

All the SD memory cards comply with the SD memory standard v.2.00, and the SDHC cards support class 6 ultra fast read write speed, with a maximum write speed of 20MB/s. The new memory cards deliver the performance level necessary for continuous shooting of still images and recording video images, and meet strong market demands for cards combining high capacities with high speed data read and write. The microSDHC can be used with an adapter that allows it to be used in SDHC slots.

Mass production of the SDHC cards will start in December, with production of the microSDHC slated to start in January 2009.

Resource - Tech-On

Hynix Introduces 7Gbps, 1Gb GDDR5 Graphics DRAM

2008-11-30T08:48:00.000-08:00

Hynix's 1Gb GDDR5 Graphics DRAM

Hynix Semiconductor Inc of Korea has developed what it said is the industry's first and fastest 1Gb GDDR5 Graphics DRAM.

Built on the company's 54nm process technology, the 1Gb GDDR5 is said to operate at the fastest speed of 7Gbps. This represents an improvement of 40% compared to 5Gbps GDDR5. The graphics DRAM processes up to 28Gbyte of data per second with a 32-bit I/O. In addition to its improved speed, the product is also designed to minimize power consumption at 1.35V power supply. Such features make the DRAM suitable for use in high-end applications, such as game PCs, game consoles and graphic cards.

The 1Gb GDDR5 graphics DRAM meets JEDEC standard. Volume production is expected to start in the first half of next year.

Resource - Tech-On

Australia Ratings Board Blocks F.E.A.R. 2

2008-11-30T08:47:00.001-08:00

Monolith Productions’ upcoming horror themed first-person shooter F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin has been refused classification in Australia, effectively banning the game from sale.

Due to be released in February by Warner Bros., the original game was praised for its mix of standard shooter elements and horror sequences inspired by Asian movies like The Ring. The original was given an ‘M’ for mature rating in the U.S., with similar equivalent ratings granted in other countries.

The Australian Classification Board and Classification Review Board currently offers no information on specifically why the sequel has been refused classification; Australia again proves one of the strictest countries around the world in terms of age ratings.

The inflexibility stems from the lack of an R18+ rating for video games, despite the age rating being available for non-interactive media. As a result, the highest possible rating for a video game in Australia is MA15+. Several attempts have been made to introduce a R18+ rating for games, so far without any success.

Recent games initially refused classification in the country include Fallout 3, Dark Sector, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Shellshock 2: Blood Trails. All of these titles were later censored to meet the MA15+ restrictions, but it is so far unclear whether Warner Bros. will pursue a similar policy with F.E.A.R. 2.

Resource - Gamasutra

Have it all: Lunascape, the browser with three engines

2008-11-29T21:18:00.000-08:00

You know what I'm sick of? Running three browsers on my Windows system. Not because I want to, but because I have to. I need Internet Explorer (which uses the Trident engine) for some CNET corporate pages and to run Outlook Web Access. I have to use Firefox (Gecko engine) for our blog publishing system and to run all the plug-ins I like. When I want to just browse quickly I turn to Chrome (Webkit). This is no way to live.

But a new browser, Lunascape, handles all three of the rendering engines at once. When you open a new tab or click on a link in Lunascape, you can tell the browser which engine you want to use. You can also set up certain sites to open using a particular engine. If you're trying to figure out which engine is best for a given page (or if you're a Web developer and need to test your site in the three engines), you can reload any page with another engine.

The developers claim the browser is faster than all others, thanks to its optimized implementation of Gecko. That may be, if you're running benchmarks, but I found the alpha version of Lunascape 5 (the version coming out today) to be very slow to start up and with some user interface quirks that slowed me down.

It is, no doubt, a browser for geeks. It is incredibly full-featured. It has native support for RSS feeds, inlcuding podcasts. It saves data--not just passwords--that you enter into forms, so you can get info back if your page closes or crashes before you submit. The browser supports mouse gestures for navigation, and it has more menu access to engine tweaks than any browser I've seen. It's the antithesis of the super-simple Chrome interface, but if you want to do things like quickly extract all the images on a page to a directory on your system, it might be the tool for you.

Lunascape supports its own plug-ins and themes, as well as the add-ons for IE. It does not, however, support Firefox add-ons, which is a real drag. The browser's address bar is also bare-bones, lacking the useful intelligence of the Firefox "awesome bar" or Chrome's even-better psychic search and URL entry field.

I wouldn't recommend Lunascape 5 alpha to anyone in the real world. I'm going to continue to run the three browsers I do instead of moving over to this product. I may change my mind as the product matures, though. Developers and Web geeks might get a kick out of it right now

Resource - CNET

Get Your Own PlayStation Credit Card

2008-11-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

You may have seen the mailers, and it’s true. We’ve introduced our very own PlayStation credit card to offer fans a new way to show off their PlayStation pride and earn reward points towards the purchase of PlayStation and SONY products.

We’ve even sweetened the pot with a special introductory offer. Starting today until December 31, 2008, you could save $150 on the purchase of a PLAYSTATION 3 this holiday. There are a couple ways to do this. You can go to to www.sony.com/newpscard to get instant approval for your card, and an immediate $150 credit when you purchase a PS3 directly through the website.

Or you can go www.sony.com/getpscard to apply for the card and upon receipt of the card, use it at any authorized PlayStation retailer to purchase a PS3. The $150 credit will show up on your billing statement.

The holidays just got merrier. Happy shopping.

Resource - Gamasutra

HP intros mini-Q nettop with dual-core Atom CPU

2008-11-26T07:56:00.000-08:00

HP recently used an event in Taiwan to unveil its first-ever nettop PC, the mini-Q 2030, that is powered by Intel's 1.6GHz dual-core Atom 330 processor and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Other hardware includes a 160GB 7,200rpm SATA hard-drive with Windows Vista preloaded and a dual-layer DVD burner. It also has four USB 2.0 ports, two PS/2 ports, an Ethernet port, a VGA jack for connecting to monitors and an audio and microphone jack.

The mini-Q weighs in a maximum of just 4.4lbs and does not include a monitor or any peripherals. Along with the mini-Q 2030, HP also showed the mini-Q 2020 which sports the single-core Atom 230 rated at the same 1.6GHz, half the RAM at 1GB and the older Windows XP OS.

The HP mini-Q 2030 will be available in Taiwan for the equivalent of around $386 while the HP mini-Q 2020, will cost about $296. There is no official information on if or when the nettops will be available in North America. [via Slashgear]

Resource - Electronista

US Consumers Cutting Back on Technology Purchases

2008-11-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

Consumers plan to cut back this holiday season on consumer technology purchases, according to a new report by the NPD Group. The report examined consumer purchase intent for popular holiday gift categories including flat-panel TVs, desktop and notebook PCs, MP3 players, digital cameras, GPS devices, and digital picture frames - although not mobile phones.

The report found that among the consumers who plan to come out and shop on Black Friday, a good deal on a specific item is what they are looking for. Fifty-four percent of consumers who said they will get up and shop early on Black Friday are more interested in deals on specific products rather than just overall bargains.

Then there are some consumers who are rethinking making a big-ticket consumer technology purchase for the holidays. Of the 23 percent of consumers who were considering buying a flat-panel TV (40”+), 33 percent said because of the economy now they definitely are not going to buy one. DSLRs were on the shopping lists of about 12 percent of consumers, but now 25 percent of that group said they probably won’t go ahead with purchasing a higher-end camera.

But there will still be plenty of consumers going ahead with planned purchases; they just may be a less expensive brand, or less expensive model from their manufacturer of choice. According to the report, brand loyalty will play a big part in DSLR purchases, but consumers said they will be looking for a less expensive model. More consumers said they won’t be as brand loyal for their digital picture frame or MP3 player purchases, with price being the driving factor.

“The extraordinary economic turmoil we have seen will have a tremendous impact this season as consumers have said that they will probably or definitely hold off on products that have grossed the highest revenue over the last several holiday seasons,” said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis at NPD. “To take the best advantage of the consumers who still plan to buy these products, retailers will need to consider where consumers are cutting back on features and where they are switching bands or simply skimming on accessories.”

Resource - cellular-news

Bigger Isn't Always Better... But in This Case, We Believe It Is

2008-11-26T07:51:00.002-08:00

Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback from you about what you'd like to change about YouTube, and the size of our video player is always top of mind. That's why today we're excited to announce a bigger YouTube player.

We're expanding the width of the page to 960 pixels to better reflect the quality of the videos you create and the screens that you use to watch them. This new, wider player is in a widescreen aspect ratio which we hope will provide you with a cleaner, more powerful viewing experience. And don't worry, your 4:3 aspect ratio videos will play just fine in this new player.

As always, we welcome your feedback and encourage you to share your thoughts with us on this exciting, new change happening for all videos on YouTube.

Example - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQuFBjMk9tc&feature=dir
Resource - Official YouTube Blog

HTC Increases Google Phone Sales Forecasts

2008-11-26T07:51:00.001-08:00

Taiwan's High Tech Computer (HTC) expects cumulative shipments of T-Mobile's G1 Google Phone to reach one million units by the end of 2008. The firm also expects to ship some three million units of its Windows Mobile based Touch Diamond smartphone.

The company had previously said that it expected sales of the T-Mobile phone to be in the region of 500,000 units by the end of this year - rising to between 1.5 and 2 million units by the end of 2009.

Recent research from Strategy Analytics reported that the Android operating system will account for 4 percent of all smartphones sold in the United States during the fourth quarter of 2008.

Neil Mawston, Director, Wireless Device Strategies at Strategy Analytics, said, “We forecast 10.5 million smartphones to be sold in the United States during Q4 2008. We estimate smartphones with Google’s Android operating system, led by HTC of Taiwan, will reach 0.4 million units in the quarter, for a 4 percent marketshare. Android is a relatively late entrant and it will join an increasingly crowded market alongside Blackberry, Microsoft, Apple, Palm, Symbian and LiMo.”

HTC's CEO Peter Chou also told DigiTimes that the company is not laying off staff - refuting some recent news reports. Chou also revealed that HTC is planning to acquire a handset design company in the USA but did not give any further details.

Resource - cellular-news

Google cutting contractor workforce

2008-11-26T07:33:00.000-08:00

Google is in the process of paring back a contractor workforce that numbers about 10,000, the company confirmed Monday. The news, though, isn't as fresh as it might appear at first blush.

The contractor cut story made the rounds Monday after publication of a Silicon Valley WebGuild story with the alarming headline of "Google Layoffs - 10,000 Workers Affected." The 10,000 number and Google's efforts to reduce it, though, emerged in October in a San Jose Mercury News story, and it's not clear exactly how many will lose a job.

Google's solar panel-studded headquarters as viewed from the air.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

In that article, Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed the 10,000 number and said, "It's really high." According to the story, "He said Google began looking at the number six months ago and has a plan to significantly reduce that number through vendor management, converting some contractors to regular employees, and other approaches."

Google spokeswoman Jane Penner didn't share too many details Monday, such as how many contractors are affected, whether contracts are being canceled or just not renewed, how many contractors Google will hire, and over what time frame the changes will take place.

"We have 10,000, and we have had a plan in place for awhile to significantly reduce that number," she said. "This is something we've been thinking about for awhile--six or seven months. It predates the most acute phase of the (present economic) crisis."

Google has been slowing hiring and reportedly had 20,123 of its own employees at the end of September. The company has been working to increase revenue from YouTube and other properties, and has shut down projects such as the Lively virtual world and SearchMash experimental search site, which "has gone the way of the dinosaur" according to the page.

Layoffs are of course spreading across the world, including at direct Google competitors such as Yahoo, but Google gets more attention than most. For one thing, Google is a high-profile company with lavish benefits such as "20 percent time" in which engineers can work on projects of their own choosing. For another, the company has been relatively bullish about the extent to which its primary source of revenue, search advertising, is recession-proof.

Resource - CNET

Opera Mini browser available for Google Android

2008-11-26T07:32:00.000-08:00

The latest version of the popular mobile browser Opera Mini is now available for the T-Mobile G1, the first phone built on Google’s Android operating system. The Android availability is part of the improvements in Opera Mini 4.2, which leaves testing mode tomorrow.

Opera Mini is the first alternative G1 users have to the phone’s built-in browser, which is based on WebKit. Matthew Miller of ZDNet spotted Mini in the Android Market this morning, and reports that it provides “very fast” internet access, and has the added benefit of synchronizing Opera bookmarks across multiple devices. It’s also just nice to have multiple browsers to choose from, similar to the freedom of choice you have on your desktop or laptop computer. If Opera Mini takes off among Android users, that would be a rebuke to Apple, which rejected the browser as a competitor to Safari on the iPhone. (I asked Opera if there are any plans to bring its higher-end Opera Mobile browser to the Android, but the company isn’t commenting.)

The latest version of Mini has been in public testing for about two weeks, and other new features include the ability to customize the browser with new skins, additional languages (including Armenian, Bengali and Urdu), improved video, and note syncing via Opera Link. When 4.2 was announced, the update didn’t seem terribly exciting, but the just-revealed Android support changes things.

With more than 20 million users worldwide, Opera says Mini it’s the world’s most popular mobile web browser.

Resource - VentureBeat

First Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) alpha hops into view

2008-11-26T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April.

The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements.

In addition to the ongoing long-term usability enhancement efforts, Canonical and the Ubuntu development community are focusing on several specific technical goals for 9.04, including improving performance and boot time and integrating web services more tightly with the desktop.

A particularly exciting community-driven effort for Ubuntu 9.04 is the jump to Mono 2.0, a major update of the open source .NET implementation that was recently released by Novell. The Mono stack comes with some very complex dependencies that make it a bit challenging to package properly. Members of the community have responded by proposing a Mono 2.0 transitioning initiative that will involve close collaboration between Ubuntu and upstream Debian packagers. The goal is to transition all of the major Mono packages to 2.0 dependencies—a move that will help save space on the installable Live CD image.

Ubuntu 9.04 is still at a very early stage of development and little of that work has fallen into place yet. More specific timelines should emerge next month during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Mountain View. The big priority during the first part of a new Ubuntu development cycle is merging in new and updated packages from Debian—this step has already been completed.

According to developer Colin Watson, who announced the alpha release on an Ubuntu mailing list on Saturday, progress has also been made on the new Ubuntu ARM port. Canonical's ARM porting effort was revealed earlier this month; it will be used to bring Ubuntu to mobile Internet devices and upcoming ARM-based netbook products. It is still a work in progress, however, and no ARM installation images are available yet.

Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1 is available for download from the Ubuntu web site, although only the server CD image and the text-based "alternate" CD image were built for the release. If you want an installable Live CD, you can get the latest daily image. I tested the alpha by installing the alternate CD image in a VirtualBox virtual machine. The differences between 8.10 and 9.04 alpha 1 aren't really going to be apparent to regular users at this stage and it isn't ready yet for production use—it's primarily offered for testing purposes and for developers.

"This is the very first roughly working set of images off the production line, and they haven't all been tested, so you should expect some bugs," wrote Watson in the release announcement. "Prominent among these are that some of the images are oversized and can only be tested using a DVD or a virtual machine, and that the desktop CD isn't ready yet!"

The next major alpha release is scheduled for December 18, shortly after the developer summit. The final Debian package import freeze for 9.04 will be on Christmas day. Additional prereleases will follow until the final release arrives on April 23.

Resource - Ubuntu

Microsoft To Rebrand Search. Will It Be Kumo?

2008-11-26T07:29:00.000-08:00

Microsoft will relaunch Windows Live Search under a new brand sometime early next year, says a source within the company. What we don’t know is what that new brand will be, although a few names have been thrown around. According to our source, a “final” decision has been made, but very few people inside of Microsoft are aware of it, and it could change.

Now LiveSide is saying there’s evidence the new search brand will be Kumo, which means “cloud” or “spider” in Japanese.

Why would Microsoft go through yet another rebranding effort? Live.com has a lot of different services under its umbrella (some server software, some client software) in addition to search. It’s also a burgeoning social network.

Over time, we’ve heard, Live.com will become a pure social network and personal productivity portal. You’ll go there to access email, calendar, photos, activity streams, etc. But search belongs somewhere else, and it definitely needs a fresh start.

Microsoft won’t comment on the name change, or even if there is a name change. But our sources caution us that nothing has been finalized, and the fate of Yahoo could swing this one way or another as well. So Kumo may very well be the name Microsoft is planning to use, but that decision may change.

Resource - TechCrucnh

Acquisition Dance Between Facebook And Twitter Over For Now?

2008-11-26T07:28:00.000-08:00

It’s not the first time we’ve heard rumors about Facebook looking to acquire Twitter or about an impending deal breaking down. But this time, Kara Swisher over at BoomTown offers a bit of insight about the actual deal size. According to Kara (and her sources), Facebook was offering $500 million of its stock at the infamous (and ridiculous) $15 billion valuation to acquire Twitter up until 3 weeks ago.

Update: while Twitter CEO Evan Williams declined to comment on the rumors, we’re hearing that 20 percent of the offer that was made was in fact cash (which would mean $100 million in cash and $400 million in stock).

Apparently talks, which were reportedly initiated by privately-held Facebook, broke down because of doubts on behalf of Twitter investors and executives about the stock’s actual worth, the usual concerns that arise when acquisitions are made (like integration, duration, costs, etc.), and a strong belief that Twitter will ultimately be able to weather the economic downturn on its own. Also noted is Facebook’s concern over Twitter’s current burn rate and future revenue potential.

At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, moderator John Battelle asked Mark Zuckerberg on stage if Facebook would be interested in buying Twitter. The young Facebook CEO’s response was: “we’re really impressed by what they’ve done”, and that they have “a very elegant model”.

We’re trying to get more out of the companies and will update this post if there’s anything else to add.

For comparison: Facebook has raised $516 million in funding to date, while Twitter is backed by $20 million in investment. Twitter boasts 6 million active users, while Facebook reports more than 120 million.

Noteworthy caveat: serial entrepreneur and angel investor Marc Andreessen is sitting on both sides of the fence, being both an early investor in Twitter and a member of Facebook’s Board of Directors.

Resource - TechCrunch

Jaguar Chases Roadrunner, but Can’t Grab Top Spot on Latest List of World’s TOP500 Supercomputers

2008-11-24T08:04:00.000-08:00

MANNHEIM, Germany, BERKELEY, Calif., and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.—The 32nd edition of the closely watched list of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers has just been issued, with the 1.105 petaflop/s IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory holding on to the top spot it first achieved in June 2008.

The Los Alamos system, nicknamed Roadrunner, was slightly enhanced since June and narrowly fended off a challenge by the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory called Jaguar. The system, only the second to break the petaflop/s barrier, posted a top performance of 1.059 petaflop/s in running the Linpack benchmark application. One petaflop/s represents one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Both of the systems are at national laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Seven of the top 10 systems on the newest TOP500 list are located at DOE facilities. Nine of the top 10 supercomputers are located in the United States. The most powerful system outside the U.S. is the Chinese-built Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. It is the largest system which can be operated with Windows HPC 2008 operating system.

The TOP500 list, which is issued twice a year, will again be the subject of a session at the SC08 conference being held Nov. 15-21 in Austin, Texas. Complete information about the TOP500 list can be found at: top500.org.

Just as the performance levels have increased dramatically, so have the costs of running and cooling such large systems. To help assess the energy efficiency of supercomputers, the TOP500 list is now tracking actual power consumption of supercomputers in consistent fashion. Not only is it the most powerful supercomputer, but Roadrunner is also one of the most energy efficient systems on the TOP500. Roadrunner is based on the IBM QS22 blades which are built with advanced versions of the processor in the Sony PlayStation 3. These nodes are connected with a commodity InfiniBand network.

Here are some other highlights from the November 2008 list:

A total of 379 systems (75.8 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is virtually unchanged from six months ago (375 systems, 75 percent). Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share of TOP500 systems.
The IBM Power processors and the AMD Opteron family are almost tied as second most common processor family with 60 and 59 systems each (12 percent and 11.8 percent). Both had only minor changes from six months ago.
Quad-core processor based systems have taken over the TOP500 quite rapidly. Already 336 systems are using them. 153 systems are using dual-core processors, and only four systems still use single core processors. Already seven systems use IBMs advanced Sony PlayStation 3 processor with nine cores.
HP took over the lead in systems with 209 systems (41.8 percent) over IBM with 188 systems (37.6 percent). IBM had 210 systems (42.0 percent) six months ago, compared to HP with 183 systems (36.6 percent). But IBM still stays ahead by overall installed performance.

Highlights from the Rest of the Top 10:

The No. 3 system called Pleiades is a new SGI Altix ICE system installed at NASA Ames in Moffett Field, Calif.., narrowly grabbing this spot with 487 teraflop/s.
The No. 4 system is the IBM BlueGene/L system installed at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), with a Linpack performance of 478.2 Tflop/s.
At No. 5 is a newer version of the same type of IBM BlueGene/P system installed at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and it achieved 450.3 Tflop/s.
The No. 6 system is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas and recently received faster processors. Nicknamed Ranger, it is built by Sun using SunBlade x6420servers and achieved 433.2 TFlop/s.
The No. 7 system, called Franklin, is the second new Cray XT5 system. It is installed at DOE’s NERSC Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and achieved 266.3 Tflop/s.
The No. 8 system is a Cray XT4 system installed at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It achieved a Linpack performance of 205 Tflop/s.
The No. 9 system is the enlarged Sandia/Cray Red Storm system. It is installed at DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and achieved 204.2 Teraflop/s.

General highlights from the Top 500 since the June 2008 edition:

The entry level to the list moved up to the 12.64 Tflop/s mark on the Linpack benchmark, compared to 9.0 Tflop/s six months ago.
The last system on the current list would have been listed at position 267 in the previous TOP500 just six months ago.
Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 16.95 Pflop/s, compared to 11.7 Pflop/s six months ago and 6.97 Pflop/s one year ago.
The U.S. is clearly the leading consumer of HPC systems with 291 of the 500 systems (up from 257). The European share (151 systems – down from 184) is settling down after having risen for some time, but is still substantially larger then the Asian share (unchanged at 47 systems).
Dominant countries in Asia are Japan with 18 systems (down from 22), China with 16 systems (up from 12), India with 8 systems (up from 6).
In Europe, UK remains the No. 1 with 45 systems (53 six months ago). Germany fell steeply but is still in the No. 2 spot with 24 systems (46 six months ago).

The TOP500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Resource - TOP500

NCSoft's Tabula Rasa To Cease Operations In February

2008-11-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

Following the departure of Richard Garriott from NCsoft, the MMO-focused publisher has announced that its PC MMO Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa will be shut down February 28, 2009.

The news was delivered via the game's official site in a letter signed "The Tabula Rasa Team." The closure was pinned simply on a failure for the title to meet its financial targets.

"Last November we launched what we hoped would be a ground breaking sci-fi MMO. In many ways, we think we've achieved that goal," it reads in part. "Unfortunately, the fact is that the game hasn't performed as expected."

From January 10 through the game's shuttering, subscription fees will be waived for all players. Despite the game's imminent demise, NCsoft promised, "We'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."

Furthermore, Tabula Rasa players who were already subscribed at the time today's announcement were made will receive a variety of perks relating to other NCsoft products, including three free months of City of Heroes and Lineage II, and upcoming beta access for Aion.

Resource - Gamasutra

Final Judgment — SCO Loses, Owes $3,506,526

2008-11-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

"SCO has finally lost to Novell, now that Judge Kimball has entered final judgment against SCO. Of course, this is SCO we're talking about. There's still the litigation in bankruptcy court, which allowed this case to resume so that they could figure out just how much SCO owes, which is $3,506,526, if I calculated the interest properly, $625,486.90 of which will go into a constructive trust. And then there's the possibility that SCO could seek to have the judgment overturned in the appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court when that fails. Of course, they need money to do that and they don't really have much of that any more. Remember how Enderle, O'Gara and company told us that SCO was sure to win? I wonder how many people have emailed them to say, 'I told you so.'"
Resource - Slashdot

SGI Designs Atom-based Supercomputer

2008-11-24T07:57:00.000-08:00

A 3U-high package houses 90 blocks. "A few more blocks can be added because the actual package is slightly deeper," SGI said.

The substrate mounted with the Atom N330 and the block composed of two such substrates. The substrate is mounted with actual chips, but the block is a mockup.

A close-up picture of the substrate. The slender chip on the left is the Atom N330. The big chip in the center is a controller IC. The four chips on the front side are memory chips.

Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) of the US exhibited a concept model of a novel high performance computer (HPC) at Super Computing 2008 (SC08), an international convention and exhibition on HPCs.

The computer is being developed under the code name of "Project Molecule." The aim of the project is to "create a supercomputer featuring ultrahigh-density, low power consumption and low cost using the ultimate commodity processor that can be easily programmed," SGI said.

The commodity processor used in this concept model is the "Atom N330," which Intel Corp developed for mobile devices called "MID (Mobile Internet Device)."

SGI exhibited a chassis, which corresponds to a 15cm-high (3U) rack. And, in the chassis, 90 blocks that look like building blocks are laid out with little space left. The block has several square pores dimensioned about 5 x 5mm so that air from the air-cooling fan on the back of the package can pass through the pores.

The block consists of two 5 x 5mm substrates attached to each side of a pore structure used for air cooling by resin. Each of the substrates is mounted with microprocessors, LSIs for datapath control, and eight memory chips on two sides. The dual-core Atom is incorporated as a microprocessor. This atom is a 1.3GHz model and supports "x86-64" instruction set. Each substrate has a memory capacity of 2 Gbytes.

In order to achieve ultrahigh density, more than 180 microprocessors with CPU cores exceeding 360 are packed into the 3U rack. The power consumption of this Atom is as low as 10W, making it possible to array many blocks leaving small spaces for tiny air-cooling pores. The power consumption of the whole package is less than 2kW, according SGI.

"As the next step, we are planning to employ a liquid-cooling system and further improve the density by, for example, packing more than 10,000 CPU cores in one rack," the company said.

The Atom is a low power consumption microprocessor developed by Intel for use in MIDs. Intel explains that it is not suitable for complicated processing and only good for Web browsing and checking e-mail.

In respect to this point, SGI said, "We place priority on memory bandwidth, and the Atom's memory bandwidth is not small. A supercomputer based on this model will be intended exclusively for calculation, in which memory bandwidth is important."

IBM Corp's "Blue Gene" supercomputer was developed under a similar concept. The Blue Gene uses the "PowerPC 440" embedded microprocessor. SGI admits that there are some similarities between its concept model and the Blue Gene, but said "they are not the same." The biggest difference is in that the Atom microprocessor supports the x86-64 instruction set, which is designed for general PCs and servers.

In respect to its commercialization, "It has yet to be given the go-ahead. But once its commercialization has been decided, we will be able to develop a product in 15 to 18 months," SGI said.

Resource - Tech-On

Malaysia among top five with internet access in Asia Pacific

2008-11-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

BANGKOK, Nov 19 (Bernama) -- Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are the most connected countries in the Asia Pacific region, with 55 per cent to 80 per cent of their populations having access to the Internet by 2007.

In contrast, the bottom five -- Myanmar, Timor-Leste, Tajikistan, Bangladesh and Cambodia -- have less than one per cent of their populationd using the Internet while the average for region is 20 per cent.

The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) said that despite significant progress that Asia and the Pacific had made in utilising information communication technology (ICT), a significant disparity still remained in access to the Internet between high-income and low-income countries.

It said the wide gap appeared despite its study which showed that both phone and Internet use had increased over the last five years since the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was first held in 2003.

"How to overcome this 'digital divide' is the focus of a meeting being held in Bangkok with participants compromising ICT experts from governments, the academia, UN and other international agencies and the private sector, including from Microsoft," Unescap said in a statement.

The agency said the number of mobile phone subscribers increased by nearly 70 times in South Asia between 2000 and 2007 and by over 40 times in Central Asia while in Southeast Asia, which has a relatively more developed market, the number of subscribers still grew by about 10 times.

"Yet, the growth is the fastest in the poorest countries in the region. The least developed countries in the region as a group had seen their mobile phone users increase by close to 80 times," it said.

The expert group meeting, WSIS+5 and Emerging Issues in Asia and the Pacific, is intended as a platform to discuss technical aspects of ICT development and solicit expert views on key issues -- such as problems with
infrastructure -- which need to be addressed at the regional level.

Among issues being discussed are the current status of ICT and the implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action in the Asia-Pacific region and key emerging issues that are standing in the way ICT connectivity in developing nations.

Also in the agenda is the integration of ICT in effective disaster risk reduction programmes, for example, by providing technical solutions such as region-wide early warning systems, and better communications systems to assist with disaster recovery. (Bernama)
Resource - UNESCAP

Asia-Pacific world’s largest broadband market, but wide gap in access, says UN

2008-11-24T07:50:00.000-08:00

2 September 2008 – While some countries in Asia and the Pacific – the world’s largest broadband market – have high speed and affordable Internet access, the same cannot be said for most of the region’s poorer nations, the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said today.

In its Telecommunication/Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Indicators Report for Asia and the Pacific, the ITU states that Internet access in the region’s poor countries remains limited and predominantly low speed.

The report, released at the ITU Telecom Asia 2008 conference which kicked off today in Bangkok, also points out that the region is the world’s largest broadband market with a 39 per cent share of the world’s total at the end of 2007.

In terms of access, it notes that the region has made remarkable progress in the past few years, with subscriber numbers growing almost five-fold in five years, from 27 million at the beginning of 2003 to 133 million at the start of 2008.

The Republic of Korea leads the world in terms of the percentage of households with fixed broadband access. Along with Hong Kong and Japan, it also leads the world in terms of the proportion of households with fiber optic connections, which are essential for supporting the next generation of ultra high speed Internet applications.

Meanwhile, in most of the region’s low- and lower middle-income economies, high speed Internet access “is limited to urban areas at best, typically expensive, and often not available at all,” says the ITU.

“The regional broadband divide is striking, with poor economies having a close-to-zero broadband penetration, compared to that of rich economies where one in four persons is a broadband subscriber,” it adds.

The gap in available broadband speeds between rich and poor countries is as wide as broadband penetration. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Hong Kong, the minimum advertised broadband speed is faster than the maximum broadband speed in Cambodia, Tonga, Laos and Bangladesh.

The report also notes that Asia and the Pacific is home to almost half the world’s fixed telephone subscribers; has 42 per cent of the world’s Internet users; and has the largest mobile phone market share, with 1.4 billion mobile cellular subscribers. By mid-2008, China and India alone had over 600 and 280 million mobile cellular subscribers, respectively, representing close to a quarter of the world’s total.

In addition, text messaging is the predominant non-voice, mobile application in the region. Filipinos send a “staggering” 650 text messages per subscriber per month, the highest in the world.

Among other things, the report recommends that governments develop policies and incentives to narrow the broadband gap.

The theme of Telecom Asia 2008 is “New Generation, New Values” which pays tribute to the region’s reputation as a global leader for innovation and a burgeoning population of ICT users.

The opening sessions of the conference looked at the “Broadband Generation” of “New Users, New Needs and New Solutions,” “New Business Models” and “New User Interfaces.” The gathering will also address green solutions and approaches to the environment as well as promote the strengthening of emergency communications to save lives in the event of natural disasters.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré noted that Telecom Asia showcases the trends and technologies that define future global markets. “Asia is at the cutting edge, both in terms of pioneering technologies and the way the region interacts with these technologies to define new digital lifestyles,” Mr. Touré said.

“Yet, while some nations lead the world in defining, developing and deploying ICTs, others still strive to make basic products and services affordable and accessible to their populations. Despite the region’s wealth of technological skill and evident enthusiasm for the many benefits ICTs can offer, the digital divide remains a significant blight on Asia’s economic landscape,” he adde

Resource - UN

Radiolicious Brings AM/FM Radio to iPhones

2008-11-21T08:11:00.001-08:00

n the war between radio and Internet-based technologies, Radiolicious is trying to build a business model by striking back on broadcasters' behalf. Radiolicious is a free downloadable player for iPhone users. Once on their wireless handsets, Radiolicious allows them to stream audio and Web content from any AM/FM station that is signed up to the service, at no cost to the iPhone user.

"Radiolicious is the third leg of the modern broadcasting stool, the other two being over-the-air transmission and the Web," said Rick Brancadora, an early affiliate. He is the CEO, licensee and GM of LifeRadio WIBG(AM), a Christian talk station that has signed up to Radiolicious.

"With more than 20 million iPhones out there, Radiolicious is a great way for us to grow our audience."

The technology

Radiolicious is a software application developed by MySimBook.com, a developer/marketer of awareness-based advertising products. The company is owned by Global Security Systems, also known in the radio industry for its FM Alert technology.

"Radiolicious is a truly native iPhone radio player," said Doug Daigle, co-founder of MySimBook. "It provides all of the Web streams, including WMA, from subscribing broadcasters directly to iPhone users."

Radiolicious works on all commercial wireless networks, including EDGE, WiFi and 3G. Besides delivering audio, it provides iPhone users with graphics and the ability to request songs, send comments and enter contests from their handsets.

Operationally, Radiolicious is simple; after subscribing to the service — usually by purchasing a subscription based on market size or bartering commercial airtime to MySimBook — the station logs onto MySimBook's business Web site and links their audio streams. They can also provide the other content described earlier and arrange for interactive traffic between their station's e-mails and Radiolicious users.

At the consumer end, "The user simply downloads a Radiolicious from the app store," said Daigle. "It is free to download, and there are no additional charges."

Stations are categorized by genre and location, making it easy for Radiolicious users to find the stations they want and add them to their Favorites list for fast access. Radiolicious subscribers can also access Internet-only audio streams, share music with friends and buy songs directly from iTunes while using the player.

"The mobile phone has profoundly changed how people interact with media when they're on foot or in their cars," he says. "Radiolicious makes it easy for broadcasters to reconnect to this audience; many of whom have forsaken conventional AM/FM radio for newer technologies."

Benefits

LifeRadio is based in Ocean City, N.J. It is licensed as a daytime AM, operating at 1,900 watts; it signs off every sunset to make way for clear channel KDKA. But WIBG runs on the Internet 24/7, and with its appearance on Radiolicious, the station says it has found a second way to keep reaching its audience at night without broadcasting.

"We are finding more and more people are tuning into our Web-based audio stream," said Brancadora. "With iPhone now included via Radiolicious, we've got the necessary second half of this one-two punch."

Being on Radiolicious isn't just a way around being a daytimer. "On the Web and Radiolicious, we have as big a footprint as ABC and CBS," Brancadora said. "But it's really Radiolicious that makes the difference, because we are now available on a portable medium unfettered by radio's physical limits."

To further promote LifeRadio online, Brancadora hopes to take advantage of blogging sites offered by Radiolicious, plus the system's two-way messaging capability.

"We are already a two-way station, because we're talk radio," he said. "Instant messaging is also proving to be big, which is where Radiolicious comes in. With this platform, people will be able to hear us all over America, and interact with us as well."

Resource - cellular-news

Researchers Make New Electronics - with a Twist

2008-11-21T08:08:00.000-08:00

They've made electronics that can bend. They've made electronics that can stretch. And now, they've reached the ultimate goal -- electronics that can be subjected to any complex deformation, including twisting.

Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have improved their so-called "pop-up" technology to create circuits that can be twisted. Such electronics could be used in places where flat, unbending electronics would fail, like on the human body.

Their research is published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Electronic components historically have been flat and unbendable because silicon, the principal component of all electronics, is brittle and inflexible. Any significant bending or stretching renders an electronic device useless.

Huang and Rogers developed a method to fabricate stretchable electronics that increases the stretching range (as much as 140 percent) and allows the user to subject circuits to extreme twisting. This emerging technology promises new flexible sensors, transmitters, new photovoltaic and microfluidic devices, and other applications for medical and athletic use.

The partnership -- where Huang focuses on theory, and Rogers focuses on experiments -- has been fruitful for the past several years. Back in 2005, the pair developed a one-dimensional, stretchable form of single-crystal silicon that could be stretched in one direction without altering its electrical properties; the results were published by the journal Science in 2006. Earlier this year they made stretchable integrated circuits, work also published in Science.

Next, the researchers developed a new kind of technology that allowed circuits to be placed on a curved surface. That technology used an array of circuit elements approximately 100 micrometers square that were connected by metal "pop-up bridges."

The circuit elements were so small that when placed on a curved surface, they didn't bend -- similar to how buildings don't bend on the curved Earth. The system worked because these elements were connected by metal wires that popped up when bent or stretched. The research was the cover article in Nature in early August.

In the research reported in PNAS, Huang and Rogers took their pop-up bridges and made them into an "S" shape, which, in addition to bending and stretching, have enough give that they can be twisted as well.

"For a lot of applications related to the human body -- like placing a sensor on the body -- an electronic device needs not only to bend and stretch but also to twist," said Huang. "So we improved our pop-up technology to accommodate this. Now it can accommodate any deformation."

Huang and Rogers now are focusing their research on another important application of this technology: solar panels. The pair published a cover article in Nature Materials this month describing a new process of creating very thin silicon solar cells that can be combined in flexible and transparent arrays.

Resource - cellular-news

Chinese Software Standard Approved By OASIS

2008-11-21T08:05:00.001-08:00

The China Electronics Standardization Association announced in Beijing that the Unstructured Operation Markup Language, a read and write access standard for electronic documents created by CESA, has been approved by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, making it the first Chinese-made international standard of its kind in the software industry.

UOML defines the read and write access standard for electronic documents, which realizes mutual read and write between documents in different formats.

Fifty-one international companies, users and academies, including Google, HP, Sun Microsystems, University of California at Berkeley, EMC, Fujitsu, Red Hat, Nokia, U.S. Department of Defense, Boeing, Lockheed, Schneider Electric, Juniper, Freescale, the Forestry Commission of Great Britain and Korea Communication Commission voted to approve the UOML standard as an international standard, which exceeded the threshold of 45 votes.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China says the ministry will encourage the use of this standard. At present, seven Chinese software companies have jointly set up a UOML Alliance and software products and application solutions which can support the UOML standard have also been launched.

Resource - chinatechnews

Hong Kong Launches Wi-Fi On Public Buses

2008-11-21T08:02:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong's Citybus and New World First Bus jointly announced on November 17, 2008 that the first bus with free Wi-Fi services has been put into operation and ten buses of 11 routes will be installed with Wi-Fi equipment within two weeks.

Elaine Chan, deputy head of corporate communications of Citybus and NWFB, says that the Wi-Fi services is a value-added service for local residents, aiming to provide convenient Internet surfing for passengers and to promote the development of Wi-Fi in Hong Kong. The first batch of ten Wi-Fi buses will be put into use in two weeks for a three-month trial. After gauging the reaction of passengers to the new service, the company will decide whether or not to extend the service to more buses.

Chan says the Wi-Fi services will first be available on buses of 11 routes, which are mainly long-distant routes. The first Wi-Fi bus launched on November 17 is currently serving Route 112. The company started to prepare for the Wi-Fi services one year ago and the services have been tested from various aspects to ensure their stability. In addition, the company has done a lot regarding the network security. Apart from the technology against hacking, the services will filter pornographic and gambling websites so that wayward passengers can concentrate on other matters while surfing.

Jointly owned by Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Limited and NWS Holdings Limited, Citybus and NWFB say the new bus mobile Internet services will improve the quality of life for the public.

Resource - chinatechnews

Mozilla has IRS breathing down its Google branded neck

2008-11-21T08:01:00.001-08:00

With the release of the Mozilla Foundation’s 2007 financial report, questions have been raised by the IRS who are due to perform an audit on the non-profit organisation behind the massively popular Firefox browser.

Last year the Foundation received $66 million of its total $75 million revenue (88 percent) from search engine maestro’s Google, so the IRS are looking for blood over the organisations tax exempt status. Back in 2006, Mozilla got $59.5 million from Google – around 85 percent of the organisations revenue.

Google and Mozilla are part of a “you scratch my back, I’ll pay your bills” sort of agreement with the Google search bar firmly placed in the toolbar, and on the default homepage. Things were a bit rocky a couple of months back when Google unveiled the Beta-run of its Chrome browser, but Mozilla and Google hugged it out and sealed a deal that will last for a further three years. That deal will expire in November 2011.

In 2003, Mozilla received tax exempt status, which meant it didn’t pay any taxes in 2004’s revenue of $4,422,674. The organisation said the agreement with ‘a search provider’, “facilitates the dissemination of the Foundation’s browser, thereby increasing the accessibility of the internet.” Do I know exactly what they mean by that? Well not really if you must know.

In 2005, Mozilla created a for-profit operation, whereby multiple search engine contracts were transferred to the new Mozilla Corporation. When they made the change, Mozilla say they have a “tax reserve fund” set aside in-case the IRS come looking for the tax from 2004/05 – which they are.

The IRS has stated that they are launching a review: “We are early in the process and do not yet have a good feel for how long this will take or the overall scope of what will be involved.”

In the finance report, Mozilla claim that its search revenues should be classed as royalties, and therefore not be taxed, however, they are well aware that the IRS could see things differently. Mozilla has a bit of spare cash in its tax reserve - $14,832,000 at the end of 2007.

The report also says that an inquiry into the organisations tax exemption has begun due to Google supplying a large chunk of the Foundation’s revenue.

“While the Foundation did not automatically qualify as a public charity with public support at 33 per cent of total support, it believes that it qualifies as a public charity under the facts and circumstances test with public support over 10 per cent,” said the report

If the IRS finds Mozilla hs not been taxed correctly, the organisation says it will become a private charity, and release around 100,000 in taxes.

Resource - Linux Solutions

Sony Loses $18.5 Million Patent Infringement Suit

2008-11-21T08:00:00.001-08:00

Sony has been ordered to pay $18.5 million for infringing on a patent held by Agere Systems for a "wireless local area network apparatus," reports PSPFanboy.

Agere sued Sony in 2006, saying the firm used the company's technology in its PSP handheld gaming system. The jury in the case recently sided with Agere, ordering Sony to pay $18.5 million for what it deemed "willful" violation of the smaller company's patent claim.

Agere's suit originally sought both profits lost from Sony's infringement as well as damages totaling three times the amount of those profits. It is unknown at this time how nearly the $18.5 million figure matches the sum originally sought, though it is certainly a significant win for Agere.

Resource - Wired

Spice up your inbox with colors and themes

2008-11-21T07:59:00.000-08:00

Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven't been an integral part of Gmail. We wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes we're launching today, there's a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There's even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers -- it's not exactly practical, but it's great for testing out your geek cred. We've also done a minor facelift to Gmail's default look to make it crisper and cleaner -- you might notice a few colors and pixels shifted around here and there.

As you can see from these photos taken around our office in Zurich, Switzerland, themes have made their way into more than our inboxes -- that's a character from the ninja theme made out of pixel blocks, customized laptop decals, and a giant Zoozimps character on a beam next to my desk:

To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings. We'll be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don't see them yet, check back soon. As for which theme to choose, don't ask us. We're neutral ;)
Resource - Gmail Blog

Lively no more

2008-11-21T07:58:00.001-08:00

In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.
Resource - googleblog

PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version

2008-11-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only.

PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s.

It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.

“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.

The change will not require much of an adjustment, because the focus has been on getting articles to the Web first, said Lance Ulanoff, the editor of the PCMag Digital Network, which is what PCMag.com and its accompanying Web sites were renamed on Wednesday. “All content goes online first, and print has been cherry-picking for some time what it wants for the print edition,” Mr. Ulanoff said.

Circulation at PC Magazine has been declining since the late 1990s, when it hit a peak of 1.2 million. This year, the magazine’s rate base was 600,000.

Mr. Young said that while the print magazine would be profitable in 2008, he forecast that it would lose money in 2009 because of fewer advertisements and rising costs. The final print edition will be the January 2009 issue.

“Obviously, the macroeconomic condition is putting pretty significant pressure on all forms of advertising,” Mr. Young said.

Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year.

Other publishers have also moved publications online only.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview.

The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition in favor of its Web site; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site.

“If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said.

But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.

Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.

On Tuesday, Time Inc. said that it would shut down Cottage Living, part of the Southern Progress division of Time Inc., along with the CottageLiving.com Web site. Nine of the 47 staff members will get jobs elsewhere in Time Inc., and the 38 others will be laid off, said Debra Richman, a Time Inc. spokeswoman.
Resource - The New York Times

It's Jam time

2008-11-21T07:56:00.000-08:00

Today we hosted the Google Code Jam finals, inviting 100 of the world's top programmers to flex their brains in a grand coding showdown. This is our fifth annual Global Code Jam competition, and thanks to a new platform created by a 20%-time team that includes previous Code Jam winners, more than 11,000 contestants tackled complex algorithmic challenges, programming in the language of their choice. After a series of online rounds in July and August, the top 500 semi-finalists competed in regional semifinals at 15 offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas to determine the final 100.

We're pleased to announce that after three hours of furious typing, debugging and problem-solving at the onsite finals in Mountain View. this afternoon, Tiancheng Lou of China took home the $10,000 Grand Prize. Zeyuan Zhu from China won second place, Bruce Merry from the UK came in third, and cash prizes went to the other finalists. Overall, the 100 finalists represented 23 different countries.

Congratulations to all the Code Jammers. We hope to see you at the next Jam. It's never too early to start practicing!
Resource - Official Google Blog

NASA tests "deep space Internet"

2008-11-19T07:49:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet.

"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," Adrian Hooke, NASA's manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards, said in a statement.

The US space agency said Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA spacecraft some 20 million miles (32.4 million kilometers) from Earth.

NASA said the software protocol, which must be able to withstand delays, disruptions and disconnections in space, was designed in partnership with Vint Cerf, a vice president at Internet search giant Google.

DTN sends information using a method that differs from the normal Internet's Transmission-Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, communication suite, which Cerf co-designed, NASA said.

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection, NASA said, noting that glitches can happen when a spacecraft moves behind a planet, or when solar storms and long communication delays occur.

It said the delay, for example, in sending or receiving data from Mars takes between three-and-a-half minutes and 20 minutes at the speed of light.

NASA said that if a destination path cannot be found, data packets are not discarded but kept by each network node until it can communicate safely with another node.

Eventually, it said, the information is delivered to the end user.

"In space today, an operations team must manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it," said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically."

NASA said engineers had begun a month-long series of DTN demonstrations in October using NASA's Epoxi spacecraft, which is on a mission to encounter Comet Hartley 2 in two years, as a Mars data-relay orbiter.

It said there are 10 nodes in the early interplanetary network -- the Epoxi spacecraft itself and nine on the ground at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory simulating Mars landers, orbiters and ground mission-operations centers.

NASA said a test of DTN software loaded on board the International Space Station would begin next summer.

It said an "Interplanetary Internet" could enable many new types of space missions including complex flights involving multiple spacecraft and ensure reliable communications for astronauts on the the moon.

Resource - AFP

Introducing Adobe AIR 1.5

2008-11-19T07:48:00.001-08:00

Adobe AIR 1.5 marks the second significant update to the AIR runtime since its release on February 25, 2008. Since then, the developer community response to AIR has been truly amazing with more and more applications appearing every day. With over 260 applications on the Adobe AIR Marketplace and well over 25 million installations of apps deployed on Adobe AIR, we're seeing a tremendously positive response not only from application developers but end users as well.

Many applications powered by AIR are becoming extremely popular, such as Twhirl, the most popular Twitter desktop (over 600,000 downloads and counting). One of our favorite applications is from FedEx, called FedEx Desktop, which provides customers a way to easily track and manage their packages. Parleys is an application that allows you to watch developer-oriented presentations recorded at popular conferences.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we are continuing to add powerful, new capabilities to the AIR runtime with the release of version 1.5. In this release, some of the additional capabilities now available to AIR developers include the following:

Encrypted local database: By popular request from developers, we've added a way of encrypting the local database inside of AIR. While encrypting data in AIR has been possible since AIR 1.0, using the Encrypted Local Store (ELS)—the new encryption support—offers better support for encrypted larger data files and is generally more convenient since many developers prefer to persist using the local database.
Flash Player 10 capabilities: Adobe Flash Player 10 is one of the most significant releases of the player, with groundbreaking new capabilities. We've updated the version of Flash Player included with AIR to version 10. For example, it's now possible to take advantage of custom filters, blend modes, and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender. AIR 1.5 also supports the new 3D effects, including perspectiv,e correct transformation, and animation of 2D plans in a 3D space (also known as postcards in space). Rich media enhancements include dynamic streaming to improve the quality of video playback based on bandwidth availability as well as support for the Speex codec for delivering high-quality audio at lower download speeds.
WebKit update: The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode interpreter that improves the execution speed of JavaScript for common actions. Our internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.

The Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, Flex Builder 3, Dreamweaver CS4, and Aptana Studio authoring tools have also been updated to support AIR.

In addition, we focused on fixing critical issues. If you run into a bug or a feature request that you would like to relay back to our team, please submit it using the feedback form. Members of our team read every message that comes through. If you have a general question, post it to the Adobe AIR discussion forums.

We'd also like to invite you to visit our team blog for announcements, tips, and other news related to Adobe AIR.

And be sure to check out Adobe AIR Developer Center for inspiring sample applications, articles, and tutorials.

Resource - Adobe

Alchemy

2008-11-19T07:45:00.000-08:00

Welcome the preview release of codename "Alchemy." Alchemy is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The purpose of this preview is to assess the level of community interest in reusing existing C and C++ libraries in Web applications that run on Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe AIR®.

With Alchemy, Web application developers can now reuse hundreds of millions of lines of existing open source C and C++ client or server-side code on the Flash Platform. Alchemy brings the power of high performance C and C++ libraries to Web applications with minimal degradation on AVM2. The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

Alchemy is primarily intended to be used with C/C++ libraries that have few operating system dependencies. Ideally suited for computation-intensive use cases, such as audio/video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions or physics simulation, performance can be considerably faster than ActionScript 3.0 and anywhere from 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. Alchemy is not intended for general development of SWF applications using C/C++.

With Alchemy, it is easy bridge between C/C++ and ActionScript 3.0 to expand the capabilities of applications on the Flash Platform, while ensuring that the generated SWCs and SWFs cannot bypass existing Flash Player security protections.

Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.

The Alchemy preview is prerelease software that is not supported by Adobe and may contain bugs. It is therefore advised that Alchemy not be used to generate code for use in production.

Watch Branden Hall, CTO of Automata Studios, discuss his experience working on the Ogg Vorbis porting project using Alchemy.

We are making this software available to gauge community interest in Alchemy and welcome your feedback. Please use the feedback link below to request features, make comments and report problems. Please also note that this is a research project and there is no assurance that there will be a shipping version of Alchemy.

Resource - Adobe

Vendors share for 11/2008

2008-11-19T07:44:00.001-08:00

In addition to the table below, you can view the visual charts using the TOP500 charts page. A direct link to the charts is also available.

Vendors	Count	Share %	Rmax Sum (GF)	Rpeak Sum (GF)	Processor Sum
Cray Inc.	22	4.40 %	2486731	3226223	376309
Dell	19	3.80 %	569640	774686	82250
Fujitsu	3	0.60 %	84140	100310	10240
Hitachi	2	0.40 %	98795	131892	12416
IBM	186	37.20 %	6511376	10059679	1498276
Intel	1	0.20 %	21810	25715	2296
NEC	1	0.20 %	35860	40960	5120
SGI	17	3.40 %	1218446	1479534	141560
Sun Microsystems	7	1.40 %	542762	724744	82936
Appro International	4	0.80 %	158700	191536	30736
Linux Networx	2	0.40 %	55810	72652	7784
Transtec AG	1	0.20 %	12640	17194	1616
Self-made	3	0.60 %	52740	82556	8880
Hewlett-Packard	209	41.80 %	4193950	7260891	708784
California Digital Corporation	1	0.20 %	19940	22938	4096
Dawning	1	0.20 %	180600	233472	30720
ClusterVision	1	0.20 %	13600	17338	2064
Bull SA	3	0.60 %	115090	137523	19696
NEC/Sun	1	0.20 %	77480	161816	30976
DALCO AG Switzerland	1	0.20 %	28990	34560	2880
ClusterVision/Dell	2	0.40 %	37200	52462	4332
Koi Computers	1	0.20 %	13460	23104	3040
Pyramid Computer	1	0.20 %	32800	52032	5420
ACTION	1	0.20 %	38170	49731	5336
UNICORNER/Fujitsu-Siemens	1	0.20 %	18810	24576	2048
ClusterVision/IBM	2	0.40 %	41476	53312	4928
SKIF/T-Platforms	1	0.20 %	47170	60000	5000
ServiWare	1	0.20 %	12604	16781	1824
LUFAC Computacion SA de CV	1	0.20 %	18480	25440	2120
Raytheon-Aspen Systems/Appro	1	0.20 %	26730	36601	3440
Dell/Sun	2	0.40 %	89800	112853	12240
Lenovo	1	0.20 %	102800	145965	12216
Totals	500	100%	16958600.19	25449076.20	3121579

Resource - TOP500

Apple Poor at Converting iPhone Queries into iPhone Sales

2008-11-19T07:41:00.002-08:00

Nielsen Mobile has estimated that there are 3.6 million mobile subscribers 13+ actively using the Apple iPhone, as of October 2008. While some sources suggest that the iPhone has overtaken Motorola’s RAZR in sales, their analysis of Q3 acquisitions shows a very close race at the top. Among those subscribers who acquired their phone in the past three months, iPhone had a 3% market share in Q3 2008, behind the Motorola RAZR V3 series which still had a 5% share of recently acquired devices.

Looking more broadly at iPhone’s mass appeal, their analysis shows that 11% of those purchasing a new mobile phone between January and September of this year considered purchasing an iPhone. Did they go for it? 21% of those who considered purchasing the iPhone during that period converted to acquisition.

Comparing Apple to other leading brands, 21% is a relatively low conversion rate (those with HTC in their consideration set converted at 69% and those with Motorola converted at 49%, for example). As of Q3 2008, Apple was the 7th most cited brand considered, but 12th in terms of conversion. Nelson analysts believe this reflects the high degree of awareness and buzz around the iPhone, but AT&T’s exclusive carriage of the device.

Among owners, Apple can today boast the highest overall satisfaction rate of any handset manufacturer. In Q3 2008, 89% of recent iPhone acquirers (past 6 months) were highly satisfied with their device – compared to an industry average of 71%. While brand affinity and style play a part here, data further below will demonstrate the high degree to which iPhone users are making the most out of their device.

The expansion of the iPhone universe will continue. As of Q3 2008, one in five subscribers (21%) who intend to upgrade their device in the next 12 months say they’ll consider purchasing an iPhone next – up from just 15% a year prior. That’s in part due to a heavy ongoing advertising spend from both Apple and AT&T to promote their wunderkind: Nielsen estimates that AT&T spent $21M across TV, Print, Radio and Internet to promote devices in September. For their part, Apple spent $15M themselves to promote the iPhone.

As for the basics:

Demographics

Adults 35-54 make up the largest portion of iPhone users (34%)Hispanic subscribers make up a larger portion of the iPhone audience (21%) than of the total U.S. subscriber audience (13%)
iPhone subscribers are twice as likely as total subs to have a household income of $100K+ (44% vs. 22%)

Usergraphics

98% of iPhone subscribers use at least one data service (yet it’s still notable that 2% of iPhone subscribers only making phone calls with their device)13% of iPhone users have their employer footing the bill (compared to 7% of all subscribers)
43% of iPhone users have a monthly bill of more than $100 (compared to 20% of all subscribers).

Data Usage

70% of iPhone users listen to audio tracks on their phone (39% download music directly to the device)66% of iPhone users download software and applications
35% of iPhone users watch video on their phones (making them seven times as likely as the typical mobile subscriber to do so)

Resource - cellular-news

JCB Breaks Record for Worlds Toughest Mobile Phone

2008-11-19T07:41:00.001-08:00

The ultra-rugged JCB Toughphone has achieved a Guinness World Record for the World’s Toughest Mobile Phone. To fulfil the Guinness World Record requirements, the record attempt had to be witnessed by independent judges who would act as testers once the phone had been dropped and who would also verify the height the JCB Toughphone had been dropped from.

Click to enlarge

JCB Toughphone

The JCB Toughphone survived the first drop of 1.6 metres with barely a scratch. The bucket of the JCB 3CX Digger was raised repeatedly until it reached its maximum height of 3.25 meters. The Toughphone hit the ground, bounced and continued to be fully operational with no cracks or dents. The judges were able to continue making calls and sending texts, even after the 3.25 meter drop onto unforgiving concrete.

Guinness specified that the height from which the item is dropped must be measured and evidence of this had to be submitted, alongside the phone being fully functional following the drop. Only superficial cosmetic damage would be tolerated, even a small crack in the screen would have jeopardised the record attempt.

Bob Plaschke, CEO of Sonim Technologies, makers of the JCB Toughphone comments: "From the very start we set out to make rugged phones for people who work and play in rugged environments. We're thrilled that Guinness World Records has recognised the JCB Toughphone made by Sonim as officially the toughest phone in the world.”

The JCB Toughphone also comes IP54 certified against dust, dirt and shock and as well as being fully water-resistant.

Resource - cellular-news

Mobile Games Market to Reach $10bn by 2013 - Growth to Be Restricted by Operators

2008-11-19T07:39:00.001-08:00

The report found that although the retail value of the global mobile games market is expected to rise from $5.4bn in 2008 to more than $10bn in 2013, the potential for growth in many key markets is being dampened by a combination of limited on-portal revenue share for publishers -- meaning that some are exiting the mobile games industry -- and poor games marketing.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, "The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive. The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely, thereby reducing consumer choice in the longer term."

Mobile Games Market to Reach $10bn by 2013 - Growth to Be Restricted by Operators

While the arrival of the iPhone has generated a universally positive response from mobile games publishers and developers, the volume of paid-for mobile game downloads has nonetheless flatlined across North America and Western Europe, according to Juniper Research.

The report found that although the retail value of the global mobile games market is expected to rise from $5.4bn in 2008 to more than $10bn in 2013, the potential for growth in many key markets is being dampened by a combination of limited on-portal revenue share for publishers -- meaning that some are exiting the mobile games industry -- and poor games marketing.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, "The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive. The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely, thereby reducing consumer choice in the longer term."

The report also found that while ad-funded downloads have increased markedly in popularity, the revenues accrued from advertising are unlikely to be sufficient to provide developers or operators with a primary revenue stream. It argued that, with cost per mille (CPM) rates likely to fall in the face of pressures on advertising budgets, advertising would be largely employed by most publishers as a means of monetising older content.

However, the Juniper study remained optimistic about prospects for growth in regions such as the Indian Sub Continent, Africa/Middle East and South America, where the combination of increased mobile adoption and low levels of penetration of both games consoles and fixed Internet means that the mobile handset has already become the de facto gaming device.

Other findings from the Juniper report include:

China and the Far East will remain the largest regional market for mobile games throughout the period covered by the report.
Global revenues from in-game advertising will rise significantly from 2008 to 2013.
Operators need to reduce data charges further for out of bundle customers to encourage casual mobile Internet usage and thereby stimulate the mobile entertainment market

Resource - cellular-news

ZTE, Qualcomm and Aircell Collaborate on In-flight Mobile Broadband System

2008-11-19T07:37:00.000-08:00

It has been announced that China's ZTE has been working with Qualcomm to create the networking platform for Aircell’s new Inflight Internet service, Gogo, which first began service in August on select American Airlines flights. Aircell’s Air-to-Ground (ATG) service relies on ZTE’s EV-DO Rev. A base stations and IP switching platform and Qualcomm’s aircraft-mounted modems.
ZTE’s base stations are stationed across the U.S. to support service for Aircell’s airline customers. While en route, subscriber Wi-Fi traffic is transmitted to ZTE’s CDMA EV-DO Rev. A networking equipment via Qualcomm’s aircraft-mounted modems. The technology was engineered to accommodate the high speed and high altitude of aircraft connecting with the base station. As a result, the service dramatically improves upon previous in-flight wireless services, which were slow, expensive and complex.

“At ZTE, we are committed to developing customized and flexible solutions that enable our customers and partners to offer their own customers the most innovative and desirable applications and services,” said Dr. George Sun, CEO, ZTE USA. “In this instance, by working closely with Aircell and Qualcomm, we were able to tap into the brightest R&D minds available to create the most cutting-edge and flexible networking platform. We look forward to working with Aircell and Qualcomm to scale the platform to support increasing demand and future expansion of the service.”

“Qualcomm was pleased to collaborate with Aircell and ZTE to help enable this unique wireless data innovation,” said Ahmad Jalali, vice president of technology for Qualcomm. “EV-DO Rev. A was a clear choice for creating a powerful, spectrally efficient and high-speed data connection to carry the aircraft’s passenger traffic to ZTE base stations on the ground.”

“When designing our industry-first in-flight mobile broadband service, we were searching for companies that would work hand-in-hand with us to create a flexible and customized networking platform that was optimized for our unique ATG needs,” said Joe Cruz, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Aircell. “We found those allies in ZTE and Qualcomm. As a result, we are able to offer our customers the best possible broadband experience on North America’s only comprehensive Inflight Internet service.”

Resource - cellular-news

GSM Trade Body Wants All New Phones to Have NFC by Mid-2009

2008-11-19T07:36:00.000-08:00

The GSMA, the global trade group for the mobile industry, has called for full NFC functionality -- including the standardised 'Single Wire Protocol' interface -- to be built into all new mobile phones from mid-2009.

The GSMA's Board said that it fully supports the need for the ETSI endorsed 'Single Wire Protocol' standard to provide the interface between the Universal Integrated Circuit Card (UICC, or SIM card) and the embedded NFC chipset within the handset. The NFC chip can communicate with existing contactless readers to deliver a wide range of secure, interoperable and transparent services, such as credit and debit payments.

Rob Conway, CEO of the GSMA, said, "There is no doubt that there is a huge latent demand for a large variety of mobile transaction services, of which there is universal interest in proximity payments, as trials across the world have already shown. We are committed to ensuring that mobile payment services are delivered as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. But this will require device manufacturers to make sure that the vast majority of commercially available handsets incorporate the Single Wire Protocol and Near Field Communications features as standard.

"Doing so would enable the industry to leverage significant economies of scale, and ensure greater accessibility of NFC services for mobile users, added Conway."

This call for handsets is supported by recent operator trial results, which indicate a growing consumer demand for mobile payment services. Trials are underway across eight countries involving nine mobile operators as part of the GSMA's Pay-Buy-Mobile initiative. Further pilots are planned across 14 countries by 15 mobile operators.

In Taiwan, in a trial of over 200 users, FarEasTone found that 90% of people felt positive toward to this new service. 80% of people were satisfied that the service is secure, and 40% said they would switch their monthly spending to a mobile credit card service.

Seven banks and four mobile operators -- including Orange and SFR -- involved in the "Payez Mobile" trial in France have announced the results of trials conducted with almost 500 sales outlets and nearly 1000 triallists. Over 90% of triallists said they found contactless mobile payment convenient, fast, and easy to use. In addition, 94% declared that they would recommend it to their friends and family. Merchants welcomed the possibility of offering to their customers an innovative payment solution, with over 80% saying they appreciated the speed and cutting-edge appeal of mobile contactless payment.

Equally, in Korea, SKT and KTF found that m-transportation was very popular with users, and this is likely to translate to other mobile payment services. Approximately 450,000 users of the "T-money" service were quick to adopt the service as it is convenient and compatible with existing readers. According to KTF's survey, 85% of m-transportation users indicated satisfaction levels were 'very high'. 85% of them believe that using a contactless mobile phone is much more convenient than getting their wallet out to use public transportation, and would continue to use the mobile service. "T-money" attracts users not only for the public metro and bus, but also for small transactions such as buying goods from convenient stores by simply tapping on the contactless readers.

In July the GSMA on behalf of operators issued a detailed Device Requirement document to a wide range of vendors and suppliers in the 'Pay-Buy-Mobile' ecosystem. 37 key players responded, giving a clear picture of the core requirements for any SWP/NFC device.

Resource - cellular-news

Judge Dismisses Psystar's Anti-Trust Counterclaim Against Apple

2008-11-19T07:33:00.000-08:00

A California judge has dismissed a counterclaim from Psystar which asserted that Apple was violating federal and state anti-trust laws in limiting the sale and use of Mac OS X on Apple branded computers..

But in a 19-page order passed down on Tuesday, Judge William Alsup largely reject Psystar's claims and granted Apple's motion to have the countersuit thrown out of court should the clone maker not better its argument through an amended complaint that can be filed no later than Monday December 8th.

AppleInsider notes that Psystar attempted to define a "Mac OS market" in which Apple held a monopoly. Apple, of course, successfully disputed this definition of a "market" with which the judge agreed.

"Apple asks its customers to purchase Mac OS knowing that it is to be used only with Apple computers," he wrote. "It is certainly entitled to do so."

Psystar is a small company which sells a Mac clone using off-the-shelf PC parts and a modified version of Mac OS X Leopard. Apple sued Psystar over these products and that case is still pending.
Resource - MacRumors

NVIDIA announces cost, energy-saving Tesla Personal Supercomputer

2008-11-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

AMD has already outlined its plans to harness the power of its GPUs for some added computing muscle, and it looks like NVIDIA is now taking things one step further by announcing its new GPU-based Tesla Personal Supercomputer, which promises to deliver the power of a traditional supercomputer cluster at 1/100th of the price. That "personal supercomputer" is actually a platform based on NVIDIA's new Tesla C1060 GPU Computing Processor, which itself is based on NVIDIA's CUDA parallel computing architecture. The supercomputers themselves will come from a whole host of manufacturers that have already partnered with NVIDIA, including ASUS, Dell, Lenovo, and a number of more specialized computer makers. While complete details on those systems are still a bit light at the moment, they'll apparently be "priced like a conventional PC workstation," and the first few out of the gate should be available starting today.

Resource - Engadget

Microsoft on the cloud: Sharepoint and Exchange go Online

2008-11-19T07:31:00.000-08:00

Back in July, Microsoft revealed pricing models and partner compensation details for Microsoft Online Services, and it boasted that a growing number of companies were finding the beta program solid enough to sign on for when the products were released. Yesterday, Microsoft finally announced the availability of two of the services in the United States: Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Redmond hopes that businesses see these subscription services as a complementary option to the non-cloud versions of Microsoft's solution for portals and collaboration (Sharepoint) and its solution for e-mail and calendaring (Exchange).

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, spoke of the launch as if Microsoft had had a major breakthrough: "Customers are embracing Microsoft’s software and services strategy en masse because of the choice and flexibility it gives them. Today, we bring business-class communications and collaboration technologies to the cloud, and we are committed to delivering more capabilities in the months ahead. No one has done what we are doing at this scale, and I’m certain that our customers will continue to take on these solutions as our offerings grow." In reality, Microsoft has bided its time and watched as the market pointed to the cloud, and now the company is offering businesses something that they'll find it hard not to take a closer look at: cloud versions of products their business already relies on.

Microsoft also claimed again that a growing number of companies of all shapes and sizes are embracing Microsoft Online Services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online. According to a press release, "In just the past year, Microsoft has sold more than a half million seats. "Since July 2008, more than 1,500 companies have enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Program for Microsoft Online Services, with 100 more joining every week."

These numbers aren't by any means shocking, at least when compared to software solutions Microsoft provides. Still, "the cloud" is a software delivery medium that many companies don't want to yet, and given that, half a million seats is quite good. Subscriptions mean businesses can offer their employees the latest version for a fraction of the normal upgrade cost, assuming that the work being done with these services doesn't require much heavy lifting (not all features in the software are present in the service). These cloud services, which are hosted on Microsoft's own computers, aren't replacements for their software counterparts, but they do appear to be filling a gap that was previously too expensive to fill.

Exchange Hosted Services is $1.75 per user per month; Sharepoint Online is $7.25 and Exchange Online goes for $10. Suites, which refer to combinations of cloud services, start at $15 per user per month. That price equates to $180 a year, and as we've said before, that is quite steep when compared to Google Apps, offered for $50 a year. Microsoft's argument is that you get what you pay for, and the software giant argues that its offering is much more advanced and robust than Google's. Microsoft also has the advantage of offering familiarity for the many businesses that already use its products.

Microsoft must be seeing its Software + Services strategy doing very well, as the company also announced plans for an expansion of Microsoft Online Services in the next year. A Microsoft Online Services solution "that will provide IT management and security capabilities for businesses, enabling IT managers to secure and manage desktops using a Web-based subscription service" is on the way, along with the previously announced Office Communications Online. That's the business side of things, while the consumer pipeline has Microsoft Equipt and Office Web.

Resource - Ars Technica

Mozilla to end support for Firefox 2

2008-11-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

The Mozilla Foundation is planning to end support for the Firefox 2 browser in mid-December, despite the persistence of significant flaws in the most-recent version of the popular browser.

The 'end of life' (EOL) plan for Firefox 2 is part of Mozilla's policy of ending support for previous versions of a product six months after a new version's release. It is designed to allow Mozilla developers to focus their efforts on the current browser version, Firefox 3, released in mid-May.

For users, the policy means an end to security and stability updates for the existing versions, as well as an end to releases of new features.

Support will also cease for the Gecko 1.8 layout engine that underlies both Firefox 2 and the Thunderbird 2 email client. The move will affect a range of third-party Gecko-based browsers, such as SeaMonkey, the Mac-only Camino and the Unix/Linux browser Galeon.

Mozilla confirmed the move on the web page devoted to older versions of its software, stating: "Firefox 2.0.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until mid-December, 2008. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 3."

Mozilla is pressing on with the transition despite criticisms of Firefox 3 from some quarters, including some organizations that have found the newer browser unusable due to particular bugs. Some users have noted that Firefox 3 appears to be more prone to crashing than the older browser, and has problems with using too much memory. The browser's new location bar has also come in for criticism. Earlier this month, a system administrator for the University of Bergen commented that a bug related to the use of network drives had meant the organization could not install Firefox 3.

Firefox 2 is still receiving significant numbers of bug-fixes in new releases. Last week, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0.0.18 and Firefox 3.0.4, addressing a dozen security flaws, half of which were ranked as critical. Mozilla's current plan is to release only one more update to Firefox 2, version 2.0.0.19.

Mozilla assured developers that support would continue for Thunderbird 2 past December, despite the fact that it is based on the now-outmoded Gecko 1.8 engine.

"Mozilla (in some form) will provide support for Thunderbird based on the official lifecycle policy," said Mozilla's Michael Connor in a recent message to the Mozilla planning mailing list.

The support situation for third-party browsers based on Gecko 1.8 is more ambiguous, according to Firefox director Mike Beltzner. While he acknowledged that Mozilla developers' focus would no longer be on Gecko 1.8, he said third-party developers would still be free to maintain the software and fix bugs.

"EOL doesn't mean 'everyone stop coding and doing reviews', more that 'we don't have a team doing weekly triage on blockers and milestone releases'," Beltzner wrote in a recent Mozilla mailing list post.

In October, Beltzner said two-thirds of Firefox users were already using version 3. Mozilla set a world’s record for its more than eight million downloads of Firefox 3 in June.

Resource - ZDNet

Video games kill driving skills, police say

2008-11-19T07:29:00.000-08:00

VIDEO games allowing teenagers to show off in street races and crash for fun are contributing to a lack of responsibility when they drive real cars, police and experts say.

The games made teens think they were invincible and too often it was being left to police to save P-platers from themselves, New South Wales acting Superintendent Dave Evans said yesterday.

The warnings come as experts and victims' families backed raising the driver age limit to at least 18 after revelations 104 P-platers are losing their licences each day.

More than 2000 lost their licences for drink driving, speeding over 45km/h over the limit and other serious offences, while 1674 were caught breaking the speed limit by more than 30km/h.

Researchers in Germany found that men take more risks on the road after racing in video games but women did not.

"Video games can have a negative impact on young drivers because it increases their complacency and their indulgence in risk-taking behaviour," Supt Evans said.

"In games you race, you crash and it is a matter of pressing the buttons and off you go again. In real life it doesn't work that way, you can be killed."

Friends Steph Khoo and Stephanie Krautil, who were last night playing arcade racing car games in Sydney, said they understood the difference between video and real-life driving.

But the 18-year-olds admitted it could badly influence other drivers.

"I can understand mainly guy drivers who might take it a bit more seriously, especially if they're really into cars," said Ms Khoo, a P-plater.

George Institute researcher Dr Teresa Senserrick said young drivers should be handed P-plates at 18 and full restrictions lifted at 21.

Yesterday New South Wales Roads Minister Michael Daley said the "unacceptable" level of P-plate offences might lead to compulsory driver education classes.

"We need to look at other ways to try and educate our young people to slow down," he said.

"There are some driving programs in schools... but there is nothing formal."

Police have called for parents to be tougher on young drivers but a Daily Telegraph poll yesterday found 55 per cent of 1365 readers disagreed.

Resource - News.com.au

Blogger says G1 multitouch capable

2008-11-19T07:28:00.001-08:00

From the very beginning, Android has planned to support multitouch. The G1's touch screen is a ClearPad, created by Synaptics—a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance. Synaptics provides the touch interface driver for Android, and will at some time offer "advanced multi-touch gestures for the Android platform." Over at the RyeBlog, blogger RyeBrye has tapped into the unit's multitouch capabilities.

Synaptics offers a touch module that supports a number of single touch and multitouch gestures that include tapping, pressing, flicking and pinching. This gesture support requires no additional interpretation software on the host end, helping to lower processor demands for the screen's host.

RyeBrye writes that by uncommenting critical lines in the Synaptics driver and recompiling the kernel, he replaced his boot image with a version that supported two finger tracking and debug logging. He posted that the feedback returned by the driver includes position information along with finger width and a finger number. The number allows you to track more than one finger at a time.

He then went ahead and tested a variety of one and two finger gestures. He has pastebinned the debugging output for a half dozen tests, so you can review the data yourself to confirm how the G1 screen tracks two fingers.

As to why the G1 does not officially support multitouch at this time, RyeBrye relates feedback from a Google employee speaking off-the-record. That employee suggests that the G1 specs do not specify anything but a single touch screen, so in the future they might source screens without the built-in multitouch capacity. That makes the multitouch capabilities of the current G1 run a nice extra rather than a necessary component for future production lines. At this time, Synaptics is the sole touch interface company in the Android alliance.

Resource - ArsTechnica

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 spec officially released, first chipset demonstrated

2008-11-19T07:26:00.000-08:00

It's been nearly a year since we first saw the USB 3.0 connector make an appearance at CES, and after months of corporate infighting, spec-polishing, and technical navel-gazing, the future of consumer peripheral connectivity is here -- in the form of complete specifications and a demo. Yeah, so maybe SuperSpeed USB isn't making the most dramatic entrance ever, but hey, it doesn't have to with 4.8Gbps transfer speeds, improved power management, and backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 along for the ride. As expected, the first wave of devices won't hit until 2010, but Symwave's giving attendees of this week's SuperSpeed conference a taste of tomorrow with a demo of the Quasar USB 3.0 chipset, which is targeted at "sync-and-go" devices like phones and media players. Sounds lovely -- now if you'll excuse us, we have to go back to mourning the death of FireWire 400.

Resource - Engadget

Yang Steps Down As Yahoo CEO, Search For Successor Begins

2008-11-19T07:23:00.000-08:00

Expect Yahoo’s share price to jump tomorrow - Jerry Yang will be stepping down as CEO of the company, a job that he took on an interim basis in June 2007.

Yang will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo, and will remain on the board of directors. The company has hired executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles to find the new CEO.

This was an unavoidable event, and in our opinion Yang took too long to step down. In May it was clear that Yang’s heart was no longer in it, and he reconfirmed that last month at the Web 2.0 Summit. Under his watch the company has lost tens of billions of dollars in market cap and thousands of former Yahoo employees (and hundreds of execs) are now gone.

How much of the downfall was his fault? It’s impossible to say, except that he takes full responsibility for mishandling the Microsoft acquisition offer last February. One thing you have to love is Yang’s tenacity in keeping Yahoo an independent company at any cost. But what shareholders and employees need is a leader with an actual plan.

Who will be the next CEO? We speculated back in June that Jeff Mallet or Dan Rosensweig were possible candidates. Mallet wouldn’t consider the job, we’ve heard. But Rosensweig would probably take it if offered.

Whoever ends up with the job, let’s just hope it’s an outsider. Yahoo is being clear that they are considering internal candidates. President Sue Decker is likely being considered. But ex-execs we’ve spoken with say she was a big part of the problem at Yahoo, and if she takes over as CEO it will likely be more of the same.

The press release:

Yahoo! Conducting Search for New CEO
Co-Founder Jerry Yang to Step Down Following Appointment of New CEO
and Return to Former Role as Chief Yahoo! and Board Member

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov 17, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) –

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO) today announced that its Board of Directors has initiated a search for a new Chief Executive Officer. Jerry Yang, co-Founder of Yahoo!, has decided to return to his former role as Chief Yahoo! upon the appointment of his successor as CEO, and he will also continue to serve on the Board. Yang, 40, assumed the CEO role at the Board’s request in June 2007, and he has led Yahoo! through a strategic repositioning and transformation of its platform.

Chairman Roy Bostock, working with the independent directors and in consultation with Jerry Yang, is leading the process of assessing potential candidates and determining finalists for consideration. The search will encompass both internal and external candidates, and the Board has retained Heidrick & Struggles, a leading international executive search firm, to assist in the process.

“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues,” said Roy Bostock. “Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensible to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” said Jerry Yang. “When the Board asked me to become CEO and lead the transformation of the Company, I did so because it was important to re-envision the business for a different era to drive more effective growth. Having set Yahoo! on a new, more open path, the time is right for me to transition the CEO role and our global talent to a new leader. I will continue to focus on global strategy and to do everything I can to help Yahoo! realize its full potential and enhance its leading culture of technology and product excellence and innovation.”

Resource - TechCrunch

Introducing SketchUp 7

2008-11-19T07:21:00.000-08:00

We're very excited to announce the new release of Google SketchUp 7. If you don't already know about the fun you can have with SketchUp, here's a quick recap:

SketchUp is software you can use to build 3D models of anything: your house, killer robots, furniture, trees, abstract art — anything. Architects and engineers use it to design buildings and other structures. Woodworkers use it to plan their projects. And lots of people use it to figure out where to put their furniture. SketchUp is easy to learn, it comes in free and Pro versions, and it's more fun than a houseful of clowns. Oh, and you can use it to build models for Google Earth, too.

So what's new in SketchUp 7? There's too much to list here, but we focused on three major areas for this release:

Making it even easier to get started – We've created a new class of "smart" objects called Dynamic Components, which are simpler to work with for new modelers. Take a look at this video to see what I mean:

Making it easier to share what you make and collaborate with other people – We built a better link between SketchUp and the rest of the 3D world, made it possible to "sign" your models, and added Google Docs–style collaboration and sharing to our 3D Warehouse.
Adding powerful features for experienced SketchUp Pro users – SketchUp is only half of the SketchUp Pro suite; the other half is all about sharing your work with your clients. LayOut 2 (which is now officially out of beta and rarin' to go) lets you create multi-page documents and presentations. Your models are linked to your LayOut file so that changing the former automatically updates the latter.

Take a look at the What's New in 7 page on the SketchUp website to get the whole scoop. There's a great video to watch, and it stars some of the more prone-to-sunlight members of our engineering team — in lab coats, no less. Don't miss it.
Resource - Official Google Blog

800MHz CPU-packing P565 handset appears on ASUS site

2008-11-19T07:19:00.000-08:00

ASUS' P565 has been pretty much unofficial until now, though we did see some alleged photos and specs of the device not terribly long ago. The phone has just been officially listed on the ASUS site, however, and we've got a quick rundown of its stats (which are pretty much exactly what we'd seen before). The Glide UI-sporting, HSDPA smartphone -- which ASUS claims is the "fastest business PDA phone" in the world -- runs Windows Mobile 6.1, has an 800MHz Marvell CPU, a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, 256MB flash memory and 128MB of DDR SDRAM, 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, and a microSD slot with SDHC support. Like we said, none of this is a big surprise, but it's the first official look we've had at the handset, though we're still waiting on word about pricing and availability.
Resource - Engadget

Ubuntu aims at mobile computing, netbooks with ARM port

2008-11-19T07:17:00.000-08:00

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has collaborated with ARM to produce a complete Ubuntu port for the ARMv7 architecture. Canonical aims to bring the Ubuntu experience to ARM-based mobile devices. This announcement comes only one month after ARM publicly revealed plans to enter the netbook market.

The new ARM port is expected to be made available in conjunction with the official launch of Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope. Improved netbook support was one of the primary development goals leading up to the release of Ubuntu 8.10 last month, and that trend is set to continue with Jaunty, which developers say will offer better performance and faster boot time. Canonical is clearly pushing hard to make Ubuntu a top choice for consumer netbook products.

Ubuntu is already well supported on Intel's Atom processor, which is currently the dominant chip for an emerging class of mobile Internet devices and small form factor laptops. Adding support for ARM will ensure that Ubuntu can reach a broader selection of devices, including upcoming ARM-based netbooks.

This is a natural development for Ubuntu, driven by the demand from manufacturers for an ARM technology-based version," said Canonical COO Jane Silber in a statement. "Joining the considerable community of free software developers working on the ARM platform ensures that a fully-functional, optimized Ubuntu distribution is available to the ARM ecosystem, providing wider choice for consumers looking for the best operating system for their digital lifestyles."

In addition to working with chip makers to ensure robust hardware support, Canonical has also hired some talented programmers and designers to build unique and visually rich user interfaces that are ideally suited for netbook devices. The company lifted the curtain earlier this year on its Netbook Remix, which includes a customized version of the Ubuntu Mobile Edition launcher and several GNOME modifications that make the desktop environment more comfortable on small screens.

Although this is the first time that Ubuntu has been officially supported on ARM, it is predated by an unofficial ARM port that was released earlier this year by the community-driven Handhelds Mojo group. The community port, which was sponsored by Nokia, targets ARMv5 and 6. In a response to Canonical's announcement that was published on the Handhelds Mojo web site, the group welcomes the news.

"We're delighted to note that Canonical has announced it will officially support ARM v7 with the April 2009 release of Ubuntu," one member of the group wrote in a statement. "I admit, I had hoped that they would also support the ARM v5/6 variations of the ARM processor, but this is a first step in the right direction."

Ubuntu is already shipping on Dell's Mini 9 netbook, which launched in September. It is likely that Ubuntu will reach consumers on many more devices as Canonical continues to make significant investments in mobile hardware support.

Resource - Ars Technica

Adobe answers cries for 64-bit Flash on Linux

2008-11-19T07:16:00.000-08:00

Starting to answer the clamorous demand from open-source fans, Adobe Systems plans to release an alpha version of its Flash Player technology on Monday for those using 64-bit Linux software.

Linux has moved more rapidly than Windows or Mac OS X to support 64-bit processors, in part because the developer-friendly compile-your-own-software ethos that prevails makes it easier for the technically savvy to make the switch. But one of the obstacles in the switch is that people could only use the 32-bit Flash plug-in, which meant that they only could use the 32-bit version of Firefox.

The company plans to release the software at its Adobe Max conference in San Francisco.

The 64-bit support will arrive on other operating systems later, Adobe said, but Linux fans get it first because they were the most vocal in their desire for it.

"Release of this alpha version of 64-bit Flash Player on Linux is the first step in delivering on Adobe's plans to make Flash Player native 64-bit across platforms," Adobe said in a statement. "We chose Linux as our initial platform in response to numerous requests in our public Flash Player bug and issue management system and the fact that Linux distributions do not ship with a 32-bit browser or a comprehensive 32-bit emulation layer by default. With this prelease, Flash Player 10 is now a full native participant on 64-bit Linux distributions. We are committed to bringing native 64-bit Flash Player to Windows and Mac in future releases. We expect to provide native support for 64-bit platforms in an upcoming major release of Flash Player. Windows, Macintosh and Linux players are expected to ship simultaneously moving forward."

Resource - CNET

Yukon Ho AMD shows off new ultraportable roadmap

2008-11-19T07:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, AMD announced that its integrated CPU+GPU Fusion processors wouldn't debut until 2011. Instead, we'll see a plethora of new mobile parts and chipsets rolling out of Sunnyvale through 2009, including new mobile platforms codenamed Congo and Yukon. Both will debut in the first half of 2009, with Yukon positioned as the most netbook-like solution. AMD isn't really using that term, however, and is attempting to position these products as "full-featured" ultraportables with form factors that more closely resemble the Macbook Air.

Let's pause a moment, and define a few terms. Yukon and Congo are high-level terms that refer to an overall platform. Congo, the higher-end version, will use AMD's upcoming Conesus CPU. Conesus, shown below, is a 65nm, dual-core CPU with 1MB of cache (presumably 512K per core), and will support DDR2. Combined with the Congo platform, it will carry an RS780M GPU, the SB710 southbridge, and will support at least some of the Radeon's HD decode features. Yukon is the low-end variant of Congo and will be paired with a low- end Conesus-derived CPU, codenamed "Huron." This new chip will pair up with the RS690E video core and an SB600(?) southbridge.

I dropped in that question mark because I'm having a hard time seeing the logic for an SB600 in an ultraportable or mini-notebook. SB600 used more power than SB700, offered less connectivity, and was a bit buggier than the SB700 and SB750 that have since replaced it. I've no doubt it can do the job, but it's an odd choice for an ~~netbook~~ ultraportable. AMD is targeting a sub-25W TDP for both of these platforms. Granted, that's well above Intel's Atom, but disclosing total platform TDP as opposed to CPU TDP alone is a more accurate representation of how much power the shipping product is going to require.

As for Huron and Conesus, a quick check of AMD's existing product line yields several interesting possibilities. AMD currently has two embedded solutions that might fit Yukon's power consumption profile. The first is virtually a guaranteed fit—it's an integrated Athlon 64 2000+, with a 1GHz core clock, 512K L2, and an 8W TDP. I say "guaranteed," in this case, because if AMD can't deploy a motherboard chipset+IGP that draws less than 16W, the company has no business in this space to begin with. There's also an embedded Athlon 64 2600+—single-core, 15W, 512K of L2 cache. That's a bit tighter of an envelope, but it's still potentially possible.

Conesus is a bit trickier. AMD currently only has just one mobile core in the 25W space, the QL-62 (2GHz, 1MB L2 cache). Then again, since this is a 25W part at 2GHz, it shouldn't be too hard to knock 500MHz off the core, trim the voltage, drop the system bus from 3600MHz to something in the 2GHz range. The reason I'm spending so much time discussing current options, for the curious, is because I seriously doubt Conesus or Huron are actually new CPUs. They might be respun for lower power consumption (we know AMD's 65nm process technology has improved in that regard, based on current Phenom TDPs compared to what the company originally shipped), but the CPUs themselves, I think, are likely to be K8 derivatives.

I have seen some questions on whether or not AMD could ship this sort of part in time to compete with Intel's Atom refresh next year, but again, I don't think that's an issue, for reasons of power consumption and the fundamental performance differences between an out-of-order execution engine and an in-order design. Attempting to compare the two, at this point, smacks more of an inherent desire to grab onto something that's currently popular (Atom) and associate it with something new (Huron/Conesus) even if the two have very little in common.

Resource - Ars Technica

AMD Fusion now pushed back to 2011

2008-11-19T07:13:00.000-08:00

One of the updates that came out of AMD's Financial Analyst day today is that the company's much-discussed Fusion CPU+GPU hybrid will not appear until the company transitions to 32nm technology. That means no Fusion CPUs until 2011 at the earliest. The Shrike platform, once planned to be some sort of next-generation Shanghai + integrated GPU on 45nm has now been canceled altogether. Long-term, AMD still claims to believe in the power of Fusion—just not on a 45nm process.

This may be disappointing news to some, but it's probably a good move for the company. It was never very clear how AMD was going to economically deliver an integrated GPU on 45nm, even if it went for two separate dies on the same physical packaging. A Fusion part needs to be cheap enough that OEMs prefer it (as opposed to an integrated GPU + discrete processor), while simultaneously performing well enough to make customers want it. It can't be all that expensive, either, considering the fact that a relatively modern HD Radeon 3450 sells for just $29 at NewEgg. Waiting for 32nm to come online buys the company both breathing room and die space, and AMD could use a bit of both.

A block diagram of Fusion

Over the next two years, AMD plans to split itself in half, successfully launch The Foundry Company, manage its own 32nm transition, and break ground on Fab 4x in New York, which will come online as a 32nm plant. Bobcat and Bulldozer, meanwhile, may have been delayed, but they aren't gone; both are currently scheduled for launch in 2011. On the server side, AMD has to scale Shanghai through its 45nm lifespan, release the six-core ~~Constantinople~~ Istanbul variant (coming in second half 2009), and successfully launch its first in-house server chipset, Fiorano. On the GPU side, AMD must continue to gain ground (or hold what it has gained) in the GPU market, and transition the Radeon series down to 40nm, with 32nm possibly following after.

That's an aggressive launch schedule, particularly from a company in as precarious a position as AMD is, and successfully executing it will require a great deal of skill. Shanghai is far stronger out of the gate than Barcelona ever was, but it'll be quite some time before Sunnyvale is back on any kind of good financial footing. As for what's coming post-Shanghai on the desktop, AMD did release a few details. It plans to introduce two 32nm Bulldozer cores in 2011, Llano and Ontario. Llano will be a quad-core part with support for DDR3 and up to 8MB of cache, while Ontario will be a dual-core laptop part with an integrated GPU. There's no word yet on the company's "Quebec" processor, but we expect that core will feature AMD's Separatist Technology. Rumor has it that the project is bogged down in negotiations, most of which are aimed at persuading the upcoming chip that it is not, in fact, a Xeon.

Resource - Ars Technica

Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone)

2008-11-19T07:12:00.000-08:00

SAN FRANCISCO — Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Google’s voice search software works only with iPhones, but the company plans to make it available to other phones.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Vic Gundotra, right, and Gummi Hafsteinsson, of Google, with an iPhone running the voice search.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering. The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was easily accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.

The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions.

Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who has done pioneering work in voice recognition, said Google’s advantage in this field was the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data. “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months,” he said.

“It’s important to understand that machine recognition will never be perfect,” Mr. Reddy added. “The question is, How close can they come to human performance?” For Google the technology is critical to its next assault on the world of advertising. Google executives said location-based queries would make it possible to charge higher rates for advertisements from nearby businesses, for example, although it is not selling such ads now.

As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.

“We are dramatically increasing value to the advertiser through location and voice,” said Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.

Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries.

Several weeks ago Adobe added voice recognition technology developed by Autonomy, a British firm, to its Creative Suite software, allowing it to generate transcripts of video and audio recordings with a high degree of accuracy.

Mr. Gundotra said Google had been tackling the twin problems of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.

“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” he said.

The new iPhone search capability is not the first speech offering from Google. In March, it announced that GOOG-411, an experimental directory information service, had turned into a real product. The service allows users to ask for business phone and address information. The company said it had built on its experience and the data it collected through GOOG-411 in developing the iPhone service.

The new service is an example of the way Google tries to blend basic computer science research with product engineering. The company has hired many of the best speech recognition researchers in the world and now has teams working on different aspects of the problem in New York, London and its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

An intriguing part of the overall design of the service was contributed by a Google researcher in London, who found a way to use the iPhone accelerometer — the device that senses how the phone is held — to set the software to “listen” mode when the phone is raised to the user’s ear.

Google researchers said that another of its advantages over competitors was the billions of queries its users have made over the years.

“One thing that has changed is the amount of computation and the amount of data that is available,” said Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.

Past queries can be used to build a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, Mr. Cohen said. This is just one of the components of the speech recognition system, which also includes a sound analysis model and a mechanism for linking the basic components of language to actual words.

Google recently published a technical paper on building large models for machine translation of language. The researchers wrote that they had trained the system on two trillion “tokens,” or words.
Resource - Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone)

Smart camera sports Atom

2008-11-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Matrox Imaging announced a Windows CE "smart camera" that uses a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor. The Iris GT features 256MB of RAM, 1GB of flash storage, a gigabit Ethernet port, USB 2.0 and RS232 serial ports, plus an opto-coupled trigger input and strobe output, says Matrox.

(Click here for a larger view of Matrox's Iris GT)

According to Matrox, the Iris GT is designed to run "machine vision" applications created using the company's Matrox Design Assistant (IDE) integrated development environment. The IDE aims to let manufacturing engineers and technicians configure and deploy applications without the need for conventional programming, the company claims.

Matrox Design Assistant runs on a Windows desktop PC, and is said to let users design machine vision applications using a flowchart. Adding elements to an application is done by taking steps from a toolbox. Available steps include image analysis and processing, communication, flow-control, and I/O, the company says.

A finished application will be able to accept input from the camera, then perform operations such as the following, according to the company:

Locating and reading barcodes

Finding and recognizing character strings

Recognizing patterns

Measuring the geometry of 2D objects

Compensating for lens distortion, and calibrating itself via a grid or a list of known points

Matrox's Design Assistant IDE (left) creates applications (right) that run on the Iris GT smart camera
(Click to enlarge)
Once an application has been created via the IDE (above left), it is then deployed to the Iris GT smart camera, where it runs independently. The device includes an integral HTTP server, allowing an operator to check up on its operations remotely (above right) from any web browser, Matrox says.

Camera hardware

As mentioned above, the Iris GT runs Windows CE 6.0 on a 1.6GHz Atom processor, though Matrox did not say whether the CPU is the N270 part usually associated with netbooks, the 230 aimed at nettops, or -- most likely, we think -- the Z530 commonly found in MIDs (mobile internet devices). The device has 256MB of RAM and 1GB of flash storage.

Connectivity for the camera includes gigabit Ethernet, an RS232 interface, four digital inputs, four digital outputs, one opto-coupled trigger input, and one strobe output. The device can connect to Modbus via TCP/IP, Matrox adds.

Optically, the camera has a C-mount connector that allows lenses to be interchanged. According to Matrox, the Iris GT is available with a choice of two different monochrome sensors: A Kodak-supplied CCD has 640 x 480 resolution and captures 110 frames per second, while a Sony-supplied CCD has 1280 x 960 resolution and captures 22.5fps.

Described as "sturdy, dust-proof, and washable," the Iris GT operates over temperatures from 0 to 50 deg. C (32 to 122 deg. F). It requires 24VDC input power and uses approximately 10 Watts, says Matrox.

Features and specifications listed by the company for the Iris GT include the following:

Processor -- 1.6GHz Intel Atom

Memory -- 256MB of RAM and 1GB of flash storage

Camera -- Monochrome sensor, with 640 x 480 or 1280 x 960 resolution

Networking -- Gigabit Ethernet, with 8-pin M12 connector

Other I/O:

RS232
Digital I/O -- four inputs and four outputs
Trigger input
Strobe output

Operating temperature -- 0 to 50 deg. C (32 to 122 deg. F)

Power requirements -- 24VDC, 10 Watt typical

Weight -- n/s

Dimensions -- n/s

According to Matrox, the Iris GT will be available in the first quarter of 2009, though pricing was not released. More information may be found on the company's website, here.
Resource - WindowsForDevices

The YouTube Presidency

2008-11-19T07:10:00.000-08:00

Today, President-elect Obama will record the weekly Democratic address not just on radio but also on video -- a first. The address, typically four minutes long, will be turned into a YouTube video and posted on Obama's transition site, Change.gov, once the radio address is made public on Saturday morning.

The address will be taped at the transition office in Chicago today.

"This is just one of many ways that he will communicate directly with the American people and make the White House and the political process more transparent," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told us last night.

In addition to regularly videotaping the radio address, officials at the transition office say the Obama White House will also conduct online Q&As and video interviews. The goal, officials say, is to put a face on government. In the following weeks, for example, senior members of the transition team, various policy experts and choices for the Cabinet, among others, will record videos for Change.gov.

Yesterday, transition co-chairman Valerie Jarrett recorded a two-minute video that summarized the goings-on in the past week. "President-elect Obama adopted the most sweeping and strict ethics rules that have ever been in place in the course of a transition," said a bespectacled Jarrett, looking directly at the camera in a video that's yet to be posted.

President Bush, too, has updated WhiteHouse.gov, which offers RSS feeds, podcasts and videos of press briefings. The site's Ask the White House page has featured regular online chats dating back to 2003, and President Bush hosted one in January after a Middle Eastern trip.

But online political observers say President-elect Obama's innovative, online-fueled campaign will likely evolve into a new level of online communication between the public and the White House--the Internet-era version of President Franklin Roosevelt's famous "fireside chats" between 1933 and 1944,

"The Obama team has written the playbook on how to use YouTube for political campaigns. Not only have they achieved impressive mass -- uploading over 1800 videos that have been viewed over 110 million times total -- but they've also used video to cultivate a sense of community amongst supporters," said Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube. "Obama told us in a YouTube interview last year that he plans to have 'fireside chats' on video, and we expect his administration will launch a White House YouTube channel very soon after taking office."

Added Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, a D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for government transparency: "We're living, after all, in the Internet era. This is an individualized version of the 'fireside chats.' It's not delivered between 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. but whenever anyone wants to see it. I don't know if it necessarily creates transparency -- it's still a controlled, one-way message. But it creates the aura of a much more accessible presidency."

So what's next from the Obama White House?

A behind-the-scenes online video exclusive of the State of the Union Address? A text message reminding us to turn in our taxes? Who knows...

This is one in a series of online columns on our growing "clickocracy," in which we are one nation under Google, with e-mail and video for all. Please send suggestions, comments and tips to
Resource - Washington Post

Sun restructures, lays off up to 6,000

2008-11-19T07:09:00.000-08:00

Sun Microsystems announced Friday a restructuring that involves layoffs of 15 percent to 18 percent of its global workforce.

The company's reorganization of its software operations includes the departure of Rich Green, executive vice president of software.

Sun's restructuring will result in a charge of between $500 million and $600 million over the next 12 months, with about $375 million to $450 million coming in the current 2009 fiscal year.

The company said it should start seeing cost savings in the third quarter of the current fiscal year. Sun expects the restructuring to save it between $700 million and $800 million annually.

Sun will realign its software organization into new business groups: Application Platform Software, Systems Platforms, and Cloud Computing & Developer Platforms, with a focus on "boosting open-source momentum and growing new sectors of the market who view technology as a competitive weapon."

Chief Marketing Officer Anil Gadre will run the Application Platform group, which will include the company's Java technology franchise, MySQL open-source database product, the GlassFish Application Server, and the Sun Learning Services organization.

The Systems Platform group will be led by John Fowler and include Solaris Virtualization and systems management software.

Dave Douglas will lead the Cloud computing group, which will include Network.com, the NetBeans developer platform, and the StarOffice portfolio.

Sun announced a 7 percent drop in fiscal first-quarter revenue last month, coming in the midrange of its previously lowered earnings forecast.

Sun's stock opened lower. But by 8:25 a.m. PST, it was down just 2 cents at $4.06.

At least one analyst thinks the cuts are not enough.

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein, said in a research note that Sun could "return to reasonable levels of profitability if it underwent an aggressive workforce reduction: We estimate that a cut of 20 percent of total headcount (6,700 people) could drive operating margins of 7 percent-plus (vs. -0.5 percent expected for FY09), yielding EPS of around $1.00."

Sacconaghi, who has a $6 price target for Sun, warned short-term investors that Sun's declining gross margins are likely to continue given the pressure its traditional high-end business is putting on its financial results. But for long-term investors, Sacconaghi sounded a bit more bullish, noting Sun is attractively priced right now. Over time, he noted, the potential exists for Sun to increase its operating margins if management aggressively keeps its costs in check, which eventually could leave to profitability.

Resource - CNET

European debut for '$100 laptop'

2008-11-19T07:08:00.000-08:00

The XO is due to go on sale again in the US on 17 November

Europeans will soon be able to buy their own XO laptop.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation is planning to sell the devices via online store Amazon's European outlets from 17 November.

The machines will be sold under the Give One, Get One scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US.

Under that scheme, buyers get one machine for themselves and the other is donated to a school child in a developing nation.

Late delivery

The plan to put the distinctive green and white XO laptops on sale in 27 European nations was revealed by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte in a speech to the World of Health IT Conference in Copenhagen.

When it goes on sale the XO laptop is expected to cost £268 (313 euros) and should be available in 27 EU nations as well as Switzerland, Russia and Turkey.

The Give One, Get One programme was first run in the US in November and December 2007. The OLPC organisation claims it sold almost 190,000 machines via the scheme.

Despite the success of the scheme, it drew criticism because the OLPC group had trouble delivering machines to those who had ordered one. In a bid to resolve these issues, it signed up with Amazon in September 2008.

The original idea for the OLPC was to create a small, powerful laptop for school children that would sell in the millions yet cost less than $100.

The final version of the machine ended up costing about $188 and the OLPC group has only sold about 600,000 of the machines.

Many nations have expressed an interest in using the XO but few have signed up to buy them in the numbers expected by the OLPC organisation. Most recently the Caldas region of Colombia signed up to buy 65,000 XO machines.

The XO has also faced competition from Intel's Classmate laptop. In September, Venezuela ordered one million Classmate laptops for its school children.

Resource - BBC

ASRock's Instant Boot: 0 to Vista in 4 seconds

2008-11-15T05:43:00.001-08:00

ASRock has a ploy to sell more of its motherboards: Instant Boot. The BIOS update for select MoBos promises to boot XP or Vista systems 10 times faster than standard PCs -- in other words, about 3 to 4 seconds from a full shutdown. ASRock achieves this minor of miracles through manipulation of the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface that Microsoft manipulates for its sleep and hibernate modes. At the risk of oversimplification, ASRock appears to add the processing baggage to the backend of the shutdown process, essentially rebooting the OS and then dropping it into a suspended state ready to instantly pop on the next time you hit the power button. Pretty smart actually. Here's the catch: the system you're using must be limited to a single user account without any password protection -- a definite no-no for corporate environments. See what happens when Hugo and George steal Dad's camcorder after the break.
Resource - Engadget

Sun's Cloud Computing Wheels in Motion

2008-11-15T05:41:00.000-08:00

So, I had a conversation with a “cloud evangelist” at Sun Microsystems yesterday (more on that next week), during which I noted his reference to Network.com in the past tense. Naturally, I asked him about this, and he pointed me to network.com. Here is what I found:

We're Making Changes

Network.com is in transition as we add some exciting new options. We're not ready to show off what we're working on just yet, but we'd like to hear from you, and we'd like to keep in touch.

That’s right, the service is no longer available (except for existing customers). Oh, and did I mention the cloud imagery in the background? Hmm …

The man on the other end of the call, Sun’s Russ Castronovo, was tight-lipped about what the future incarnation of Network.com might look like, but he did acknowledge that rarely are such images used without a reason. And while I was a bit taken aback by the decommissioning of the once ballyhooed service, I wasn’t surprised. More than a year ago, a Sun executive told me the company was demoing internally storage, infrastructure and applications as services.

As for what the reborn, cloud computing-style Network.com will look like, we’ll all have to wait a while for details. Research projects like Project Caroline and Project Hydrazine might give some clues, and I think it would be foolish to count out altogether the grid aspect that defined the original offering. One thing that is for sure: cloud computing is no afterthought at Sun. The company’s cloud division reports directly to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and includes among its leaders Lew Tucker, who returns to Sun’s ranks after, among other things, spearheading Salesforce.com’s App Exchange service.

Network.com might never have lived up to its hype, but part of that was due to Sun’s taking the lead in cloud computing before there even was such a thing ($1/CPU/hour, Web portal, credit card payment, etc.). As it retools the service for today’s cloud-crazy atmosphere, Sun has plenty of existing cloud offerings from which to learn, and, this time, the world should be ready for whatever Sun ultimately unveils. God knows Sun has the technologies and the Internet chops to pull off something special.

Resource - ON-DEMAND ENTERPRISE

HTC Launches WiMAX-GSM Smartphone

2008-11-15T05:40:00.000-08:00

Scartel (brand Yota), a Russian provider of Mobile WiMAX, and HTC have launched the world’s first integrated GSM/WiMAX hands

“Yota was established to provide a unique set of mobile communication services to millions of people in Russia and today we have launched the first device and services to realise its full potential,” said Denis Sverdlov, General Director of Yota’s parent company, Scartel LLC (brand Yota). “We really believe that these innovative services, high-speed Internet and stylish HTC MAX 4G will completely change the communications industry, just as the introduction of cellular communications did many years ago.”

The Yota Mobile WiMAX network offers high-speed wireless Internet access, and the Mobile WiMAX network with traffic prioritisation algorithms, allows online films, video and TV programmes to be viewed on the large WVGA screenet.

Broadcasting 14 free channels at launch and 23 channels by the end of 2008, Yota TV introduces a powerful mobile television experience. The vibrant, 3.8 inch 800x480 screen of the HTC MAX 4G can display up to nine TV channels simultaneously, allowing quick and easy channel surfing and programme selection. Thanks to the device’s TV-out capability, users can also watch content on the big screen, putting the HTC MAX 4G at the very heart of the mobile entertainment experience.

”The introduction of the HTC MAX 4G represents the culmination of a close partnership between HTC and Yota to develop the world’s first integrated mobile GSM/WIMAX handset,” said Peter Chou, CEO and President, HTC Corporation. “Russia is a key strategic market for HTC and Yota’s Mobile WiMAX network sets a new global benchmark for next-generation mobile services.”

The HTC MAX 4G supports GSM calls using a SIM card from any Russian network operator and when both callers are Yota subscribers, the call will automatically be routed as a VoIP call over the Yota Mobile WiMAX network.

Resource - cellular-news

Sony Shows off 12.3 Megapixel Camera Unit for Mobile Phones

2008-11-15T05:39:00.000-08:00

Sony has shown off a 12.25 megapixel camera module which the company says can be used within mobile phones - offering the highest megapixel cameraphone on the market today.

Camera Modules

The "IMX060PQ" is a new type 1/2.5 CMOS image sensor "Exmor" for use in camera enabled mobile phones that leverages Sony's proprietary formation technology to realize the industry's smallest unit cell size (1.4µm), and the industry's highest pixel count (12.25 effective megapixel resolution). Sony also announced the launch of "IMX046PQ", a type 1/3.2 CMOS image sensor "Exmor" with 8.11 effective megapixel resolution, and "IMX045PQ", a type 1/4 "Exmor" CMOS image sensor featuring 5.15 effective megapixel resolution.

Sony will also commercialize "IU060F", a type 1/3.2 lens module with 12.25 effective megapixel resolution, and "IU046F", a type 1/3.2 lens module with 8.11 effective megapixels. Equipped with lens and auto focus functions, the two modules are the industry's smallest and thinnest in their class.

Resource - cellular-news

Nigerian satellite launched by China loses power

2008-11-15T05:38:00.000-08:00

A Nigerian communications satellite built and launched by China has been knocked out of service due to a power failure, a spokeswoman for China's launch services provider said Thursday.

The Nigerian Communication Satellite, or NIGCOMSAT-1, ceased functioning early Tuesday Beijing time, said Geng Kun, the spokeswoman for Great Wall Industry Corp., the company that sent the satellite into orbit atop a Long March 3-B rocket in May 2007.

"The solar wing malfunctioned, which led to exhaustion of electric power, then the satellite failed," Geng said.

Most satellites carry solar panels on an extendable wing to generate electricity, with backup batteries activated only when in the earth's shadow.

Intended to expand cell phone and Internet services in central Africa, the satellite's launch last year was hailed as the first time a foreign buyer had purchased a Chinese satellite and its launching service. It was built by the China Academy of Space Technology as part of a $311 million deal signed by China and Nigeria in 2004.

Nigerian Communications Satellite Ltd. Managing Director Abimbola Alale said technicians were working to diagnose the exact problem with the solar panel, but warned a fix could take "some time." Alale said the satellite had been placed into an emergency operating mode to enable the technical work.

China has built up a lucrative satellite launching industry, in part by catering to developing nations. Last month, Venezuela's Chinese-made Simon Bolivar Satellite was launched from the Xichang base in China's southwestern Sichuan province. It is scheduled to begin carrying radio, television and other data transmissions in early 2009 after three months of tests.

Resource - cellular-news

Eight-Fold Improvement in Lithium Battery Life Proposed

2008-11-15T05:36:00.000-08:00

Researchers at a South Korean university have developed a lithium battery which is 90% more energy efficient than existing products. The team led by Cho Jae-phil, an applied chemistry professor at Hanyang University, claimed that the battery life of laptop computers and cellular phones can be extended eight times longer than conventional batteries with the new technology.

The team replaced graphite as the main material of the negative electrode with a novel three dimensional porous silicon particles made of silica and hydrogen fluoride.

The idea of using silicon has been investigated in the past, but the material tends to expand when in contact with lithium and hence was unstable in a closed battery container. In their findings, published in the latest online issue of the Angewante Chemie journal, the team said that they were able to overcome that critical shortcoming of silicon with porous particles.

Commercial production could begin in four to five years - and patents have been applied for.

Resource - cellular-news