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May 31, 2005
Companies announce RFID drug-tracking project
By Nancy WeilUnisys Corp. and SupplyScape Corp. have begun a test project to track pharmaceuticals through the supply chain using RFID (radio frequency identification) or barcodes with the aim of cutting down on counterfeit medicines, the companies said Tuesday. The "electronic drug pedigree" program will track distribution of Oxycontin, a narcotic used for moderate to severe pain made by Purdue Pharma LP, from the drug-maker's manufacturing facility to U.S. wholesaler H.D. Smith, said Brenda Kelly, the vice president of marketing who also manages regulatory affairs at SupplyScape. Oxycontin, which is addictive, was in news headlines in recent years because it became a high-profile target of fradulent attempts by addicts to obtain prescriptions.
Technology for the project is under development and is expected to be deployed in July, she said.
Five states have passed laws with varying time frames for complying with implementing electronic pedigrees on drugs, and a stay placed on a federal regulation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will expire in the coming months, so companies also have to comply with those mandates, she said.
RFID uses very small tags attached to radio antennae that can be placed on products for tracking. The tags can carry serial numbers for tracking items through supply chains and have begun to find widespread use throughout the retail industry, for example. State and federal regulations don't necessarily require RFID tracking for pharmaceuticals, but that is one way to accomplish establishing a pedigree, while barcode systems are another, Kelly said. Laws generally require a record of which companies had possession of the pharmaceuticals and when, and to whom the drugs were sold, establishing an entire chain of custody.
Unisys is a global IT services and products company based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, and is managing the project. SupplyScape, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides electronic pedigree software. Purdue is based in Stamford, Connecticut, and specializes in pain-relieving medicines distributed both by prescription and over-the-counter. Wholesaler H.D. Smith is based on Springfield, Illinois.
Other drug makers will participate in the pilot project, as are other distributors and pharmacies, but do not want their names to be publicly revealed.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:36 PM
No-frills, low-tech cell phones come to Europe
By John BlauAfter spending billions of euros on acquiring new 3G (third-generation) mobile broadband licenses, billions more on building the sophisticated wireless networks and still more on promoting the high-speed data service, numerous mobile phone operators in Europe are now launching new no-frills, low-tech cell phones and services. Talk about a u-turn.
The move to "less is more" comes as mobile operators in Europe fight to win and, perhaps even more importantly, retain customers in rapidly saturating markets.
"It's all about customer segmentation and about targeting a huge group of people out there who want nothing more than easy-to-use, inexpensive phones. These are people who aren't interested in a bunch of fancy data functions," said Emma Mohr-McClune, an analyst with Current Analysis Inc.
The most recent mobile phone company to enter the less-is-more fray is Germany's E-Plus Mobilfunk GmbH & Co. KG. On Monday, the Düsseldorf, Germany, company launched a new mobile discount operator, Simyo GmbH, which will sell SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards over the Internet at discounted rates.
Customers only need to know two basic rates: €0.19 (US$ 0.24) per minute for calls made around the clock; and €0.14 per text message using SMS (Short Message Service). They can top up their SIM cards online as low or high as they want, and are not bound to a contract. A one-off starter fee of €19.95 is required, but includes a call credit of €10.
In return, customers must forgo some perks, such as subsidized handsets, free 24-hour hot-line service or even support in shops.
"Simyo is a service that, among other things, rewards people who are willing to purchase a phone service online without tying up resources in call centers or shops," said Mohr-McClune.
Vodafone Group PLC, Europe's largest mobile phone company, is testing the low-tech end of the market with two new phones that the operator launched on May 20. The phones, branded "Simply," are designed for ease of use with a large screen and dedicated buttons to make a call or send SMS messages, having dispensed with advanced features, such as cameras, multimedia messaging, Bluetooth and 3G.
Both stripped-down phones, the simple black, candybar-shaped VS1 and the more stylish VS2, are manufactured by Sagem Communication SA.
"Simply is the product of almost two-year's research, essentially confirming the uncomfortable truth that a sizeable proportion of the mass market view high-tech handsets as inscrutable and time-wasting gadgets with zero applicability or use," Mohr-McClune wrote in a report.
The analyst expects Vodafone to launch a set of attractive tariffs to accompany the Simply handsets.
Dutch mobile phone company KPN Mobile NV, which owns E-Plus, is another operator that has been at the forefront of customer segmentation, according to Mohr-McClune.
In a move to differentiate itself from more than 20 companies offering mobile phone services in the country, including over a dozen so-called MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators), KPN Mobile has rolled out a youth-centric service branded Hi.
At the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, earlier this year, numerous mobile phone operators, including T-Mobile International AG, spoke of the low-end, youth sector as one of the last big remaining customers acquisition opportunities in a near-saturated Europe.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:35 PM
Spam hurts developing countries most, OECD says
By John BlauSpam may be a global problem but it's hurting Net users in developing countries more than their counterparts in industrialized nations, according to a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris. Numerous underdeveloped countries, especially in Africa and Asia, lack the knowledge, technology and money to effectively combat the growing flow of junk e-mail over their domestic communication networks. As a result, users in these regions suffer from more outages and less reliable service, and are often distrustful of the Internet -- all factors that threaten to widen the global digital divide.
"Spam is a much more serious issue in developing countries than in OECD countries, as it is a heavy drain on resources that are scarcer and costlier in developing countries than elsewhere," the report states.
The report, prepared by Suresh Ramasubramanian, a consultant to the OECD, reflects many of the concerns voiced at a meeting on spam held last year with representatives of developing countries in preparation for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December.
High volumes of incoming and outgoing spam are a severe drain on the meager available bandwidth in developing countries, according to the report. ISPs (Internet service providers) in developing countries face huge costs for receiving, storing and forwarding spam over their networks, and for hiring administrators to do spam filtering when their skills could be devoted to other tasks, it said.
Moreover, ISPs with lax antispam and security policies are likely to find their networks overrun by spammers. Spam will increasingly form more of their incoming mail streams, thus making e-mail practically unusable for their customers. Open relays, open proxies and machines infected with viruses or Trojan horses on their networks will become major spam sources.
Spam also digs deeply into the shallow pockets of users in developing countries. Users in these countries typically rely on dialup Internet access at home or share access at cyber cafes with connections that are often slow and expensive as they have to pay for each byte of data they download.
Telephone infrastructure in developing countries is largely antiquated, adding to users' costs. After making a few attempts to log onto the network and finally get a connection, users are often disconnected and have to make several calls to establish a new connection.
"All this effort and expense is completely wasted when the users finds that the downloaded e-mails are to a large extent random spam or viruses," the report states.
Not only that, users in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to malicious spam and viruses because they often avoid purchasing expensive licenses for operating systems and antivirus programs -- worth a month's salary in many cases, according to the report. Consequently, they purchase cheaper -- and most likely pirated -- copies of software that is not only difficult to keep updated because it lacks proper licenses but is also a source of viruses.
To help curb spam and encourage people in developing countries to communicate via e-mail, authors of the OECD spam report listed several recommendations in its report. For a start, they urge governments to adopt legislation against spam and ISPs to invest in spam-filter technology or outsource their spam filtering to third-party providers.
The authors also recommend establishing computer security and incident response teams (CSIRTs) or computer emergency response teams (CERTs) to organize an effective response to major incidents, and call on ISPs around the globe to help each other fight the spread of spam.
And the ball doesn't stop there. The OECD spam experts also urge governments and ISPs in developing countries to launch widespread public education awareness campaigns in a move to reduce security risks from spam carrying viruses.
The 32-page OECD report is in available at: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/5/47/34935342.pdf.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:32 PM
U.K. police arrest two linked to computer espionage case
By Scarlet PruittLondon police have arrested two computer consultants who are believed to be part of an Israeli industrial espionage scandal in which malicious software was used to steal corporate secrets. The Metropolitan Police arrested Michael Haephrati, 41, and his wife Ruth Haephrati, 28, in London last week on allegations of computer hacking, a police spokesman said Tuesday.
According to several media reports, the two are thought to be part of a group of software programmers and business executives being investigated by Israeli police for industrial espionage. Michael Haephrati allegedly created a type of malicious software program, known as a Trojan horse, which was sent to corporate computers via an e-mail attachment and then used for spying, the reports said.
Although the Met spokesman declined to comment on the espionage allegations, he confirmed that London police have received a provisional extradition request by Israeli authorities.
The couple is currently being held and due to appear in court on Friday, the spokesman said.
Israeli police authorities weren't immediately available to comment on Tuesday. However, investigators told the Tel Aviv-based Haaretz newspaper earlier this week that they have arrested 18 people in relation to the case.
Meanwhile, e-mail security firm MessageLabs Inc. warned Tuesday that it is no longer uncommon for companies to receive these kind of targeted malware attacks. Security researchers are advising companies to keep their antivirus software up-to-date.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:31 PM
May 27, 2005
The battle for the blogosphere
By Juan Carlos PerezUntil recently, most providers of blogging software and services were relatively small startup companies, but now big-footed competitors are joining them, changing the dynamics and philosophies of the so-called blogosphere. As heavy entrants such as Microsoft stomp into blogging with groundshaking steps, the question is whether the changes they are bringing will be benefitial or detrimental to the market.
Blogging is a medium whose skyrocketing popularity in both the consumer and enterprise spaces is widely credited with how simple and easy it made publishing text on the Web. Already, however, Microsoft has single-handedly introduced what many consider a significant variation to the original stripped-down approach to blogging with its MSN Spaces service.
Blogging services and software traditionally have provided a simple core functionality for creating online journals easily. These services generally are built on open platforms so that users, if interested, can add extra features to their blogs and integrate them with third-party services to add capabilities.
However, with MSN Spaces, Microsoft is delivering a pre-set suite of blogging and complementary services on a platform that doesn't allow for much manual tweaking and extension on the part of the end-user.
"There are two big buckets in blogging services. There are those built on open standards and meant to be publishing platforms. The beauty of those products is that they allow a lot of customization by the end-user," says Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst.
"At the other end of the spectrum is the Microsoft approach, which is blogging services that are quite connected to e-mail, instant messaging, photos, music, and the like. Blogging is just one element of the overall experience, and they are more restrictive and harder to customize," Weiner adds.
Introduced in beta form just last December, MSN Spaces now hosts over 10 million blogs, an eye-popping adoption rate that has blown past internal Microsoft expectations. "MSN Spaces is the fastest growing service MSN has ever introduced," says Brooke Richardson, lead product manager at MSN communication services.
The significant thing for the blogging market is that Microsoft is doing it its way, designing MSN Spaces to have a central text-blogging core but complemented by and integrated with a suite of MSN online services, such as instant messaging, e-mail, music playlist posting, and photo sharing. Microsoft also built into the service access control features to let users determine who can view their blogs, although they can make their blogs totally open if they want. MSN Spaces will also notify users when blogs from friends have been updated.
In March, Yahoo introduced in limited beta a service called Yahoo 360 whose concept and design are similar to MSN Spaces. This service comes as no surprise, because Yahoo, like Microsoft's MSN, has a wide variety of online services with which to surround its blogging service. As two leading Web portals, MSN and Yahoo have an amount and variety of online services under one roof that few others can rival, and blogging is something they're weaving into their overall fabric.
This clashes with the philosophy of most original blogging services, including Blogger, which Google acquired in 2003 after Blogger had become popular. Services such as Blogger offer basic blogging functionality but also tend to be open, flexible platforms that tech-savvy users can extend, build upon, and integrate with third-party services.
"I personally get a little overwhelmed when there are so many things to choose from, and so many different fields, and it's so loud, and it's asking me so many different questions at once," says Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist.
"I got into blogging because it was this blank box and I could type a thought into there and press a button. For me that's almost enough," Stone adds.
For example, Blogger to date has no native way for users to control access to their blogs, nor does it feature native image uploading, two capabilities core to MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360.
"Once you create [an access controlled] blog and you bring your instant messaging and music playlist and pictures into it, you wind up with something that is very powerful but that I would argue is not a blog," says Gartner's Weiner. "I would call it a community content site, and it will be extremely popular, but it is definitely a variant" on the conventional blog concept.
In April, when MSN Spaces exited its beta period, it was already among the most popular blogging sites in the U.S. based on stats indicating 2.87 million unique visitors that month, according to market researcher comScore Networks.
MSN Spaces was topped only by blogging stalwarts. Google's Blogger and its accompanying Blogspot hosting site together drew 12.63 million unique visitors in April, followed by Six Apart's Typepad and LiveJournal services, which together rang up 11.47 million, and by Xanga.com with 8.26 million.
Microsoft makes no apologies for adopting a different approach. "When you thought of a blogger a year ago, it was someone writing a blog that they wanted to disseminate to anyone in the entire world. Now we're seeing blogging entering the more mainstream consumer space, and people are using it to share with a closer, tighter circle of people," MSN's Richardson says.
Surrounding MSN Spaces natively with a variety of vehicles to share and communicate with others helps draw people who may have avoided blogging out of fear it would require them to generate a large amount of text to post on a daily basis, Richardson said.
The tradeoff for services such as MSN Spaces that come with native integration of a variety of features and capabilities is that they can be less flexible and extensible than a service such as Blogger.
After MSN Space's debut in December, Microsoft's most famous corporate blogger, Robert Scoble, greeted the service warmly but posted on his blog all the reasons why it wasn't a service for him, which in essence boiled down to customization constraints.
Failing to win over sophisticated and tech-savvy bloggers such as Scoble, a Microsoft technology evangelist, is a tradeoff that Microsoft is happy to make, at least for now. Providing a rich sharing experience that includes not only text but also photos, playlists, access control, instant messaging and e-mail in a single, integrated, easy to use, out-of-the-box type of way is paying off for MSN Spaces, Richardson said. "At this growth rate, we could become the largest blogging service in the near future," she said. Microsoft is tapping mostly people who haven't blogged before, and specifically among the ranks of MSN Messenger users, she said.
Standing in the middle between the MSN Spaces and the Blogger approach is Six Apart. The San Francisco company's Typepad caters to conventional bloggers interested in publishing and reaching an unlimited number of readers, whereas its LiveJournal service, which it acquired this year, appeals to bloggers who want to communicate with a limited sphere of friends and thus seek a service with tight, very granular access control to individual blogs. Six Apart also has a sophisticated software blogging platform called Moveable Type designed for companies, developers, and organizations.
"We have offerings for all bloggers right now. We cover every base in the market right now," says Mena Trott, Six Apart's president and co-founder.
Six Apart acquired LiveJournal to diversify and broaden the company's user base, she says. LiveJournal's user base is about 70 percent female and about 70 percent under age 21. Typepad's demographic is split equally among men and women who are on average in their early 30s, she says.
Ultimately, the consensus is that the shift in blogging from new services such as MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360 will not have a negative effect on the market because it is attracting new users, and that can only be good for everybody.
"It's great for the entire space as a whole. The more of those services there are, the more connections people are making online," says Blogger's Stone.
"We definitely welcome it because it brings more people to blogging and helps expose blogging to a larger audience, so that helps us because more people will realize they'll want to use our products," says Six Apart's Trott. "We're heavily influencing what they put in their services, so in terms of innovation we're not too scared about that."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:27 PM
As Salesforce.com grows, analysts probe ROI
By Stacy CowleySalesforce.com Inc. recently reported first-quarter results showing growth of more than 80 percent in its paid-subscribers count and revenue from the year-ago period, then followed that news by announcing two high-profile endorsements this week: a partnership with Accenture Ltd. and a 5,000-seat licensing deal at Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. But as Salesforce.com's star continues to rise, analysts are stepping up their warnings to customers that hosted applications can carry steep costs over the long run, especially for larger organizations. Research firm Gartner Inc. estimates that after three years, the cost for complex organizations of running Salesforce.com will surpass that of traditional, packaged CRM (customer relationship management) software. Salesforce.com's strength is SFA (salesforce automation) functionality; while it offers tools for customization and adding additional applications to its platform, building out those features requires a customer to invest the resources themselves or work with a third-party ISV (independent software vendor).
Gartner cites integration of production planning and scheduling information from logistics systems, complicated pricing contracts, detailed quotation information and access to customer financial data from accounting systems as areas where Salesforce.com may not be robust enough to support complex customers' needs without additional, potentially pricey, customization.
In a report issued this week probing the ROI (return on investment) Salesforce.com delivers to customers, Nucleus Research Inc. found most customers reported positive returns, with the scale of those returns depending primarily on how rudimentary the customers' previous CRM efforts were. More than 70 percent of the 29 Salesforce.com customers Nucleus polled were replacing a basic or paper-based contact management system; for these users, the ability to access information in one unified database delivered immediate time savings and better sales visibility.
Nucleus also found that while Salesforce.com touts marquee customers like Merrill Lynch, big enterprise deals remain rare exceptions for the company. Salesforce.com's average deal size is for 17 users, and in Nucleus's survey, 45 percent of respondents were running Salesforce.com for fewer than 100 users. More than 90 percent of those polled had fewer than 500 users. The danger for Salesforce.com is that smaller customers are the ones most likely to jump ship: More than a third of Nucleus's respondents said they would consider changing CRM vendors or were in the process of doing so.
"People are more open to switching," said Rebecca Wettemann, Nucleus's vice president of research. "If you've reached the point where you have positive ROI from an on-premise solution, you're probably not going to change. Whereas with an on-demand solution, unless you've done a lot of work on customization, you haven't invested as much and might be open to other options."
Salesforce.com doesn't disclose its renewal rates. Executives brush aside questions about the issue by pointing to Salesforce.com's track record of constant subscriber growth over the past four years; Phil Robinson, Salesforce.com's vice president of global marketing, said the company is satisfied with its ability to both hold on to current customers and win new ones.
With 267,000 subscribers from more than 15,000 organizations, Salesforce.com currently holds the lead in the hosted applications market it helped legitimize. Faster than many would have predicted, it has carved out a sizable chunk of the market: The $64.2 million in subscription revenue it reported last quarter isn't far off the $75 million traditional CRM leader Siebel Systems Inc. brought in from license sales. To counter Salesforce.com's jabs, Siebel has taken to prominently touting its industry-leading base of 3.2 million users. It also fires off a press release every time its Siebel CRM OnDemand service wins a deal in which the prospect also considered Salesforce.com.
Showing growth isn't hard in the early years when you start from nothing, as Salesforce.com did in 1999, but the company's ability so far to sustain its momentum is winning over doubters like John Freeland, the managing partner of Accenture's CRM practice. "Eighteen months or so ago, I have to tell you, I was a skeptic on the business model," Freeland said at a Salesforce.com event this week where he announced Accenture's partnership agreement with the company.
When Freeland first began tracking Salesforce.com, he doubted whether it would move beyond the midmarket into the large, enterprise customers Accenture works with. But Salesforce.com's gains over the last year convinced Accenture to devote additional staffing resources and executive-level attention to supporting the company; just recently, Accenture closed a deal to implement Salesforce.com at a major insurance company, Freeland said. And so Accenture, a longtime close partner to Siebel, will help Salesforce.com in its efforts to expand its enterprise presence.
Siebel is under fierce attack from shareholders concerned about its slumping sales and series of management changes -- but for customers, the intensifying industry competition may be paying off. Three years ago, Nucleus issued a devastating assessment showing that more than 60 percent of Siebel reference customers it interviewed reported a negative ROI after more than two years of use. In a new set of ROI reports released this week, Nucleus places Siebel the top of the industry, for both enterprise and hosted deployments.
"What we've seen in the past year or so [at Siebel] is a refocusing on service -- really, a greater sense of responsibility for making customers successful," said Nucleus' Wettemann. Siebel's product road map, with an emphasis on analytics and vertical editions of its OnDemand service, is also pleasing customers, she said.
Meanwhile, Salesforce.com is facing its own escalating competition as it works to prove it can meet the demands of larger customers and deliver enough value to longtime subscribers to keep them paying monthly subscription fees.
"The challenge that they're facing is what happens to any first mover in a market," Wettemann said. "Other people start to really develop and focus on catching up."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:27 PM
Siebel drafts retention plan to keep staff amid rumors
By Stacy CowleySiebel Systems Inc. has adopted a set of employee benefits plans guaranteeing its workers severance payments and continued health-care coverage if the company is acquired, a move Siebel said is necessary to retain employees amid widespread speculation about the company's future. Siebel revealed the new plans, which took effect May 20, in a regulatory filing on Thursday. "Recent rumors concerning potential acquisitions or takeovers of the company have created a great deal of uncertainty among the company’s employees and executives, which could negatively impact employee productivity and company performance," the filing says. "If this issue is not addressed, particularly with regard to key employees and executives, the company believes it could adversely affect the company and its stockholders."
Siebel's fate has been a subject of intense Wall Street speculation in recent weeks. The company has a large base of customers using its CRM (customer relationship management) software, but has struggled over the past few years to grow during a period of sluggish enterprise software sales. With little debt and more than US$2 billion in cash on hand, it presents an attractive acquisition target -- if a suitor can be found who is willing to bid more than the US$4.8 billion market valuation Siebel currently commands. Rumors the company is on the block increased after the abrupt dismissal last month of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mike Lawrie, who held the job for less than a year before being a forced out by a board unimpressed with his progress in turning the company around.
Siebel's executives routinely decline to comment on whether the company is entertaining takeover offers, and new CEO George Shaheen says he's drafting a long-term strategy for Siebel. Still, the company took the unusual step earlier this month of issuing a disclosure statement addressing the persistent rumors and the subsequent heavy trading of Siebel's stock.
"Potential opportunities have recently been presented to us that continue to be evaluated and discussed in a manner that is consistent with our past practices and the fiduciary duties of our officers and directors," Siebel said in a May 4 regulatory filing. "There are none under current consideration that have progressed to the point at which the full board of directors has met to consider them. We undertake no obligation and do not intend to make any further announcement regarding the exploration of potential strategic opportunities, except as required by law."
Siebel's new retention plans guarantee workers cash payments of three to 18 months (the duration depends on the employee's title and position) of base salary and target bonus, along with three to 18 months of continuing health-care and other benefits. It also guarantees immediate acceleration of unvested stock awards and removal of holding periods on stock awards. Essentially all of Siebel's 5,200 employees are covered by the plans.
The plans' trigger is a change in control of more than 50 percent of Siebel's shares. A shareholder revolt installing new members on Siebel's board of directors could also trigger it: One clause defines a "change in control" as a change within the next two years in Siebel's board composition so that Siebel's incumbent directors no longer form a majority.
Siebel adopted four different retention plans, separately covering senior executives, vice presidents, directors and lower-ranking staffers. The plan benefits kick in if an employee is terminated during a period running from three months before to one year after a change in Siebel's control.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:26 PM
SSA raises $99 million in IPO
By Stacy CowleyEnterprise software vendor SSA Global Technologies Inc. raised US$99 million in an IPO (initial public offering) on Thursday that saw the company's shares close on the Nasdaq exchange right at their initial price, $11. Chicago-based SSA Global has a portfolio of sales, supply-chain, accounting and human-resources management applications strung together through acquisitions. Its highest profile product is Baan, an ERP (enterprise resource planning) technology that was once among the industry's most popular before an accounting scandal overwhelmed the company.
Invesnsys PLC bought the devastated Baan in 2000 for €762 million (around $708 million at the time), then let Baan fall into disrepair as it struggled with its own losses and strategy problems. Invesnsys sold Baan in 2003 for $135 million to private investors Cerberus Capital Management LLP and General Atlantic Partners LLC, which then merged it with SSA Global, another entity they controlled. Cerberus and General Atlantic continue to dominate SSA Global: They control more than 80 percent of the company's shares.
SSA Global is struggling to return its distressed applications to some of their former glory, but so far it remains a minor vendor in the ERP market, where it trails other midmarket vendors such as Sage Software. Still, the company estimates that its software is used by 13,400 customers, including more than 100 enterprise companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
In its last fiscal year, ended July 31, SSA Global had revenue of $636.5 million, including $157.5 million from software licensing fees and the rest from services and support. Its net loss for the year was $62.7 million.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:26 PM
Website helps those who fret about zombie threat
By Scarlet PruittWorried about zombies? Internet users concerned about the number of virus-infected PCs ready to launch an attack over the Web can at least keep track of how afraid they should be, and satisfy their curiosity, by visiting CipherTrust Inc.'s new ZombieMeter resource. The security company added the meter to its Web site this week, offering visitors hourly information on the global activity of new zombies by tracking data it receives through its IronMail e-mail security appliances.
Zombies are Internet-connected computers that have been infected by malicious code that allows hackers to control them remotely. They are often used to launch denial-of service (DoS) attacks or send unwanted e-mail.
Although CipherTrust only monitors zombie activities based on data from its network of e-mail appliances, it counted an average of 172,009 new zombies a day for the first three weeks in May. Of these, 20 percent are in the U.S. and 15 percent in China. That represents a slight shift from late March and early April, when around 20 percent of the 157,000 new zombies it identified on average each day were in China.
The European Union, meanwhile, was a virtual hothouse for zombies, with 26 percent of new infected machines in its member states during the first three weeks of May, CipherTrust said. Six percent of these were in Germany, 5 percent in France and 3 percent in the U.K., the company said.
South Korea is also a popular zombie haunt: 10 percent of new infected machines in the first few weeks of May were in that country, CipherTrust said.
While the Alpharetta, Georgia, security company said tracking zombies helps it to identify behavioral patterns and predict threats, it was unclear how the information might aid the average Internet user.
"I suppose it might increase your paranoia as a home user, or convince you to update your antivirus software," said one London-based IT manager.
The ZombieMeter can be found at http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/zombie.php.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:25 PM
Microsoft: New Netscape breaks IE
By Robert McMillanMicrosoft Corp. is advising users of Netscape 8 to either uninstall the software or to edit their computer's registry files because of a bug in America Online Inc.'s (AOL) new browser. According to a Microsoft engineer, Netscape 8 disables the XML (Extensible Markup Language) rendering capabilities in Internet Explorer, meaning that some Web pages will not be visible in IE after Netscape 8 is installed. In a Thursday posting to the Internet Explorer Web log, Microsoft's Dave Massy, senior program manager for Internet Explorer, said that his company had confirmed the problem, which had previously been reported on Internet newsgroups and forums. "If you navigate in IE to an XML file such as an RSS feed... rather than seeing the data you are presented with a blank page," he wrote. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format widely used to keep track of updates to Web sites.
Massy offered two work-arounds to the problem: uninstalling Netscape 8, or deleting the XML node from a registry file entitled HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension
According to AOL, however, these measures are unnecessary. "This issue effects a very small number of users who visit sites that require that advanced technology," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman.
The company plans sometime next week to deliver a fix to the problem, which will be delivered to users via Netscape's auto-update feature. "We would not encourage people to uninstall or effect their browser settings," Weinstein said. "It's a minor issue."
The bug is the second piece of bad news concerning Netscape 8 for AOL, which unveiled the eagerly anticipated browser last Thursday. Within hours of the initial release, AOL found itself scrambling to patch more than 40 security holes in the software.
The free browser combines many of the features of both IE and the open-source Firefox browser, and has been promoted as a secure and easy to use product. AOL laid off the bulk of its Netscape software development team in 2003, and the work on Netscape 8 was largely completed by Victoria, British Columbia's Mercurial Communications Inc.
Netscape 8 is the first major upgrade to the once-dominant browser since 2002.
Massy's IE blog posting can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/05/25/421763.aspx.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:24 PM
May 26, 2005
Firefox users snap up Netcraft's antiphishing toolbar
By Scarlet PruittUsers of the Firefox Web browser have been flocking to Netcraft Ltd.'s Web site to download the security company's new antiphishing toolbar, a company representative said Thursday. The free toolbar, released Tuesday, was downloaded more than 60,000 times within hours of its release, according to Netcraft Internet Services Developer Paul Mutton. By comparison, the company's antiphishing toolbar for Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) browser has been downloaded around 100,000 times since its release earlier this year, he said.
"This seems to indicate that the Firefox community is more interested in security," Mutton said.
An increase in phishing attacks has been grabbing the attention of Internet merchants, end users and security providers alike. Phishing is a type of online fraud in which criminals send emails that entice users into visiting Webs sites designed to look like those of a legitimate company, such as a bank or auction provider, for example. Users are asked to enter sensitive information such as a credit card number or passwords.
The scam is currently one of the most prevalent Internet threats, according to security researchers. And given the profit potential, online criminals are becoming more cunning in their attacks, by targeting scams at users of particular banks, or by geographical location, Mutton said.
Netcraft's antiphishing toolbar seeks to thwart these kinds of threats by blocking access to reported phishing sites. Once the first recipients of a phishing email report the URL of a fake site, the site is blocked for toolbar users.
Netcraft, in Bath, England, checks each reported site to verify that it is phony, in order to avoid blocking legitimate sites, Mutton said.
The toolbar also displays the hosting location and a risk rating for each site visited. While the product is free for Internet users, Netcraft licenses a version to organizations such as banks to put their own brand on.
Netcraft has no current plans to offer versions of the toolbar for other browsers.
"There's no other browser as popular as Firefox right now," Mutton said. The open source browser, offered by the Mozilla Organization, has nowhere near the market share of IE, but has been steadily gaining users. As of Feb. 18, IE had a market share in the U.S. of 89.9 percent, down from 92.9 percent in November, according to analytics firm WebSideStory Inc.
Firefox, meanwhile, had grabbed 5.7 percent of the U.S. market as of February, up from 3 percent in November. Internet companies have taken note of its rising popularity. Yahoo Inc. began offering a toolbar for Firefox earlier this year, and Google Inc. has snapped up one of its key developers. But with success has come a downside: Security researchers are reporting an increase in threats aimed at the alternative browser.
When it comes to phishing, at least, Netcraft hopes to have an answer. "People are showing a lot of interest in the Firefox toolbar," Mutton said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:02 PM
Yahoo to test photo-sharing feature in Web mail service
By Juan Carlos PerezE-mail and photo files traditionally haven't played well together, but Yahoo Inc. believes it can help improve the situation with an enhancement to its Web mail service that it plans to announce on Thursday. Photo files are typically large and sharing them via e-mail isn't a smooth process because bloated messages are often difficult to send and receive.
On Thursday, Yahoo plans to begin testing a new feature called PhotoMail in its free Web mail service that lets senders ship small thumbnail images which, when clicked upon by recipients, launch the original, and larger, photo file.
The PhotoMail feature will be available to a small percentage of Yahoo Mail users starting Thursday, but those who are interested in testing it and weren't randomly selected can sign up for it at http://photomail.mail.yahoo.com.
PhotoMail works by placing small thumbnail pictures in messages and storing the actual large photo files on a server of the Yahoo Photo online album service, said Andy Spillane, vice president of Yahoo Mail. Up to 300 thumbnails can be inserted in a Yahoo Mail message. When recipients click on a thumbnail, the original file residing on a Yahoo server is launched, so that a high-resolution version of the photo can be viewed, printed or saved, Spillane said.
Yahoo Mail users will see a PhotoMail button on their message interface labeled "insert photos." When clicked on for the first time, this button sends users to a one-time download and installation of a small piece of software that's needed for the PhotoMail functionality. From there, users are taken to the PhotoMail interface, where they can choose photos located on their PCs, on their Yahoo Photo image albums or on the Web, this latter option enabled through Yahoo's image search service, which has been integrated into PhotoMail.
Users drag-and-drop the photos they select to a window in the PhotoMail interface. In the background, PhotoMail places thumbnails of those files in the body of the message and stores copies of the files on a Yahoo Photo server. Back in the message window, users can manipulate the thumbnails in various ways, changing their layout, adding borders and rotating them. They can also increase or decrease the quality, and thus the size, of the actual photo files.
Non-photo files, such as word processing documents, can also be attached to e-mail messages from the PhotoMail interface. However, those non-photo files aren't stored on Yahoo servers, and are instead tacked to the e-mail messages as conventional attachments. Recipients don't have to be Yahoo Mail users for PhotoMail to work for them, as long as their e-mail service supports e-mail messages based on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
Other enhancements to Yahoo Mail the company plans to announce Thursday include:
-- In June, Yahoo Mail's interface will be available in six additional languages, for a total of 21, and in seven additional country-specific Yahoo sites -- Poland, Turkey, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia -- for a total of 34.
-- U.S. users will be able to have headlines from the Yahoo News service beamed on their Yahoo Mail welcome screen, a capability users will be able to customize to a degree.
-- For the first time, users will begin to see notifications generated by Yahoo's DomainKeys authentication technology informing them whether messages truly originated from address in the sender field, a feature intended to help protect Yahoo Mail users from spam and phishing scams.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:02 PM
Ask Jeeves improves query suggestion functionality
By Juan Carlos PerezAsk Jeeves Inc.'s search engine now can make better suggestions to users for narrowing or expanding the scope of a Web search, the Oakland, California, company plans to announce on Thursday. The search engine has also gained an increased ability to provide specific answers to queries, an improvement that will also debut on Thursday, according to Ask Jeeves officials.
Ask Jeeves has had these two features, but now both have been significantly improved, the officials said. "These two new products we're introducing are about enhancing the core search experience," said Rahul Lahiri, the company's vice president of search product management.
Along with its search results, Ask Jeeves has traditionally also returned a list labeled "related topics," which are contextually related alternatives to the search query entered by the user. The point of providing these alternatives is to help the user refine the original query and hopefully generate search results that are more relevant.
Now Ask Jeeves has improved this feature so that the search engine can better understand the various concepts related to a query and thus generate more and smarter suggestions. Users will also notice that instead of a single list of related topics, alternatives will now be grouped into three categories: suggestions for narrowing the scope of the search, suggestions for expanding the scope of the search and related name suggestions.
"This is the next generation of our related search," Lahiri said. "It's a totally different approach to what we have now."
Meanwhile, Ask Jeeves is introducing new functionality called Web Answers, which lets the search engine mine billions of pages in its Web index to provide factual answers to queries that lend themselves to this type of reply.
Ask Jeeves has had a functionality for this purpose for years called Smart Search, which for certain queries pulls data from a limited amount of preselected online sources and presents it at the top of the results list.
"Web Answers is complementary to Smart Search, which is based on content relationships and partnerships we have struck for finding structured information on the Web to answer queries," said Ryan Masse, an Ask Jeeves product manager. "This new product augments that by going to all pages [in our index] and identifying direct answers."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:02 PM
Singapore to get WiMax service in 2006
By Sumner LemonPacific Internet Ltd. plans to offer commercial WiMax services in Singapore starting in 2006, the company said Wednesday. To offer WiMax-based services, the Singapore-based ISP (Internet service provider) has secured the rights for 30MHz of spectrum in the 2.5GHz band from the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), it said, noting that the spectrum rights cost slightly more than S$2 million (US$1.2 million). That is a fraction of the cost for S$100 million that operators paid to acquire 3G (third-generation) mobile spectrum in Singapore, it said.
WiMax, which falls under the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.'s 802.16 standard, is a wide-area wireless networking technology that promises to deliver wireless broadband access over a range that is significantly greater than IEEE 802.11 WLAN (wireless LAN) technology, commonly known as Wi-Fi.
Pacific Internet said the spectrum it has acquired for WiMax will be used to offer wireless broadband and fixed wireless services in Singapore. The company already offers ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line) and cable Internet services.
Pacific Internet plans to begin commercial trials of wireless broadband services for commercial and consumer customers later this year, and plans to introduce a commercial service in Singapore next year, it said. If the service is successful, it will be rolled out in other Asian countries where Pacific Internet offers Internet services, it said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:01 PM
May 25, 2005
Two spyware bills pass US House
By Grant GrossTwo bills focusing on spyware overwhelmingly passed the U.S. House of Representatives late Monday, including one that requires many software programs collecting personal information to get permission before doing so. The Securely Protect Yourself Against Cyber Trespass Act, or Spy Act, also would outlaw the act of taking over a computer in order to send unauthorized information or code, and diverting a Web browser without the permission of the computer owner. The bill, which passed the House by a vote of 393-4, prohibits Web advertising that computer users cannot close "without undue effort" or without shutting down the computer, and it prohibits collecting personal information through keystroke logging.
A second bill, the Internet Spyware Prevention Act, or I-Spy Act, sets jail terms of up to five years for a person who uses spyware to access a computer without authorization and uses the computer to commit another federal crime. The I-Spy Act also would allow a jail term of up to two years for a person who uses spyware to obtain someone else's personal information or to defeat security protections on a computer with the intent of defrauding or injuring the computer owner.
The I-Spy Act, sponsored by Virginia Republican Representative Bob Goodlatte, passed the House by a vote of 395-1. Both bills would have to pass the U.S. Senate and be signed by President George Bush to become law. Both bills passed the House in October, but failed to make it through the Senate.
The Spy Act, sponsored by California Republican Representative Mary Bono, would allow fines of up to US$3 million for spyware-like activity such as delivering unauthorized software to a computer or hijacking a Web browser. Security software updates are exempted from the Spy Act.
Unlike an older Bono bill, this version of the Spy Act doesn't attempt to define spyware, but outlaws several actions commonly associated with spyware.
An earlier Bono spyware bill, introduced in July 2003, broadly prohibited and defined spyware. Some software vendors, including those that market antivirus update software, objected that the definition was overly broad and could subject their services to fines.
Microsoft Corp. issued a statement praising both new bills as providing "important tools in the battle against spyware and other deceptive software." But Microsoft also called for the Senate to include language that would protect vendors of antispyware software from lawsuits by companies distributing spyware. Two antispyware companies have been sued by firms asking that their software not be removed from users' computers, with Claria Corp., a distributor of pop-up advertising formerly known as Gator, filing a lawsuit against PC Pitstop in September 2003. This year, Claria also asked Computer Associates International Inc. to stop its PestPatrol software from deleting Claria ad-targeting software, but CA refused.
Microsoft released its own Windows AntiSpyware software in January. "In its current form, these bills leave companies that are responding to consumer demand for strong antispyware tools vulnerable to frivolous lawsuits brought by the very companies responsible for the proliferation of spyware and other deceptive software," Jack Krumholtz, managing director of federal government affairs for Microsoft, said in a statement.
Others, including the libertarian think-tank Cato Institute, have opposed the spyware legislation, saying it's unneeded because the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) already has the authority to seek fines for deceptive business practices.
The new version of the Bono bill requires that creators of software that collects personal information get permission from computer users before installing the software. The consent requirement, however, has an exemption for Web sites tracking their own pages visited. The bill also gives the FTC authority to allow some software vendors to ask for permission only once, not every time their programs access a computer.
Bono's bill would also preempt any state spyware laws.
"As this nation continues to push towards a global e-commerce marketplace, spyware stands to undermine the security and integrity of e-commerce and data security," Bono said in a statement. "Daily web activities by consumers have become stalking grounds for computer hackers through spyware. Consumers have a right to know and have a right to decide who has access to their highly personal information that spyware can collect."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:09 PM
New worm and phishing scam hits AIM, Yahoo IM
By Scarlet PruittUsers of instant messaging (IM) applications from Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc. (AOL) are being warned this week of two new threats spreading via IM. The first is a worm targeting AOL's Instant Messenger (AIM) software that could potentially allow an attacker to gain control of a user's system, according to security researchers. The other is a phishing scam propagated through Yahoo Messenger, which tries to lure users into revealing their Yahoo credentials.
The AOL worm sends the message "hehe i found this funny movie," encouraging users to click on a hyperlink that downloads malicious code to the user's desktop, according to an advisory released Monday by IMLogic Inc. From there, the worm connects to a public IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server and continues to spread through AIM messages, researchers at MCI Inc. security company NetSec explained.
While IMLogic rated the AIM worm as a "medium threat," a NetSec advisory warned that given the sophistication of new worms such as this, "it is a reasonable assumption that near-full system control may be possible."
When contacted at around 2 a.m. GMT Wednesday, NetSec Security Research Coordinator Tom Parker estimated that a maximum of 15,000 PCs might have been affected.
However, by midday GMT the worm appeared to have slowed and there were few reports of it still in the wild, according to Mikko Hyppönen, director of antivirus research at F-Secure Corp. Most major antivirus companies have already updated their products to deal with the threat, Hyppönen said.
What's interesting about the worm is that its topical and appears to be timed with the hype around the release "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith," Hyppönen said.
A Sober worm variant circulating earlier this month was also topical, apparently coinciding with ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. It sent e-mail carrying right-wing nationalist messages in German.
"It's an old technique but it gets people to open them," Hyppönen said.
AIM users are advised not to click on hyperlinks sent from unknown users, and to make sure they have a firewall in place and get the latest security updates for when a fix is available.
The Yahoo Messenger scam is one of a growing number of so-called phishing attacks -- a kind of online fraud in which users are directed to fake Web sites designed to look like authentic sites, and then asked to reveal sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords.
In the Yahoo scam, users are sent the following URL to lead them to the phony Web site: http://yahoopremium.bravehost.com/STAR_GAMES. The URL appears to be targeted at gaming enthusiasts and is rated by IMLogic as a "medium risk" threat.
Yahoo users are being warned to look out for the threat, and administrators are advised to use content filtering to guard against the scam, and to download the latest antivirus updates.
Paul Kallender in Tokyo contributed to this story.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:08 PM
Cisco targets IP phone flaw
By Laura RohdeCisco Systems Inc. on Tuesday reacted to a warning from the U.K.'s National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) that it had discovered a software flaw capable of causing the company's IP (Internet Protocol) telephones to crash. The San Jose, California, company issued a patch for the DNS (domain name system) protocol vulnerability, as well as free software, to fix the problem. The NISCC, also on Tuesday, categorized the flaw, which makes IP phones vulnerable to DOS (denial of service) attacks, as a moderate risk that also affects other software.
In its warning, the NISCC said that under certain circumstances, it is possible to cause both DNS servers and DNS clients to terminate abnormally by sending malformed messages.
Cisco said it knew of no products performing DNS server functions, or DNS packet inspection, which the vulnerability affects. The company also said that the problem only seemed to concern DNS clients running on its IP phones and content-networking products. Cisco's list of affected products included Cisco IP Phones 7902/7905/7912, Cisco ATA (Analog Telephone Adaptor) 186/188, as well as several Cisco Unity Express and Cisco ACNS (Application and Content Networking System) devices.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:08 PM
May 24, 2005
Scholarly publishers take on Google
By Juan Carlos PerezA group of non-profit scholarly publishers is asking pointed questions about Google Inc.'s Google Print for Libraries and what the group considers the copyright-violation potential of this project to digitize some university library collections. In a letter sent to Google on Friday, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) requests that the Mountain View, California, company clarify a number of points related to Google Print for Libraries, saying the 125 publishers that belong to the AAUP are concerned about possible misuse of their copyrighted content.
The Google project is causing confusion and "mounting alarm and concern" for AAUP members, which view it as a plan "that appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale," wrote AAUP Executive Director Peter Givler in the letter, which he sent to Alexander Macgillivray, Google's senior intellectual property and product counsel.
Google Print for Libraries, announced in December, is a project to scan all or portions of the library collections of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, The New York Public Library and Oxford University. Google intends to make the digitized texts searchable on Google: users will be able to view the full text of books in the public domain, but only "a few sentences" of copyrighted books, according to information on Google's Web site.
In his letter, Givler asks Macgillivray, among other things, how Google intends to protect from misuse the copyrighted works it digitizes and indexes, and how publishers can protect their copyrighted work should a future Google owner decide to "exploit" these works directly.
Givler also questions the legality of Google's plan to give the libraries copies of the works it digitizes. "Why aren't these copies infringing? How can the libraries claim that these copies have been lawfully acquired?," Givler wrote in the letter, a copy of which the AAUP provided to the IDG News Service.
Givler, who also requests a status update on the digitization program, asks Macgillivray to respond to his questions, by June 20.
Google didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:18 PM
Gates unveils MSN Virtual Earth
By Juan Carlos PerezMicrosoft Corp.'s MSN division will add to its search engine in about two weeks a local search index for finding business directory listings, and later on will enhance this local index with MSN Virtual Earth, a new free service that will pinpoint places in maps and satellite images. MSN Virtual Earth was demonstrated for the first time on Monday at an event hosted by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates. Microsoft officials said it will become available at some point during the U.S. summer, which means it will be released at some point between June 21 and September 22.
In addition to complementing MSN's local search index, MSN Virtual Earth will let users overlay maps and satellite photos in order to create hybrid images that combine the best of both mediums, said Stephen Lawler, general manager of Microsoft's MapPoint unit.
MSN Virtual Earth will also be integrated with users' preferred e-mail application and with a single click will place links in e-mail messages to maps and images, said Steve Lombardi, a MapPoint program manager. Users will also be able to post images to their MSN Spaces Web log from within the MSN Virtual Earth interface, Lombardi said.
Users will be encouraged to provide feedback on business directory listings, so that the MSN local search service will be able to give users a sense of what a particular area is like, Lawler said.
MSN Virtual Earth uses technology from MapPoint and from Terra Server, a database of satellite images Microsoft has had for about 10 years, the officials said.
MSN Virtual Earth will also let users view aerial images not only straight down but also from an angle, so that they will be able to view not only the tops of buildings but also view them from the side, the officials said.
Local search is a gaping hole in the MSN search engine. All other major search engine providers, including Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Ask Jeeves Inc. and America Online Inc. have a local search tab on their search Web sites. As part of its local search service, Google also provides maps and satellite images, offering functionality that is similar to what Microsoft is aiming for with MSN Virtual Earth.
Local searching is becoming increasingly popular with users and online advertisers. It lets users find business listings and complementary information from a specific geographical area, while advertisers are able to target their ads only at those who are looking for services and products in their vicinity.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:18 PM
Skype offers services through affiliates
By John BlauSkype Technologies SA aims to generate more business from its Internet telephone service by rewarding partners who agree to promote and sell it. Skype is rolling out an affiliate program that will give groups such as Web retailers, bloggers, and online communities commissions of up to 10 percent of the revenue they generate, the company said Tuesday.
The program, which Skype has tested for the past two weeks, has already generated 1,800 affiliates, including 192.com, aSmallWorld, Firstream and SuperEva, the company said.
Skype offers a VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service that uses peer-to-peer (P-to-P) software. The service allows users to make free calls between Internet-connected PCs and handheld devices.
The Luxembourg company generates revenue from premium services. These include the SkypeOut service, which allows users to make calls from the Internet to traditional circuit-switched phones; the SkypeIn service, which works the other way, allowing traditional phone users to make calls to VOIP devices, and voice mail.
The affiliate program will be managed by Commission Junction Inc., a ValueClick Inc. company and provider of affiliate systems. Commission Junction will be in charge of tracking, reporting and paying affiliates.
Skype is one of the fastest growing VOIP companies in the world. Currently, the company claims around 39 million users, a number that is increasing by more than 150,000 new users every day.
SkypeOut has around 1.4 million users, the company said. Figures for SkypeIn and voicemail were not immediately available.
Skype was launched nearly two years ago by Niklas Zennstrom who cofounded the Kazaa P-to-P file sharing service.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:18 PM
Salesforce.com President Patricia Sueltz departs
By Stacy CowleyBarely more than a year after Salesforce.com Inc. poached Patricia Sueltz from Sun Microsystems Inc. to head the hosted CRM (customer relationship management) vendor's marketing and operations, Sueltz has quietly left the company. Salesforce.com said in a regulatory filing that Sueltz resigned last Tuesday as its president of global operations. Sueltz was a high-profile catch for the CRM upstart, which appointed her to the job several months before a closely watched IPO (initial public offering) that left Salesforce.com with a market valuation of more than US$1 billion. Sueltz had previously served as head of Sun's services group, a position she took after several decades in various roles at IBM Corp. When Sueltz joined Salesforce.com, she said she had not actively sought a position outside Sun but was won over by Salesforce.com founder and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff's technical vision and the unusual, philanthropically minded corporate culture he fostered at Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com will pay Sueltz a lump-sum severance of $650,000 upon her resignation, effective May 31. Her departure leaves executive Jim Steele as the company's sole president, overseeing sales.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:17 PM
PalmOne acquires Palm brand name
By John BlauIn a move to secure a household name in the personal organizer sector, PalmOne Inc. has agreed to pay PalmSource Inc. US$30 million for full rights to the Palm brand name. The Palm brand name had been co-owned by the two companies since PalmSource was spun off from Palm Inc. in October 2003.
Under the deal, PalmOne will change its name to Palm Inc. later this year. In addition, the company has granted PalmSource certain rights to Palm trademarks for PalmSource and its licensees for a four-year transition period.
A new logo will be unveiled over the next three months, PalmOne said.
Based in Milpitas, California, PalmOne manufacturers PDAs (personal digital assistants), smart phones and other accessories.
PalmSource, in Sunnyvale, California, develops and sells operating system software for handheld devices.
On Sunday, David Nagel, 60, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of PalmSource, unexpectedly resigned. Patrick McVeigh, 53, appointed in February as senior vice president, worldwide licensing for PalmSource, was named interim CEO in tandem with the board of directors' search for a permanent successor.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:17 PM
May 23, 2005
PalmSource CEO steps down
By Laura RohdeFollowing in the footsteps of its former parent company, PalmSource Inc. is parting ways with its first chief executive officer (CEO) and will be headed by an executive within the company on an interim basis as it searches for a replacement, the handheld OS (operating system) provider announced Monday. David Nagel, 60, president and CEO of PalmSource, stepped down Sunday but will remain at the Sunnyvale, California, company in an advisory role through mid-July to assist with the transition, PalmSource said in a statement. No reason was given for the move.
Patrick McVeigh, 53, appointed in February as senior vice president, worldwide licensing for PalmSource, was named interim CEO in tandem with the board of directors' search for a permanent successor, it said.
Before joining PalmSource in February, McVeigh served as CEO of Aliph Corp., a developer of next generation audio and speech technologies for mobile devices, and as chairman and CEO of Omnisky Corp. before that company was sold to Earthlink Inc. in December 2001.
McVeigh also has a history with Palm, having been responsible for worldwide sales of all Palm products as well as international marketing and operations, PalmSource said. Before joining Palm, McVeigh spent over 10 years with Apple Computer Inc. in a variety of sales and marketing positions.
In October 2003, as part of PalmOne Inc.'s acquisition of Handspring Inc., it spun off its software division to create PalmSource, freeing PalmOne to focus on hardware. Nagel, who had served as a member of the board of directors of Palm Inc. was named CEO and elected to the board of directors of PalmSource in December 2001. Palm Inc.'s name was changed to PalmOne in August 2003 as part of the spin-off.
In January, PalmOne's first CEO, Todd Bradley, announced his plans to leave the Milpitas, California, company. Ed Colligan, who had been PalmOne's president, was named interim CEO and formally given the full-time position last week.
Competition has intensified for both PalmOne and PalmSource. As PalmOne looks to stem its dwindling share of an overall declining PDA (personal digital assistant) market, PalmSource has been looking to make deeper inroads into the market for smart phone operating systems.
In February, PalmSource acquired China MobileSoft Ltd. (CMS) with an eye toward gaining smart phone and Linux expertise. Later that month, the company introduced of a range of mobile phone software and third-party applications at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes. New products included mFone for Smart Phone, a platform designed to run on Linux, and Feature Phone, which provides an interface and engine for telephone dialing.
In March, PalmSource launched two mobile phone platforms based on software from CMS: PalmSource Feature Phone for budget mobile phones and PalmSource MFone, Linux-based software for upscale handsets.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:28 PM
Target marketing via RFID to debut in Seattle
By Johan BostromSome cafes and retail stores in Seattle next week will begin individually marketing products and services to bypassers in Seattle using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. The first target group is visually and hearing-impaired individuals who can benefit from positioning and navigation applications added to the system. Six wireless public areas, called activation fields, will go live next week throughout downtown Seattle and at the city's ferry terminal. Over a few months 15 more city areas will be added. Users carrying an active tag and entering the activation field are recognized as the tag is read, and then are presented with announcements.
"Speakers are mounted on the telephone booth or the facade of the store. So they will be above the individual’s head when they pass underneath or nearby," said Harry H Hart. III, founder and chief executive officer of Seattle's Awarea Corp., which owns and manages the system.
Users of the personalized marketing system carry an active RFID tag roughly the size of a stack of four credit cards. When the tag comes within 100 feet of a transmitter sending low frequency signals at 126 kilohertz, the tag transmits a unique identification signal to a receiver connected to a monitoring and execution server.
Depending on what information the system has filed on the individual carrying the tag, the server selects the correct file to output -- either an audio file in Microsoft Corp. Wave-format for an announcement or an Apple Computer Inc. Quicktime file for American sign language to be displayed on a video monitor. The first message could be the address and sale information from a nearby retailer.
Customers needing more information can push a tell-me-more-button, explained Ben Donohue, vice president of business development for Axcess Inc., which is providing the hardware and designing the system.
Data about the customer can be mined and sold to the retailers, Donohue said. It can also be used to personalize marketing and map customer behavior.
One hundred thirty active RFID tags have been in use at a test site with only one transmitter at Pioneer Square in Seattle for a year. Beginning June 1, when more transmitters are activated in downtown Seattle constituting six tag activation zones, more tags will be sold and rented.
Awarea plans to market the system at the National Federation of the Blind of Washington’s legislative luncheon this weekend.
Assistive technology could include safety and navigation information displayed on a personal digital assistant or a smart phone. The information could also be delivered in audio format the same way as it is today to speakers mounted in information zones or to a Braille reader.
Other possible applications might be for tourists who might want guidance in the downtown Seattle area.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:27 PM
May 20, 2005
Gartner Symposium: Loosen the reins, says Google CEO
By Robert McMillanWant to encourage new ideas at your company? Let the engineers run wild. That was the advice Google Inc. Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt had for attendees of the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco Wednesday. Schmidt's comment came in response to an on-stage interview question from Gartner Inc. Vice President and Fellow Andy Kyte, who asked him how executives should foster a sense of innovation in their IT staffs without allowing them to run rampant.
"We prefer them to run rampant," said Schmidt. "The most clever ideas don't come from the leaders, but rather from the leaders listening and encouraging and kind of creating a discussion," he said. "Wander around ... and try to find the new ideas."
Google encourages its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on "something of the engineer's own choosing," with the idea that focusing resources on activities that are not directly related to the company's core business will ultimately lead to new discoveries, Schmidt said.
Schmidt also encouraged executives to have an open-door policy when it came to technology demonstrations. "You want to see every conceivable demo, no matter how wacky it is," he told the audience. "People love that. ... They get a chance to present to someone important like yourselves. All of a sudden the whole (corporate culture) becomes about leadership and innovation."
Google views its ability to innovate as critical key to its long-term success against rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Schmidt said. But this quest for new ideas is also behind his company's embrace of open source technologies such as the Linux operating system and the MySQL database, both of which are heavily used by the Mountain View, California, search company.
Schmidt had originally wanted Google to use a commercial database supplier such as Oracle Corp. or Sybase Inc. for Google's back end, but his engineers convinced him that MySQL was actually better suited to the company's needs, he said.
The open source community has been particularly adept at attracting some of the "best and brightest of new talent," in part because it is an international phenomenon, Schmidt said. "I know this is a shock, but not all the best programmers are sitting here in California," he said.
Google itself has hired a number of these open source developers, including Mozilla Foundation contributors Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, who joined the company earlier this year. The Mozilla hires, combined with the revelation that Google has registered the Gbrowser.com Internet domain, have fuelled speculation that Google may be developing its own browser.
Schmidt downplayed this speculation Wednesday, saying that the Mozilla hires played into his company's strategy of supporting both Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browser. "We have decided to work on a browser-independent strategy," he said. "We don’t want to be specialized on any particular one, so that's why these people are working at Google."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:13 PM
Ask Jeeves buys Excite Europe
By Laura RohdeAsk Jeeves Inc. is continuing its European expansion with the acquisition of Excite Italia BV from Tiscali SpA for an undisclosed sum, the Web search engine company announced Friday. Excite Italia operates Excite Europe. The deal is the logical next step in the company's European strategy, Ask Jeeves said in a statement. In April, Ask Jeeves launched of a test search engine site for Spain called Ask Jeeves España, which it said would be followed this year and beyond with similar sites for other western European countries.
Ask Jeeves will leverage Excite's pan-European operational infrastructure and market knowledge to speed up its European strategy, the company said. It believes the acquisition will provide an instant revenue stream from additional users and advertisers. However, the deal is not expected to have a material impact on revenue or earnings per share this year, said the company, which is based in Oakland, California.
Ask Jeeves, which is playing catch up in the European markets with rivals Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., is itself part of another pressing deal, having agreed to be acquired by IAC/InterActiveCorp. in March. The media conglomerate headed by IAC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Barry Diller, intends to buy Ask Jeeves in a stock deal valued at US$1.85 billion.
Excite will remain a separate brand under the Ask Jeeves umbrella, and will continue to operate out of its primary office in Rome, Ask Jeeves said. Excite currently operates portal services in a number of European markets including Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:13 PM
FCC requires VOIP providers to offer E911
By Grant GrossVOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) carriers that connect to the U.S. public telephone network will be required this year to provide their customers with enhanced 911 emergency calling service, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled Thursday. Commissioners called E911 an essential service for all telephone carriers to provide, whether the carriers use the traditional public switched telephone network or IP networks. With E911, callers dialing 911 are connected to their local emergency dispatch center, and dispatchers see the address of the callers on their computers.
"Today's action seeks to remedy a very serious problem -- one quite literally of life or death for the millions of customers that subscribe to VOIP service as a substitute for traditional phone service," said Kevin Martin, FCC chairman. "Because certain VOIP providers do not routinely connect their customers to 911 emergency operators, public safety officials across the country have been unable to address certain calls for help in a timely fashion, resulting in several tragedies. This situation is simply unacceptable."
The FCC's order requires VOIP carriers to provide their customers E911 service within five to six months. E911 must be a standard feature, not an optional feature provided by VOIP carriers. VOIP providers that do not comply could be fined or ordered to cease operations, according to the FCC.
Although some VOIP carriers cheered the ruling, not everyone was happy with it. The Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), a technology trade group, accused the FCC of overstepping its authority in setting a deadline for VOIP carriers to offer E911. Laws giving the FCC its authority don't allow it to require social obligations of technology companies, and customer demand is sufficient to drive adoption of E911 among VOIP carriers, said Harris Miller, ITAA president.
"However well intentioned, today's FCC ruling seems to test the outer limits of the FCC's jurisdiction," Miller said in an e-mail statement. "Congress never intended the FCC to be the 'Federal Technology Commission,' with broad authority over technology applications and services."
VOIP carriers have told the FCC of technical problems that have kept them from providing E911, with fast-growing VOIP provider Vonage Holdings Corp. complaining that incumbent telephone carriers have been slow to allow competing VOIP services access to their 911 services. But on Thursday, Vonage announced it had reached agreements with three of the four large incumbent local carriers in the U.S., with new agreements with SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. in addition to an existing agreement with Verizon Communications Inc.
Thursday's FCC order requires incumbent local carriers to open up their 911 services to VOIP providers. The United States Telecom Association, representing the major incumbent carriers, applauded the FCC decision.
In March, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a lawsuit against Vonage for what he called deceptive trade practices. Without agreements in place with incumbent local carriers, Vonage provided an alternative 911 service that customers had to activate. Abbott, in announcing his lawsuit, noted a February incident in which burglars broke into a house and wounded a mother and father while a child unsuccessfully tried to call 911 using Vonage's VOIP service. The family apparently had not signed up for 911 when prompted by Vonage.
Because VOIP services route 911 calls through IP networks instead of the traditional telephone network, some VOIP phones have phone numbers that can follow the phone wherever it's plugged in. With some VOIP providers, without access to the incumbent 911 services, dispatch centers aren't able to pinpoint the address where the VOIP call originated, unlike E911 service available with most traditional telephone service today.
Vonage praised the FCC order. "The sooner our customers get E911, the better," said Brooke Schulz, Vonage's senior vice president of communications. "We have been asking for this kind of ruling for quite some time now -- since last May, in fact."
The FCC order applies only to VOIP services that can receive calls or send calls to the public telephone network. Internet-based applications that have voice features, including instant messaging and voice chat services on gaming devices, aren't required to provide E911.
Some VOIP providers had called for the FCC to allow some exceptions to a blanket order for VOIP carriers to provide E911. Level 3 Communications Inc., a wholesale provider of VOIP service, had wanted the FCC to delay the requirement for VOIP carriers operating in rural areas, said Charles Meyers, group vice president for marketing at Level 3. The company also wanted the FCC to exempt VOIP service with phones that can be moved and retain their phone numbers when plugged into multiple broadband connections.
Rolling out E911 service to rural areas served by VOIP could take time and significant investment, Meyers said the day before the FCC meeting. "What we don't want is an unintended consequence squelching VOIP adoption because of this order," he said Wednesday.
But Level 3 also supports the general direction toward requiring E911, because the emergency dialing service will help VOIP compete with traditional phone service, he said.
The FCC order does not include exemptions for rural service and mobile devices. Instead, it requires VOIP carriers to allow customers to change their location information so that 911 works wherever they take their VOIP phones, said FCC spokesman Mark Wigfield. The FCC plans to work on a future order establishing a method for customers to change their locations and have E911 work without having to report their new location, he said.
Even though Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy noted that meeting the order's requirements may not be easy for some VOIP carriers, she and other commissioners seemed to reject any arguments that some VOIP services should be exempted from E911 requirements.
"The provision of access to 911 should not be optional for any telephone service provider," said Martin, commission chairman. "We need to take whatever actions are necessary to swiftly enforce these requirements to ensure that no lives are lost due to lack of access to 911."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:12 PM
Google's home page soon available with news, weather
By Tom KrazitGoogle Inc. launched a new personalized service Thursday that incorporates features such as Google News and Gmail onto the company's notoriously sparse home page. The service allows visitors to Google's site to display content of their choosing below the query box on Google.com. Examples include headlines from The New York Times or the British Broadcasting Corp., stock quotes, weather information and as many as nine incoming Gmail messages, said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer Web products at Google.
The Mountain View, California, company demonstrated the service during a press event at its headquarters. Currently available for preview at Google Labs (http://labs.google.com), the personalized service allows visitors to include information from 12 different feeds on their view of the Google home page.
Google will add support for a variety of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to the personalized service within one to two months, Mayer said. Anyone with a free Google Account can set up a page, she said. The service was rolled out as a beta product, similar to how Google News and Gmail, the company's Web e-mail service, were introduced.
"While this is just the first step in what we hope it will become, we believe it is a very compelling offering," Mayer said.
The end result incorporates several different Google services into one spot, a portal-like model resembling that of Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft Corp.'s MSN.com that company executives had previously disdained.
But both Mayer and Google Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt called the personalized service a unique offering from Google that was not done in hopes of competing with either of those Web sites, which feature advertising in addition to many content elements.
Mayer's team has been working on developing a more personalized Google Web page for several years and did not launch the product until company executives were convinced they had found the right approach, Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session with Google co-founder and President, Technology Sergey Brin.
Still, targeted advertising eventually will become part of the personalized home page, Mayer said.
Google also previewed a new version of Google Earth that incorporates technology from recent acquisition Keyhole Corp. Keyhole developed a desktop application, now known as Google Earth, that lets users search within a database of highly detailed maps and satellite imagery. Google's Web search capabilities will be incorporated into the next version of the product, available in the next few weeks, said John Hanke, general manager of Google Keyhole.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:12 PM
Online social network scores hit in South Korea
By Jeremy KirkSK Communications Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of the largest mobile phone provider in South Korea, couldn't have dreamed a better scenario: millions of teenagers through people in their 30s captivated by a portal site that generates sizeable daily revenue. In the hit-or-miss-badly business of online social networks, the company's Cyworld branch has been able to capture as many as 12 million subscribers -- nearly a quarter of South Korea's population -- with up to 17 million unique visitors a month.
Cyworld, which SK acquired in August 2003, is simple: Users can create a free Web page and then buy templates, graphics, background wallpaper, music and animated characters to decorate it. Its ease of use and high popularity has drawn Koreans to create what's termed a "mini-hompy," or slang for mini-homepage.
Users purchase so-called "acorns," or online credits, to buy graphics. An acorn costs around US$0.10. Music, for example, can cost five acorns, and the units can be purchased using a phone or credit card. Cyworld users also give them to friends, a phenomenon noticed during traditional Korean holidays, and retailers such as Shinsegae's Emart -- Korea's equivalent of Wal-Mart -- have cleverly offered acorns as a bonus for a certain purchase amounts.
It's consumers like 23-year-old Hong Eun-sook that have kept Cyworld going since September 2001 when it started and have helped draw new interest. Since Cyworld sites can be searched or randomly selected, the service has become a magnet for those with similar interests to hook up, building extensive online communities. Hong said she spends at least 10 hours a week updating her pages, answering messages left by both friends and strangers and giving acorns.
"We think of giving acorns just like giving a gift certificate," Hong said.
Acorn sales have averaged around $150,000 a day, according to SK. For 2004, SK generated around $110 million in sales with about half of that coming from Cyworld, according to the company. The company plans to expand its operations in Asia and the U.S.
"From the early stage of its creation, Cyworld has observed the behavior patterns of youth very closely," Yoo Hyun-oh, president of SK, wrote in a recent local newspaper column. "I do not agree to some skeptical views that see Cyworld as an interim fad."
Seizing on its popularity with youth, a South Korean politician, Park Geun-hye, set up her own Cyworld site. The chairwoman of the opposition Grand National Party has an opening page with a colorful pastoral scene with animated animals and children frolicking in a field, a design made possible with the purchase of many acorns.
Cyworld has cued in on several inclinations of Korean consumers, said Song Sauk-hun, a principal analyst with Gartner, in Seoul. Koreans maintain contact with grade school and high school friends throughout their lives, and Cyworld's network has made it easier to maintain those bonds, Song said. Similar to Korea's strict social ladder, people with Cyworld pages can restrict access to people considered their "first-degree friends," and those people can contact one another.
"Those kind of special feelings are quite important here," Song said.
Korea's broadband Internet penetration rate of more than 70 percent makes it more convenient for people to spend a higher amount of time online, Song said. For an online social network such as Cyworld to be successful else where, "I think dial-up is not enough. People have to have broadband," Song said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:11 PM
Popular Japanese Web site hard hit by major hack
By Paul KallenderJapan's largest price comparison Web portal is scrambling with the fallout of a decision to keep its Web site operating for three days with the knowledge that it had been hacked and could be feeding Trojan horse programs to visitors. Tokyo-based Kakaku.com Inc., which attracted 6.4 million visitors in April, said Trojan horse programs were installed on the company's servers during an unauthorized intrusion on May 11. The company detected the intrusion soon after it occurred. Instead of closing the site, Kakaku.com decided to keep it open until May 14 in an attempt to trace the hack, company president Yoshiteru Akita said at a news conference in Tokyo on Wednesday.
The Trojan programs have been identified as "trojandownloader.small.AAO" and "PSW.Delf.FZ," and can affect PCs running Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, 2000 and NT operating systems, Kakaku.com said.
Delf is a Trojan program that installs a keystroke logger and remote control software, according to John Pescatore, research director for Internet security at Gartner Inc. The programs record all keystrokes made on an infected PC. If a PC gets hit and the user logs into a server, the attacker can get the user's password for the server and access the user's account.
Akita and other company executives bowed at the news conference and apologized several times but defended the decision to keep the site open.
"We are extremely sorry to all of our customers and shareholders," Akita said.
Keeping the site operating was exactly the wrong thing to do, at least against a Delf-type Trojan program, Pescatore said.
"If Delf gets installed on a server, much more damage can be caused. When any such Trojan is found, it is important to immediately block all connections to the outside world to prevent the attacker from using the remote control features," he said.
"Any site that was left running for several days after discovering a Trojan such as Delf would be allowing the attacker to use his remote control ability to remove all evidence of his action from audit trails, as well as possibly crash servers in an attempt to cover his tracks," Pescatore said.
Delf-type Trojan programs emerged in 2003 and can be blocked, detected and removed with commonly available antivirus and antispyware packages, according to Pescatore.
Kakaku.com was using a variety of antivirus and antispyware systems from major vendors, said Kaori Kawai, a spokeswoman for the company. But she wouldn't name the software or detail the company's update procedures.
Since closing the Web site, the company has posted a page that lists the Trojan horse programs and links to programs that will help disinfect PCs.
The company said the site wouldn't be back in operation until May 23 at the earliest.
While the company scrambles to cope with the hack, it now faces potentially big losses as a result of the closure, it said.
"We are a growing company with a growing number of customers and the impact is, frankly, enormous," Akita said.
During the first three months of 2005, the company had revenue of ¥2.14 billion (US$20 million), up 70 percent from the prior year, and profits of ¥478 million, 74 percent higher than those of the previous year, the company said.
The company is revising its financial forecast and will release the estimate within a month, according to Minoru Tanaka, Kakaku.com's chief financial officer. He declined comment on the scale of the revision.
"All we can say is that we are very sorry and that we are doing our upmost to make our security as strong as possible," Kawai said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:11 PM
May 18, 2005
Berners-Lee seeks killer app for Semantic Web
By Johan BostromThe Semantic Web could be the key to unlocking scientific data that's sequestered by disparate applications' formats and organizational limitations, and could allow scientists to harness computations full power, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee said Tuesday. The Semantic Web "will give scientists and other users unexpected help and serendipitous added value from others' data," Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), said at the Fourth Annual Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston. The Semantic Web seeks to make it easier for data on the Web to be shared and reused by people and applications.
The Semantic Web is based on the W3C's Resource Description Framework, which uses XML (Extensible Markup Language) to integrate applications. Documents and information in databases on the Semantic Web have to be published in a machine processable form creating a kind of global database.
Life scientists in particular could find the Semantic Web a useful tool, and in so doing, "provide leadership to lots of other fields" in implementing this next-generation Web technology, Berners-Lee said. "At the moment, I see a huge amount of energy from people in life sciences, getting excited by the Semantic Web and what it can do to solve the big-idea problems."
Berners-Lee, who invented key components of the World Wide Web such as HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) in the late 1980s, has long envisioned an extension of the organic, unstructured Web. The W3C launched the first projects in the late 1990s, adding metadata to Web pages.
Berners-Lee hopes that life sciences will drive adoption of the Semantic Web, just as high-energy physics drove the early Web.
"Maybe we will meet a critical mass in a certain area. The Web, for example, took off in high-energy physics. When we got six high-energy physics Web sites, then it got interesting for physicists to be onboard," he said. "Similarly, if we could get critical mass in life sciences, if we get a half a dozen or a dozen set of ontologies, the core ones for drug discovery out there, then suddenly the Semantic Web within life sciences would have a critical mass. It’ll snowball much more rapidly and it will be copied. Other areas will realize: Oh it’s worth investing in this," Berners-Lee said
Life sciences are particularly suitable for pioneering the Semantic Web, Berners-Lee said. For example, within drug discovery, many databases and information systems used by drug researchers are already in, or are ready to be transformed to, machine readable formats.
The Biological Pathways Exchange developing a standard data exchange format for metabolic, signaling, genetic regulatory and genetic pathway information and the Universal Protein Resource (Uniprot) joining information contained in catalogs of information on proteins are two examples.
"In many cases, like Uniprot, the ontology [controlled vocabulary and hierarchical data structure] exists, the modeling has already been done," Berners-Lee said.
Biodash, a Semantic Web prototype of a drug development dashboard, associates diseases, drug progression stages, molecular biology and pathway knowledge for users. A team of representatives from the W3C, IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., University of Colorado and others developed the prototype. It includes a Semantic Web browser connecting information from public sources and chemical libraries with biological entities such as genes, proteins and pathways.
Berners-Lee does not promise a quick return on investment for those formatting their data to suit the Semantic Web and he admits that the concept is “quite difficult to explain." However, he experienced the same problem trying to explain the World Wide Web 15 years ago: "'Hypertext pages; big deal!' people said. They couldn’t realize how they would be able to link to potentially anything and what that would mean."
Asked when the Semantic Web will take off, Berners-Lee said: "You tell me. I spend all my energy just telling people what I would like to see happen. What I think will happen is much more dangerous."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 09:06 PM
Google releases enterprise desktop search tool
By Juan Carlos PerezGoogle Inc. plans to make available on Wednesday a desktop search tool tailored for the workplace, about eight months after it introduced a similar tool for consumers. The workplace tool, called Google Desktop Search for the Enterprise, is expected to be available for free download on Wednesday at http://desktop.google.com/enterprise.
Google decided to develop the product because it received many requests for a workplace version of the consumer desktop search tool, said Matthew Glotzbach, product manager for the Google Enterprise group.
Like its cousin, Google Desktop Search for the Enterprise is designed to let users find information stored in their PCs, such as e-mail messages, word processing documents, spreadsheet files and photos.
"Information is growing at insane rates, especially in the business environment," Glotzbach said. "The average person in the workplace can't find what they're looking for anymore [in their PCs.] There is so much information that they're overwhelmed."
The two products, which are free, share a feature that has been a tad controversial in the consumer tool: they take snapshots on the fly of every Web page a user views and index the content. Some users have expressed concern this might be counterproductive if sensitive or confidential information is captured as a user surfs the Web, such as credit card numbers, passwords and online banking information. Users can configure both tools not to capture secure HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) Web pages.
Unlike the consumer product, Google Desktop Search for the Enterprise has a series of installation, distribution, management and security features for IT departments to use when rolling out and configuring the product for their users. For example, all user data and index files can be encrypted, and an installer package is included for enterprise-wide distribution. Also, the tool can create different indexes in a machine that is used by different people, and it can ensure each index is accessible only to the user for which it was created.
Another feature found only in this enterprise version of the product is the ability to index e-mail messages from IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes platform, support which was made possible through a collaboration between Google and IBM. The plan is to extend this support in future upgrades to other Lotus Notes data such as calendar entries and applications built on top of this IBM system, Glotzbach said.
Google Desktop Search for the Enterprise is also integrated with the company's enterprise search tools, called Google Search Appliance and Google Mini, which companies use to index information residing on their servers. For example, when a user runs a query against the Google Search Appliance or Google Mini, the enterprise desktop search tool automatically launches that query on the user's PC, Glotzbach said.
With this move into the enterprise desktop search space, Google will compete against established players such as X1 Technologies Inc. and Autonomy Corp. It will also compete against Microsoft, who this week announced its intention to develop an enterprise desktop search tool, which should be available in beta form by the end of the year.
The Google news doesn't come as a surprise. A Google official acknowledged to IDG News Service in January that the company was developing a desktop search tool for the enterprise market.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 09:06 PM
Yahoo Messenger gains improved voice communication
By Juan Carlos PerezYahoo Inc. plans to improve the PC-to-PC voice communications feature of its Yahoo Messenger instant messaging service, replacing the current walkie-talkie technology with a persistent connection. Instead of having to take turns speaking, users will have a constant connection with good voice quality even if they're hooked up to the Internet at dial-up speeds.
As with the existing voice feature, both users need PCs equipped with a microphone and speakers, since the voice "calls" are made from within the Yahoo Messenger interface and there are no phone numbers to dial. For a fee, users can dial out to a phone number from within Yahoo Messenger using the third-party Net2Phone Inc. service, an existing option.
Also new with the free voice communication service are a call history log and the ability to leave voicemail messages. "We have had PC-to-PC voice connections via Yahoo Messenger since 1999, and this is chapter two," said Frazier Miller, director of product management at Yahoo's instant messaging group.
Yahoo, in Sunnyvale, California, plans to unveil the enhanced voice communication feature in a test upgrade of Yahoo Messenger scheduled for availability at some point Wednesday as a free download at http://messenger.yahoo.com/.
Improving the voice communication capability of Yahoo Messenger is a good move, considering that VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) is catching on thanks to improved service quality, widespread broadband adoption and the prevalence of PCs that come equipped with microphones and speakers, said Marcel Nienhuis, an analyst at Radicati Group.
Fine-tuning the product's voice feature also ties into the industry trend of extending IM communication's options beyond simple text messaging, Nienhuis said. "The nice thing about IM is that you have presence," he said, referring to IM services' ability to inform about people's availability status. "That's the heart of it, so it makes for a great platform to build other applications around it."
The new Yahoo Messenger beta also has improved photo sharing, including better image quality, a new interface onto which photos can be dragged and dropped, and the ability to grab photos from anywhere on the hard drive, whereas the existing version only allows the sharing of photos from a Yahoo album, Miller said.
Other types of files, such as Microsoft Word documents, can also be dragged and dropped into a Yahoo Messenger IM window to be transferred to another user.
Also new is integration with the company's new blogging/social networking service Yahoo 360. An icon indicates if someone in the contact list has updated a blog, and users will be able to publish blogs to their Yahoo 360 account from the Yahoo Messenger interface.
A new contact card has been designed to make it easier for users to exchange contact details, such as e-mail address, postal address, phone numbers and birthdates. Another new feature is the ability for users to share their Yahoo Messenger contact lists with others.
In the security realm, the product adds the ability to report unsolicited messages, or "spim," to Yahoo, which will log the sender into its spim database and decide on actions to take based on usage patterns. Reporting a sender as spim also automatically blocks him from sending messages to the user in the future.
This new Yahoo Messenger version is also more tightly integrated with the company's Web search engine by featuring a search query box in message screens, whereas the current version only shows a search query box in the main interface, Miller said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 09:05 PM
PalmOne makes the LifeDrive official
By Tom KrazitAfter weeks of leaked details popping up on Web sites, PalmOne Inc. is expected to formally announce the LifeDrive Mobile Manager handheld on Wednesday to solve what it sees as the growing storage problems of digital media users. The announcement confirmed many of the details that had been leaked to various PalmOne enthusiast Web sites, as well as Internet retailer Amazon.com Inc. The LifeDrive Mobile Manager comes with a 4G-byte hard drive for storing photos, movies, and business data, said Stephane Maes, director of product management for handhelds at PalmOne.
Amazon inadvertantly posted details of the device on its Web page last week, including the size of the hard drive and its US$499 starting price.
The idea behind the LifeDrive Mobile Manager is to give personal digital assistant (PDA) users more storage for their personal photos and videos while still giving them business productivity applications to keep on top of their job requirements, Maes said. As more users capture digital pictures and video, they are running out of storage space on their current PDAs, he said.
PalmOne has gradually laid the groundwork for hard-drive based devices with the introduction of flash memory across its high-end Tungsten PDA category over the past few months. Flash memory protects data in the event of a battery failure, but it also requires a new file system that stores information in a different manner from PalmOne's older handhelds. That file system, first introduced last year with the Tungsten T5 PDA and the Treo 650 smart phone, also supports hard drives.
Hard-drive based music players are one of the hottest products among mobile devices, led by the runaway success of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod device. Video players with hard drives are also available from companies such as Archos Inc. and Sony Corp., and many analysts and enthusiast sites believe Apple will eventually release its own video player.
However, it's unclear whether a market exists among PDA users for an expensive device with this much storage, said Todd Kort, principal analyst with Gartner Inc.
"I don't hear all that many people that need more than 1G byte of storage. [PalmOne is] kind of aiming for a high-end niche that might not be very large," Kort said.
PalmOne included other high-end hardware features, such as built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips that allow users to check their e-mail or browse the Internet when in range of a wireless network, Maes said. The LifeDrive uses a 416MHz XScale processor from Intel Corp., and features a 320 pixel by 480 pixel display.
Hitachi Ltd. provided the 4G-byte hard drive for the LifeDrive. Hitachi's mobile hard drives are a generation ahead of its competitors, and are notably resistant to falls, Kort said.
The LifeDrive will be available worldwide from select retailers and PalmOne's Web site Wednesday, Maes said. It will be widely available by early June, the company said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 09:05 PM
Google introduces ads for syndicated feeds
By Juan Carlos PerezGoogle Inc. has begun testing the inclusion of text ads in Web content distributed through syndication technologies such as RSS or Atom, the Mountain View, California company announced Tuesday. Web publishers are increasingly making their sites' content available via syndication, and the ability to include ads in feeds such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) opens up a new revenue opportunity for them.
Google's program, an extension of its AdSense network, will include in the feeds text ads that are relevant to the content being distributed. When readers click on the ads, Google will split with the publishers the fees it charges to advertisers.
Once Web publishers get approved for the AdSense for Feeds program, Google will provide them with lines of code they need to add to their feeds to trigger the inclusion of text ads.
Google acknowledged in late April that it was working on this after a blogger disclosed details about his participation in this beta program.
More information about the program can be found at http://www.google.com/adsenseforfeeds.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 12:29 AM
Connexion launching live TV service
By Paul KallenderThe Connexion by Boeing in-flight Internet service is to shortly begin live TV programming on some Singapore Airlines Ltd. flights. This is the first time such a service will be available to commercial airline passengers, according to an announcement by Connexion by Boeing on Tuesday. The service will deliver BBC World, EuroNews, Eurosportnews, and, depending on flight origination, U.S., European or Asian editions of CNBC, to suitably equipped planes and passengers with laptop PCs who have signed up for the Connexion service, according to the announcement.
MSNBC programming will also be available for domestic flights in the U.S., Boeing said.
The TV service will be expanded to other airlines later this year, the company said, without giving further details.
Singapore Airlines plans to add TV programming to its Connexion service from June, it said earlier this year. The latest announcement is the first time Boeing has revealed the programming for Connexion's TV services.
Connexion by Boeing uses satellites to provide high-speed data connections between aircraft and ground stations linked to the Internet. The connection speed is typically about 5M bps (megabits per second) downstream from the Internet to the aircraft and 1M bps upstream from the aircraft to the Internet. So far the service has allowed access to e-mail, Web browsing, and corporate networks via a VPN (virtual private network), among other features.
Pricing for the Internet service includes set rates for short, medium and long-haul flights, and for metered access. For example, the service costs US$29.95 for the duration of a long-haul flight, or $9.95 for the first 30 minutes and $0.25 for each additional minute.
Boeing did not say if there would be a premium for the TV service.
The announcement comes a year after Connexion by Boeing went into commercial use when Lufthansa AG began offering the service on flights between Europe and the U.S. The airline later extended the service to other international routes.
Connexion by Boeing has signed agreements with 11 airlines and has equipped more than 60 planes to provide the service on more than 100 routes daily, it said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 12:29 AM
May 16, 2005
MIT's Negroponte expects $100 laptops next year
By Martyn WilliamsAn ambitious plan by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab to develop and distribute a laptop computer costing no more than US$100 is expected to take a major step forward next month with the receipt of the first order. Orders from five or six countries, for a total of 6 million machines, are hoped for before a full pilot project can begin, said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the MIT Media Lab, in an interview in Tokyo on Monday. The basic aim of the project is to provide a laptop for every child, supplied though any country that wants to offer them.
Negroponte is in Japan to promote the project at the Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Conference, a sideline conference to the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society, bringing together delegates from around 80 countries.
Many countries lack the means or ability to realize the full potential of their children through their current education systems, he said. However, as Negroponte envisions it, the combination of laptops to all children, broadband connections for the towns and villages those children live in and a school syllabus for the use of digital materials, will improve not only the education each child receives but their future prospects as well.
Advanced discussions with various governments for pilot projects are already well underway, Negroponte said. China is expected to order 3 million machines and Brazil is expected to buy 1 million of the laptops. He's looking for three more nations -- one each in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia -- to commit to laptops orders, in addition to supplying some to the U.S., before the machine goes into production, hopefully sometime in 2006.
The standard sales model for laptop computers requires a lot of capital for distribution, promotion and profit, but Negroponte is convinced that with a simplified sales model and some reengineering of the device itself, the $100 price point can be realized.
The machine won't be available in shops. The company, which has the working title of The $100 Laptop Co., plans to sell laptops in-bulk, directly to government ministries and isn't looking to make a profit. About half the price of a current laptop computer is accounted for by marketing, sales, distribution channels and profit, so removing those aspects will provide big cost savings, Negroponte said.
The remaining half of the laptop's cost is accounted for by the parts and manufacturing, and Negroponte is planning savings there too. Roughly two thirds of this cost is the display panel and associated backlight, but Negroponte's version of the machine will use a projection display system that costs a total of about $30, he said.
"The rest of the cost is there to support an absolutely obese, overweight and unreliable operating system. If you get rid of that and start with a thin, tiny operating system you can do an awful lot," Negroponte said.
The laptop will run Linux, he said. The distribution hasn't been decided upon yet but the project is in serious discussions with Raleigh, North Carolina, Red Hat Inc. and Beijing's Red Flag Software Co. Ltd., Negroponte said.
The first generation machine will be based on a 500MHz processor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which is one of the project's main backers, and will have 256M bytes of main memory, 1G byte of flash memory in place of a hard-disk drive and a wireless LAN connection, he said. The machines will automatically connect with others, forming a mesh network to support communications and also Internet connection sharing and they'll run software including the Skype voice-over-IP application, Negroponte said.
Plans are already advanced enough to include second and third generation machines, due in 2007 and 2008 respectively, Negroponte said. A prototype of the third generation machine he demonstrated was a tablet form-factor based on a plastic-film display from E Ink Corp. That machine could also use an advanced printing technology to produce the circuit board further cutting down the price, he said.
Current plans call for the first 6 million machines to be manufactured in China and then for regional manufacturing centers to be established. Brazil is also interested in building a plant to produce laptops for its market and those in South America, Negroponte said.
Additional manufacturing will be needed if the project reaches its eventual goal: production of between 100 million and 200 million laptops per year. In comparison the total worldwide PC market in 2004 was 195 million, according to a recent report from IDC.
The project is being headed by Negroponte along with two other MIT faculty members: Joe Jacobson, who developed the E Ink technology, and Seymour Papert, who is an expert on child learning. The project's home page is: http://laptop.media.mit.edu .
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 01:46 PM
Microsoft updates desktop search toolbar
By Juan Carlos PerezMicrosoft Corp. is set to release on Monday an upgrade to its MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search that adds a number of enhancements, including the ability to preview documents on users' hard drives. This upgraded version of the search toolbar, which requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 or later versions, features a new preview pane to let users view documents retrieved from their PCs. Another enhancement is an increased capability to determine which files in a user's PC the toolbar should index. Microsoft has also created a Web site at http://addins.msn.com/, where users will find components created by third parties to extend the toolbar's desktop search functionality. Finally, the upgraded version getting unveiled Monday features new wizard-like setup tools as well as improved performance.
In several months, the toolbar, which also lets users search the Web, will gain tabbed browsing functionality, which will result in individual searches organized as tabs. Another future plan is the creation of a desktop search tool for the workplace; Microsoft plans to have a beta version of this tool by the end of this year.
One thing the toolbar doesn't do is index information that users of MSN online services, such as the Hotmail Web mail service, may have stored in Microsoft servers, said Dane Glasgow, product unit manager for MSN Search. Indexing server-based information is something rival Yahoo Inc. has begun to do with its own desktop search product.
The Microsoft toolbar, which makes its desktop search functionality available from Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and Outlook, can index and retrieve the metadata of over 200 different types of files, as well as the full text of some file types. At this point, the only e-mail files it indexes are those in Outlook 2000 or later versions and Outlook Express 6.0 or later versions.
The Microsoft toolbar, which requires Internet Explorer 5.01 or later versions, will be made available on Monday for free download at http://desktop.msn.com.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 01:45 PM
Latest sober worm sends German spam
By Scarlet PruittE-mail users perplexed by the barrage of German-language spam waiting in their inboxes Monday morning can point the finger of blame at the latest version of the Sober mass mailing worm which began rapidly spreading over the weekend. Sober.q uses both German and English-language messages to direct recipients to Web sites with right-wing German nationalistic content, according to an advisory from e-mail security company MX Logic Inc. One of the URLs (uniform resource locators) points to the Web site of the right-wing German NPD party, it said.
The security firm said that it had seen over 125,000 instances of Sober.q overnight Saturday and into Sunday, and labelled it as a high severity threat. The variant is downloaded by computers already infected by the Sober.p worm which began circulating earlier this month, MX Logic said. The virus writers appear to have remote control over the Sober.p infected machines, giving them a network from which to launch future spam and denial of service attacks, it added.
The latest sober variant is one of a relatively new type of "propaganda spam," meant to spread political messages rather than sell a product or service, MX Logic said. Circulation of the worm coincides with ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe and examples of subject lines it sends include "Dresden 1945" and "Du wirst zum Sklaven gemacht!!!" ("You are made slaves!!!"), according to MX Logic.
"We are certainly seeing more propaganda spam," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with Sophos PLC. Security researchers began detecting religious spam selling a particular view of life last year, Cluley added.
Although Sophos is seeing a lot of German-language spam sent by the new Sober variant, the worm itself doesn't appear to be spreading anymore, Cluley said.
E-mail users are advised to update their spam filters to guard against the new Sober spam.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 01:44 PM
May 13, 2005
Ballmer preaches innovation and Xbox to students
By Joris EversSteve Ballmer still does not have a degree from Stanford University, but the Microsoft Corp. chief executive officer now does have proof that he dropped out after the first year. Before delivering a speech in a Stanford Graduate School of Business' "View from the Top" series, Robert Joss, the school's dean, presented Ballmer with a "core plus a quarter" certificate. Ballmer left Stanford about 25 years ago to become bookkeeper at a tiny software company called Microsoft.
After flinging the certificate aside and pitching the launch of Microsoft's new Xbox game console scheduled for later on Thursday, Ballmer launched into a speech on innovation and how it is crucial to Microsoft. He predicted a "revolution" over the next five years in how people use information and communication technology.
"I think we are going to see more change in technology over the course of the next five years than we have in the past decade," Ballmer said. "Remember, a decade ago most people did not have cell phones, a PC and did not know what the Internet was... It is a fantastic opportunity."
While some may think personal computers have reached their limits. Ballmer said unified communication, search and collaboration technologies are some of the areas in which big advances are coming.
"Perhaps even some of the novelty of computing technology is wearing off, but the potential is unbelievable. Our industry has a lot of unfinished business to really drive forward the world," he said. "I have lost track of the number of times that people continue to say that personal computing has reached it limits. It just has not happened."
Without innovation, Microsoft won't sell any new products, Ballmer said. "Our previous products are really often times our toughest competition and innovation is the life blood of how we stay in business," he said.
"We don't build a product that wears out. Software is sort of like the Energizer bunny of the computer industry. It just keeps on going and going and going. I'd hesitate to say it never breaks, but it never wears out," Ballmer said.
Software might not wear out, people do. At the end of his speech Ballmer said that he gives himself another 12 years at Microsoft. By then his kids will be out of high school. "I'll be 61, that seems about right to me," he said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:53 PM
Google buys Dodgeball networking service
By Stacy CowleyGoogle Inc. continued extending its reach beyond the PC this week by acquiring social networking service Dodgeball.com, according to a note posted Wednesday on Dodgeball.com's Web site. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A Google spokesman confirmed the acquisition but declined further comment, saying the company is not yet ready to discuss its plans for Dodgeball.com. New York-based Dodgeball.com formally launched last year as an expansion of a grad-school project started at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. The service lets users "check in" their location at a bar, club, restaurant or other local gathering spot, then transmits that information as a text message to the mobile phones of selected other Dodgeball.com users in the area. The goal is to spark in-person connections among friends, acquaintances and friends-of-friends.
Google's eclectic portfolio includes other experimental meldings of social interactions with technology, such as Orkut, a Friendster-like site started by one of Google's employees and affiliated with the company. Unlike Orkut, Dodgeball.com's focus is on offline interaction: It aims to connect mobile users when they're on the move and away from their PCs.
Dodgeball.com creator Dennis Crowley said in the Web site note that he and his partner, Alex Rainert, chose to sell to Google because they like its approach to technology.
"As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone," Crowley wrote. "We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really 'got' what we were doing -- that is until we met Google. The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a 'You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what you can do with it' type of way."
Crowley said little would change immediately for Dodgeball.com's users, beyond the service's adoption of Google's privacy policy and service terms. He and Rainert will remain with the company and begin work on new features, he wrote: "We have a lot of ideas that we've wanted to work on for a long time and we're excited that we will now have the time and resources to actually follow through with them."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:51 PM
Indian professor proposes alternate open-source license
By John RibeiroFinding the GNU General Public License (GPL) too restrictive with regard to derived works, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai is working on an alternative license that will allow people to take commercial benefit from work derived from an open-source program. The GPL of the Free Software Foundation Inc. in Boston requires a derived work to be given to the open-source community, which in many cases deters creativity, Deepak Phatak, professor of IT at the IIT told IDG News Service Thursday.
Version 2 of the GPL requires that "you must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License."
Developers and users also face the problem of changing open-source license terms, Phatak said.
Phatak favors a license modeled on the University of California, Berkeley's BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). He hopes to modify the BSD license and make it a perpetual license. "This way even the original writer of the license will not be able to modify it," said Phatak. "So developers and users are not threatened by license revisions."
The BSD license allows software redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification in both closed-source and open-source situations. Source code released under the BSD license essentially allows the user free reign over the code, with very few restrictions, Phatak said.
Phatak is uncertain how many developers and academics in India will support his plan. "For now it is just my idea," he said.
By not requiring developers of derived works to give their work to the community, the new license will not stifle the open-source movement, Phatak said. "This license will better reflect the ground reality," he said. " For 20 people who make use of this provision, there will be 200 and more who will contribute and return to the community for no monetary benefit."
To give an analogy, there have been a number of derived works for profit based around holy books like the Bible and the Bhagvad Gita, but this has actually enriched understanding of these holy books, Phatak added.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:49 PM
VOIP, Wi-Fi seen aiding Africa development
By Michael MalakataThere is an increasing awareness in Africa that VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and Wi-Fi communications technology can help countries on the continent achieve development targets, and governments are taking concrete steps to promote these new communications technologies, according to analysts, cabinet-level officials and telecommunications company executives. Africa has much to gain by using VOIP and Wi-Fi technologies because traditional fixed-line telephony penetration is still very low in many countries, and communication costs are high, according to industry insiders.
Wireless technologies are ideal for Africa because of the continent's lack of fixed infrastructure, according to Paul Budde, the managing director of BuddeComm, a telecommunication business consultancy company. Though headquartered in Australia, Budde tracks the communications arena in Africa.
In Africa, "it is nearly impossible to quickly roll out infrastructure," Budde said.
Algeria, Kenya, Mali and Mauritius have within the last year enacted telecommunication regulations that allow for the deployment of both VOIP and Wi-Fi. VOIP services convert voice calls to data and transmit them as message packets over IP (Internet Protocol) data networks. Countries often need to pass special laws to allow the commercial deployment of VOIP, since the telecommunications sector traditionally has been heavily regulated.
"The advantage of VOIP calls is that they are much cheaper than conventional telephones," Kenyan Information and Communications Permanent Secretary James Rege told the IDG News Service.
In Kenya, which recently made VOIP use legal, people can now call the U.S. and Europe at lower prices than traditional telephone calls to the same destinations, which typically cost more than one dollar per minute. VOIP users in Kenya have been using calling cards to access VOIP services.
South Africa has adopted a strategy to generate jobs by attracting international call centers to the country, market observers point out. The centers, which number about 500 according to various estimates, provide outsourced services using high-bandwidth connections, including VOIP.
Meanwhile, the Algerian government also recently approved licenses allowing ISPs (Internet service providers) to use VOIP and Wi-Fi technologies for international calls. Before the introduction of VOIP and Wi-Fi, Algeria only had one telecom operator, state-owned (Algeria Telecom), that provided international call services to users.
With governments allowing competition to flourish in the telecom sector, the new technologies are bringing greater access to information and communication technology (ICT) in less-privileged areas, said Algeria Telecom Managing Director Messaoud Chettih in an e-mail message.
The downside for traditional telecom providers, Budde said, is that VOIP and Wi-Fi put the future of conventional telephony at a crossroads. Because VOIP and Wi-Fi provide cheaper services, traditional telecom services will face more competition than ever before, he noted. Users, however, are bound to gain.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:49 PM
Interwoven draws closer to Microsoft
By Stacy CowleyDocument management specialist Interwoven Inc. is deepening its partnership with Microsoft Corp., announcing on Thursday a sales and joint-development alliance that executives from both vendors say will more closely integrate their software products. Few specifics were available on what new features customers can expect, though Interwoven did say it will release technology by year-end to better tie together its WorkSite content management suite with Microsoft's SharePoint portal software. Interwoven will also be an early adopter of Microsoft's forthcoming SQL Server 2005 software (code-named Yukon), which Interwoven executive Neil Araujo expects to add scalability to Interwoven's system.
"It will give us a lot more head room in the quantity of content we manage in a single repository," said Araujo, Interwoven's vice president of legal marketing and product management.
Microsoft and Interwoven of Sunnyvale, California, will also link their sales teams, particularly in the document-intensive legal, accounting and management consulting fields.
While the partnership plans remain vague, one customer of both Microsoft and Interwoven said he's pleased to see the two vendors align. "It can only be a good thing," said Peter Lamb, director of information services for Toronto law firm Torys LLP.
Lamb's firm has about 1,000 employees in Toronto and New York, and uses WorkSite to manage e-mail, documents and records. The firm also relies heavily on Microsoft's Office suite.
"We've been working with Interwoven for many years now, and there have been a number of times when, in order to solve problems or ask for enhancements, we've had to go to both companies. It will be nice to only have to make one call," Lamb said. "There have been times when Microsoft will give us one side and Interwoven will give us another, and we'll go round and round and round."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 05:49 PM
May 12, 2005
Travelocity buys Lastminute.com for $1.1 billion
By Laura RohdeIn a move aimed at creating Europe's largest online travel service company, Sabre Holdings Corp., the operator of Travelocity.com, is buying U.K.-based Lastminute.com PLC for £577 million (US$1.08 billion), the company announced Thursday. Technically, the acquisition will be made by Travelocity Europe Ltd., an indirect subsidiary of Sabre Holdings that has been established for the purpose of executing the deal, the Southlake, Texas, travel reservations system operator said. Sabre expects to close the deal by the end of July, paying £1.65 a share for the London company, it said.
The deal fits into Saber's overall strategy of extending its international reach as an e-commerce travel retailer. Saber added it was interested in Lastminute.com, in part, for its high brand recognition, supplier relationships (currently around 13,600) and the size of its user base. Lastminute.com currently has over 9.8 million subscribers to its weekly newsletter, Saber said.
The acquisition of Lastminute.com will also aid Saber's negotiating position with global airline and hotel companies, creating cheaper prices which it could then pass on to customers, Saber said.
Once the U.K. poster child of the Internet e-commerce boom of the late 1990s, Lastminute.com was launched in 1998 by Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox, promoting last minute online offers for airline tickets, hotel rooms, package holidays, entertainment tickets, restaurant reservations and home delivery.
After its highly publicized and profitable initial public offering (IPO) in March 2000, Lastminute.com's business and stock price suffered when the Internet bubble burst later in 2000. And after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., in September 2001, people sharply cut back on travel. But despite being blamed by analysts in numerous local media for undermining confidence in e-commerce companies in the U.K. and abroad, Lastminute.com pushed on, seeking to diversify and expand its business, in part with the purchase of 14 businesses in the past three years.
Hoberman will run the combined Lastminute and Travelocity business in Europe after the takeover, Saber said. Fox left Lastminute.com in 2003, but she and Hoberman still jointly own over 7 percent of the company's stock.
The combined business has strong positions in the U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia and Spain, Sabre said. It added that Lastminute.com will be the lead brand in most cases, though Travelocity will evaluate its brands country-by-country after the deal is completed.
Sabre values Lastminute.com's business at £606 million, including the company's debt of £69 million and cash holdings of £40 million, it said.
Also on Thursday, Lastminute.com announced its financial results for the six months ending March 31. It reported a net loss for the period of £45.5 million, or £0.01339 a share, down from a loss of £39.5 million, or £0.01332 a share in the same period last year. The company said it has never posted a net profit. Online bookings, or what Lastminute.com calls its total transaction value, rose 57 percent to £512.1 million in the period, it said.
In a conference telephone call discussing the results, Lastminute.com's Chairman Brian Collie said that three companies, including Sabre, have recently expressed interest in buying Lastminute.com and that he couldn't rule out a counter-bid, though he believes the offer from Sabre is sound.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:56 PM
MSN acquires MessageCast to expand alerts service
By Paul KallenderMSN has bought MessageCast Inc. in a move that will give MSN Messenger more access to MessageCast's technologies and will help expand MSN alert services to new content channels, Microsoft Corp. announced Wednesday. The price was not announced.
MessageCast develops broadcast messaging systems that work with real-time networks and RSS (really simple syndication) content feeds, and its technology notifies customers about information services, blog and podcast updates, and updates to MSN's alert service.
MSN has worked with MessageCast since 2003 on developing MSN alerts services to customers. Such alerts are available in the U.S. and several European and Asian countries and can be delivered via MSN Messenger, Microsoft Windows Messenger, e-mail and text messaging on mobile devices compatible with the MSN Mobile, according to Microsoft.
The acquisition was announced the same day as Microsoft said it had formed a joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. to launch MSN mobile products with more local content in China.
Microsoft has already added several new services to MSN this year.
In February, the company launched MSN Search, which allows users to search both Web sites and content from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia and MSN Music. Until this service was launched, MSN had previously relied on search technology from rival Yahoo Inc.
In March, Microsoft then started its MSN Video Downloads mobile video download service, allowing subscribers to watch videos from partners such as CinemaNow Inc., MSNBC.com and TiVo Inc., on portable devices.
And in April, Microsoft released MSN Messenger 7.0, which offers free PC-to-PC video calls for users with a webcam in addition to free voice calls. Also in April, it launched the MSN Spaces service, an online scrapbook function that lets users post blogs, photo albums, music lists and other personalized information.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:55 PM
Boingo offers connection to in-flight Wi-Fi
By Stephen LawsonAirliners are slowly coming closer to being just another place to tune in to a Wi-Fi signal. Boingo Wireless Inc. announced a deal on Wednesday that will give its hotspot customers Internet access on flights that offer the Connexion by Boeing inflight Wi-Fi service. The partnership will remove the need for airline passengers to sign up for a separate Wi-Fi service and get a bill from Connexion by Boeing.
Connexion by Boeing, a division of The Boeing Co., offers inflight Wi-Fi on a number of flights by major international carriers, including Lufthansa AG, SAS AB (Scandinavian Airlines System), Japan Airlines System Corp., All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd. and SIA Group's Singapore Airlines. The company charges passengers US$29.99 for access to the network on each long-haul flight.
Boingo offers users access to a network of Wi-Fi hotspots through customized client software. Customers pay a flat $21.95 per month fee for access to hotspots provided by many different service providers, said Scott Miller, director of retail services for the Santa Monica, California, company. Some networks, including the inflight hotspots, are "premium locations" for which there is an extra charge, he said. Boingo also provides the back-end systems for other service providers, including Earthlink Inc., BT Infonet Services Corp. and MCI Inc., to offer their customers consolidated access to hotspots.
Fliers with a Boingo account will get a $28.99 charge per flight on their regular monthly Boingo bill. The service is available immediately, and there are two introductory promotions. Right now, Boingo is offering one free in-flight Wi-Fi connection for new Boingo subscribers to a monthly account with a three-month commitment. And from May 17-23, the service will be free on all flights, Miller said.
Boingo decided to tie up with Connexion by Boeing so workers could be more productive in the air, Miller said. The inflight service, which uses a satellite connection to reach the Internet, offers a true broadband experience, he said. The relationship is not exclusive, but Boingo won't bring in any other inflight Wi-Fi services unless they offer a comparable experience, he said.
By eliminating the need for a separate account with Connexion by Boeing, Boingo overcomes one hurdle to adoption of in-flight Wi-Fi but doesn't address the biggest barriers, said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Charles Golvin. The biggest issue now is lack of availability: For inflight Wi-Fi to really catch on, finding it available will have to become the rule rather than the exception when users get on a flight, he said. Providers will also have to make fliers aware of it in many places, including the airline check-in gate and ticket-selling sites such as Expedia, he added. Price, though not an issue for very early adopters, will become an issue when providers want general passengers to log in, Golvin predicted.
In addition to surfing the Web, using instant messaging and exchanging e-mail, fliers can make voice calls using PC-based VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) systems such as Skype, Miller said. The call quality is fairly good despite latency problems caused by the satellite connection that can degrade call quality, he said.
"It's not a social recommendation, but it is available," Miller said. "I don't think anyone's going to mind if you make a 10-minute call to clear up a contract issue."
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:55 PM
DOD hacker gets 21-month sentence
By Scarlet PruittA 21-year old Indiana resident was slapped with a 21-month jail sentence for his role in a hacking attack that compromised computers at the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), law enforcement officials recently revealed. The attack was launched by international hacking gang Thr34t Krew (TK) and took place between October 2002 and March 2003, according to a statement from U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Paul McNulty.
Former TK member Raymond Paul Steigerwalt was sentenced Friday for one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers and one count of possession of child pornography, officials said. He was also ordered to pay restitution to the DOD of US$12,000.
Steigerwalt and his gang were accused of creating a worm that infected Internet-connected computers. The worm installed a trojan software program, allowing them to control the infected machines. At least two computers at the DOD were infected, McNulty's office said. It was not clear what damage was done.
Steigerwalt's sentencing came as a result of an investigation involving the DOD, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, the U.S. Secret Service, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, the Riverside California County Sheriff's Office and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Two other men in North East England were held in 2003 for their part in creating the TK trojan. At the time, the U.K.'s National Hi-Tech Crime Unit said that the virus had infected approximately 18,000 computers around the world, causing an estimated £5.5 million (US$10.3 million) in damages.
The sentencing of Steigerwalt last week represents a small victory for law enforcement officials, but the incident could still prove somewhat embarrassing for the DOD, according to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos PLC.
"Most of these government agencies are pretty clued in on security threats but the problem is that they only need to be unlucky once to have egg on their face," Cluley said.
International hacking groups, like Thr34t Krew, appear to be on the rise and they are increasingly focusing on money making schemes, Cluley said.
Security experts are warning organizations to be aware of sophisticated attacks designed to steal information or perform extortion, by threatening to launch a denial-of-service (DOS) attack against a Web site unless money is paid, for instance.
Earlier this week it was revealed that data theft reported at Cisco Systems Inc. last year is now believed to be part of a larger incident involving the break-in of servers in several countries. Some of the attacks are also thought to have been directed at U.S. government agencies.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:54 PM
May 11, 2005
Google ponders Blogger, Gmail integration
By Juan Carlos PerezGoogle Inc. is contemplating various improvements to its popular Blogger Web logging service, including native image uploading and deeper integration with the company's Gmail Web-mail service, according to a Google executive. Google is also considering the creation of an enterprise Blogger version, as well as letting users limit access to their blogs by creating private groups, said Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist.
Although Blogger currently allows users to post text and photos to their blogs via any e-mail program, Google is looking into a tighter integration with Gmail, Stone said.
"A lot of people are familiar with e-mail. I think it's great if you give them more features, more things they can do with their e-mail in a space they're comfortable with," Stone said. "For us it's not crucial that they come to Blogger.com to do their posts. If they're more comfortable [doing it] with something else that's fine too."
Google is also evaluating an enhancement that lets users natively upload images to their blogs from within the Blogger interface, Stone said. Currently, images can be posted to Blogger via e-mail or using other indirect methods, such as Google's Hello image-transmission service. "There is a button there now [in the Blogger interface for image uploading] so we're working on making that a useful button," Stone said. "We're looking into that right now."
Google is also weighing whether to develop an enterprise version of Blogger that would be tailored for workplace use, as opposed to individual consumer use, Stone said. "It's something we're always thinking about, something we have a few people thinking about and looking into. It's definitely being researched," he said.
Although users can password protect their Blogger blogs with third-party software or services, Blogger currently doesn't offer native ways for users to limit access to their blogs. However, Google is mulling over the possibility of adding some native privacy features, such as the ability for users to create private groups and that way control who can view their blogs, Stone said.
Meanwhile, Blogger has resolved some performance issues Stone acknowledged in March that were affecting the service, including slow response times. "We really spent a lot of time working on that and overall performance for 95 percent of users is really great. We're continuing to work to make that last few just as good," Stone said.
Google introduced the latest enhancement to Blogger last week, when it launched Blogger Mobile, a feature that lets users create a new blog and post to it from mobile devices. "There's lots of people walking around with little blogging appliances which others may call mobile phones," Stone said.
While it was possible to post to Blogger from a mobile device using e-mail, the process required users to have an existing blog and engage in a certain degree of setups and preferences tweaking, Stone said. Blogger Mobile was designed to simplify the process, he said. "It has been in this domain of experts. Our whole thing in Blogger is to always try to make these cool things easier for regular folks to be able to do," he said. More information on this service is at http://go.blogger.com.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 07:12 PM
Fiberlink, Skype team to offer VoIP
By Denise Pappalardo, Network WorldFiberlink has inked deals with a handful of vendors to offer its customers VoIP, 3G wireless and anti-spyware options when traveling worldwide. Fiberlink offers remote access services and client software to business users. The company is teaming with Skype and Webroot Software to offer new applications, access and security options. For the first time Skype, which is best known as a peer-to-peer VoIP service provider for consumers, is teaming with a service provider that squarely focuses on enterprise users.
"This is a fairly significant announcement showing Skype is trying to get legitimate within the business world," says Michael Disabato, service director for network and telecom strategies at Burton Group.
Skype, which claims 38.2 million users, seems to be listening to analysts who point out that lack of security and corporate billing options will prevent more from signing on to the service, despite large cost savings.
According to a March report from Gartner, users who travel nine months a year could save more than US$14,000 annually by using Skype's service, which is free when calling another Skype user. The savings result from eliminating per-minute service rates for calls from overseas to the U.S., which typically are around $2 per minute, according to Gartner. But users should keep in mind if they make calls from their Skype client to users on a traditional phone, they will not see the same cost savings because users do have to pay a per-minute rate for those off-net calls.
But in the same report Gartner says, "Skype needs to improve its support structure, which does not match corporate expectations." And that might be one of the reasons why it is now teaming with Fiberlink.
Fiberlink customers now will be able to make VoIP calls over the Internet using the service provider's secure client Extend360. Fiberlink customers will be able to make off-net calls and not worry about making PayPal payments for each call, which is the only way that Skype accepts payments today. Instead Fiberlink is offering corporate monthly billing for all off-net calls.
Fiberlink Extend360 customers are making calls behind a personal firewall running on their PC, which offers additional security.
This is another example where network managers don't have to manage another application themselves, but still gain some control over the application, Disabato says. Using Fiberlink's Extend360 client, IT managers should be able to set policies that limit the number of off-net calls a user can make per month, he says.
"Teaming with a provider that business users trust and have a relationship with already is a big step for us," says Kelly Larabee, a spokesperson for Skype. "Security is one of our favorite things about Fiberlink."
While Skype wouldn't say if it plans to team with other service providers, Larabee did say Skype is "looking to partner with world-class companies across a broad range of industries."
In addition to coupling easy-to-use, low-cost VoIP services with its client, Fiberlink also is offering wireless 3G data options. The carrier is teaming with an unnamed service provider to offer Evolution Data Optimized (EV-DO) high-speed wireless data services to its customers. Fiberlink says it expects to name the service provider at a later date.
Disabato says it's likely that Fiberlink is teaming with Verizon Wireless because it has the most robust EV-DO deployment so far. But he points out that the service provider also could be Sprint, which uses Fiberlink's client for its remote access service offering.
EV-DO is a wireless data technology that supports average transmission speeds of about 300K to 500K bit/sec. The technology maxes out at about 2.4M bit/sec.
Fiberlink is offering EV-DO access as part of an overall bundle. Customers can get unlimited EV-DO, Wi-Fi, hotel broadband and dial-up services for $100 per month, per user, says Bill Wagner, chief marketing officer at Fiberlink.
Fiberlink is teaming with anti-spyware vendor Webroot Software. The service provider is integrating the Webroot software with its client so users can easily and regularly update their anti-spyware software.
The integration will allow network managers to monitor how often users have updated their Webroot software and build policies around that. A network manager could have a policy that says if a user has not updated his anti-spyware software in six months, he is not permitted to access the VPN.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 07:10 PM
Yahoo undercuts rivals with new music service
By Joris EversYahoo Inc. on Wednesday plans to launch a trial version of Yahoo Music Unlimited, a new, aggressively-priced online music subscription service. For an introductory price of US$59.88 a year, or $6.99 when paid monthly, the service will give users access to over 1 million songs from all major record labels and most independent labels, Yahoo said in a statement.
With its pricing, Yahoo is undercutting rivals RealNetworks Inc. and Napster Inc., which both charge about $15 a month for comparable services. Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes, the biggest online music store, doesn't offer subscriptions but charges users per song or album download.
Yahoo will offer tracks in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio (WMA) format encoded at 192k bps (bits per second), a high quality when compared with other services. Users can also transfer music to digital media players that support Microsoft's latest digital rights management (drm) technology.
Digital media players that support the Microsoft technology, known as Janus, include Iriver Inc.'s H10, Dell Inc.'s DJ and Creative Technology Ltd.'s Zen Micro. Apple's iPod music players, the most popular digital media players, don't support Microsoft's technology.
Subscription services such as Yahoo's, Real's Rhapsody and Napster's offer access to music transferred to portable devices as long as the user maintains his subscription. The tracks become unplayable when consumers let their subscription lapse.
Yahoo Music Unlimited also will offer songs for purchase for $0.99 a track. Subscribers will be able to purchase and permanently own tracks for $0.79 a piece. Purchased songs can be burned onto a CD, transferred to portable devices and used on a total of five PCs, according to Yahoo.
Yahoo Music Unlimited includes the Yahoo Music Engine, software that will let users manage their music collection. Users will also be able to share their music with others via Yahoo Messenger and will get access to Yahoo's LAUNCHcast online radio service, Yahoo said.
The new music service is Yahoo's latest online music move. The Sunnyvale, California-based company last year acquired MusicMatch Inc., which offers a music subscription service and software. The MusicMatch products will remain available, but eventually be merged with the new Yahoo Music Unlimited service, Yahoo said.
Yahoo Music Unlimited will be released in beta version first and will initially only be available to users in the U.S.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:10 PM
Microsoft forms Chinese joint venture for MSN
By Scarlet PruittHoping to tap into one of the largest markets in the world for Internet and mobile phone services, Microsoft Corp. has formed a joint venture with a Chinese firm to launch MSN China and acquired assets of a local mobile software provider to offer MSN Mobile products and services in the country. Microsoft has partnered with Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. (SAIL) to create the new Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology Company Ltd., it said Wednesday. The joint venture plans to launch an MSN China portal in coming months, offering a range of content and services.
Although MSN offerings such as the Hotmail e-mail service and MSN Messenger are already available to Chinese users, the joint venture will allow Microsoft to provide more local content, according to Zhang Dongming, research director at analyst firm BDA China Ltd.
The Redmond, Washington, company also has its sights set on China's legions of mobile phone users, of which it estimates there are 340 million. It is acquiring some assets of mobile software provider TSSX. Through the transaction, Microsoft plans to deliver enhanced MSN Mobile products and services, it said.
The U.S. software maker has agreed to form a China Mobile Development Center in the southern city of Shenzhen that will include TSSX staff. The center will integrate TSSX technologies and services with MSN Mobile, allowing Microsoft to quickly expand its mobile offerings for the Chinese market, it said.
While Microsoft is making a strong push into China, it also faces some tough competition, according to Dongming. One of the country's largest mobile service providers is a company called Tencent, which also started from an online platform, Dongming said.
Tencent's Mobile QQ service allows Internet users to send SMS (short message service) text messages to mobile phones. The service is extremely popular because it requires no specific handsets and is endorsed by dominant mobile provider China Mobile, Dongming said. "Microsoft's joint venture will face a very strong, entrenched player," Dongming said.
However, Tencent's user base is predominantly young and MSN has an edge with business users in the country, she said. Tencent's attempts to target the business market have not been very successful and the segment could provide an entry point for more MSN services, she added.
Microsoft has said that it is targeting professionals in the country, and that strategy could make sense since many Chinese use MSN to keep in touch with business contacts, Dongming said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:03 PM
RealNetworks makes Finnish mobile gaming buy
By Laura RohdeRealNetworks Inc. has acquired Finnish mobile gaming developer Mr. Goodliving Ltd. for US$15 million as part of an overall plan to become more aggressive in the European mobile gaming market, the companies announced Wednesday. "Our goal is to be the dominate player in casual games for the mobile phone within the next year or two," said Derrick Morton, the general manager of RealNetworks' mobile games division. "We see this as a natural next step for us."
Mr. Goodliving, in Helsinki, develops, publishes and sells Java-based games, including its Playman Sports series, as well as various mobile phone versions of Trivial Pursuit. The company, established in 1999, employs about 40 people, all of whom will stay in their current positions, said Juha Ruskola, chief executive officer (CEO) of Mr. Goodliving.
Though the company has not given a public accounting of its balance sheet, its CEO said he expects Mr. Goodliving will generate around $3 million for the remainder of the year.
"Gaming is the biggest mobile value-added service right now, apart, perhaps, from ring tones, which have flattened in terms of growth," Ruskola said.
U.S. consumers will get a crack at some of the Mr. Goodliving games as early as July or August, Ruskola said. Mr. Goodliving's Trivial Pursuit games will not be offered in the U.S. as the company only owns the European licensing rights. The Walt Disney Co. and Verizon Wireless Inc. own the U.S. rights.
Another motivating factor to seal the deal for RealNetworks, in Seattle, is the company's desire to utilize Mr. Goodliving's proprietary development software, MrG Emerge, not just in Europe but in the U.S. as well, Morton said. After the merger, RealNetworks' development tools will be able to support 150 different handsets and 20 different languages.
"Mr. Goodliving's development platform will have a big impact on how we do things, because it works in a manner that eliminates the need to import for J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] or Brew [Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless], for instance," Morton said. "You don't need to hand port for every device; this technology really streamlines that."
RealNetworks was also keen on Mr. Goodliving's network of partners throughout Europe, which includes major operators (Vodafone Group PLC; T-Mobile International AG; Orange SA; and MMO2 PLC), portals, media companies and retail channels. Additionally, Mr. Goodliving has highlighted what it says is a strong position in the new E.U. countries and in Russia.
According to Ruskola, there will be no big changes at Mr. Goodliving, though its employees face some travel between Helsinki and Seattle as they bring the new parent company up to speed on MrG Emerge in particular.
For its part, RealNetworks has a lot on its plate as it takes on competition such as Nokia Corp.'s N-Gage. The company will focus on securing its European foothold, developing new products and aggregating about 100 developers to bring over to Mr. Goodliving, all while looking for new opportunities, Morton said.
"Of course, we can't give any details, but Asia is an area we want to see some growth in as well," Morton said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:02 PM
AOL intros Web mail service
By Juan Carlos PerezAmerica Online Inc. plans to introduce on Thursday a free Web mail service as part of a test, or beta, upgrade of its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) instant messaging service. The second beta release of AIM 5.9, expected to be available on Thursday, will offer every user a Web mail account featuring 2G bytes of storage, spam filters, antivirus protection and drag-and-drop functionality to organize messages into folders.
As would be expected, the new Web mail service will be tightly integrated with AIM. An icon will indicate if an e-mail sender or other recipients are logged into the AIM service. Users will also be able to launch the Web mail service from within the AIM client and from the AIM welcome screen. The Web mail service's address book also will feature icons that indicate if those listed are logged into AIM.
Users' e-mail address will consist of their AIM handle and the suffix "@aim.com".
Other features include a search functionality for finding stored messages and the abilty to cancel a message after it has been sent, as long as it hasn't been read and was sent to a recipient with an aol.com or aim.com e-mail address. The service will also feature a spell checker and rich text HTML formatting, which allows users to change font types, sizes and colors.
Free Web mail services have been around for a long time, so AOL may in some ways be considered a late entrant to the game. However, considering the company's marketing clout and the popularity of its AIM service, it stands a good chance of making its presence felt quickly, said Joe Laszlo, a Jupiter Research analyst. It's clear users are willing to give alternative Web mail services a try, and the set of features AOL is offering covers pretty much everything users are accustomed to, he said.
"The open question is how many people will convert to this as their primary Web mail account," Laszlo said.
AOL, a Time Warner Inc. subsidiary based in Dulles, Virginia, plans to generate revenue from the Web mail service through banner ads, said Roy Ben-Yoseph, AOL's director of communication and client products.
AOL plans to make the latest beta of AIM 5.9 available for download at some point on Thursday at http://www.aim.com/get_aim/win/win_beta.adp?aolp. In June, users will be able to sign up for the service from the company's public Web portal at http://www.aol.com.
AOL has offered Web mail service to subscribers to its fee-based online service for several years, but this is the first such service it offers to non-subscribers under the AOL brand. AOL's Netscape unit already offers a free Web mail service.
Separate from the 5.9 upgrade, AOL is working on a major revamping of the AIM service codenamed Triton, an early beta of which is also available now at http://beta.aol.com.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:02 PM
W3C gets proactive with Mobile Web Initiative
By Laura RohdeThe World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) formally launched the Mobile Web Initiative at its WWW2005 Conference in Chiba, Japan, on Wednesday, putting out a call for participants to join two working groups focused on making Web access from mobile devices as natural and easy as making a telephone call. "Web access today is so fundamental, that it shouldn't be hampered by wires," said Philipp Hoschka, W3C's deputy director for Europe. "Through this initiative, we're committed to improving the state of the art in mobile Web content production and mobile access."
The Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, with an 18-month charter, will develop authoring guidelines, checklists and tips on things to avoid, all with an aim of helping content providers develop Web content that works well on mobile devices, Hoschka said. The group is expected to produce its first results on providing best practices for what the W3C calls "mobileOK" Web sites sometime in the fourth quarter, he said.
The Device Description Working Group, working with a year-long charter, will work to improve device descriptions and databases used by content authors to adapt their content to a particular device.
"There are many devices out there and lots of descriptions about what features are supported by which devices. For example, finding out if a particular phone has a keyboard and then adapting content to that handheld," Hoschka said. "We want to help the people who have created databases for those descriptions and figure out how to share those databases."
The W3C has made a concerted effort towards improving the mobile Web experience, and in November hosted a two-day workshop in Barcelona on the topic. Companies such as Vodafone Group PLC, Nokia Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) presented over 40 position papers and around 100 people took part in discussions on making Web surfing as convenient and ubiquitous over devices like mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) as it is over the desktop.
"It became clear in Barcelona that people have big problems in accessing the Web from mobile devices," Hoschka said. "What was impressive was that the whole mobile industry was there, representing all of its various components, and they all seemed to agree that we need to collectively do something."
A number of the companies that took part in the workshop, including Vodafone and HP, have since become sponsors of the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). The W3C has so far raised €500,000 (US$642,000) to be used over three years and is hoping to bring more companies with additional funding on board, Hoschka said. All W3C members are eligible to become MWI founding sponsors until July 1.
One large aspect of the initiative will be education and outreach, according to Hoschka. "We are hoping that these groups are going to develop something mobile content providers are going to pick up. But what we've come to realize is that it's not enough to do specifications; you have got to help people actually use them," he said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:01 PM
British Airways takes off with Cisco VOIP
By Laura RohdeBritish Airways PLC (BA), Europe's third-largest airline, has tapped Cisco Systems Inc. to build a telephone system using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) for its 14,000 office and airport workers, Cisco announced Wednesday. The San Jose, California, company did not specify the size of the contract other than to say it is a "multimillion pound'' deal, which is expected to pay for itself through cost savings within two years.
By next March, London-based BA is expected to be using 8,500 Cisco IP phones with its CallManager call-processing software and MeetingPlace conferencing software over an Ethernet network built by Cisco, the company said. The project includes replacing BA's legacy phone system in Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport just outside of London.
Additionally, BA's Employee Self Service applications will be extended to include the delivery of Web-based employee services and digitized audio messages to Cisco IP phones, Cisco said.
Representatives from BA and Cisco could not immediately be reached for further comment.
Cisco said the deal with BA brings its sales of IP telephones to the 5 million mark.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:01 PM
May 10, 2005
IBM buys open-source developer Gluecode
By Stacy CowleyIBM Corp. said Tuesday it has acquired Gluecode Software Inc., a startup developer of open-source infrastructure software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. El Segundo, California-based Gluecode built a Java application development platform called Joe out of open-source components from the Apache Software Foundation's portfolio.The components include Apache's portal technology, its Geronimo application server, its Derby database and its Agila BPM (business process management) engine. Some of those technologies originated at IBM, such as the Derby database, formerly known as Cloudscape, which IBM picked up when it acquired Informix, and then donated to Apache.
IBM said it will continue developing Gluecode's technology and become an active contributor to the Apache Geronimo open-source application server software project. It plans to push Gluecode as a low-cost alternative for companies not interested in IBM's more expensive WebSphere middleware and application server software; smaller customers can start out with Gluecode and eventually scale up to WebSphere, IBM suggested. IBM also plans to profit on selling support services around the Gluecode software.
Research firm Ovum Ltd. hailed the deal as a milestone in the industry's move toward commoditized application server software. "IBM sends a clear message to competitors like BEA that it's keen to see the application server market consolidate and to get the players competing on the basis of higher-level services," Ovum wrote in a research note.
Ovum also sees the deal as a win for IBM's customers, who will be able to chose among IBM application server offerings at different price points.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:17 PM
LifeDrive on the horizon for PalmOne
By Laura RohdePalmOne Inc. plans a new category of mobile computing products called mobile manager, and will unveil the first such device later this month, the company said in a statement Monday. But it appears Amazon.com Inc. has beaten PalmOne to the punch by offering details of the PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager on its Web site. PalmOne has created the mobile manager category of products for users who want to carry, file and manage content such as music and video, the Milpitas, California, company said. According to analysts, PalmOne is planning to officially announce the new product on May 18.
On Saturday, the price of the LifeDrive PDA (personal digital assistant) was listed at US$499.99 on the Amazon.com Web site, according to several reports on the Web. By Monday Amazon.com's site said the product is unavailable and listed no price. However, a few details of the device remained online: the LifeDrive will come with an Intel XScale processor running at 416MHz, and its 320-pixel-by-480-pixel color display will work in landscape or portrait modes. The device will also offer a feature called smart file management, according to details on the Amazon.com site.
Apparently reacting to some of the product details leaked on the site, Amazon.com users posted comments indicating that LifeDrive will also have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless networking built in, and an integrated hard drive. The device will play MP3 format music files, the comments said.
PalmOne's mobile manager range of devices is aimed users who want to use as much digital content as possible, including music, video, e-mail and business documents in Word, Excel and Powerpoint formats, PalmOne said in its statement Monday. The new devices will sit alongside PalmOne's other two ranges: the Tungsten and Zire branded handheld organizers, and the Treo smart phone, the company said.
Representatives for PalmOne and Amazon.com could not immediately be reached for further comment.
In April, PalmOne began offering an update to its most popular handheld, the Tungsten E2. This has double the battery life of previous products, the company said.
PalmOne has been looking to add some zip to its product line after having suffered a sizeable dip in demand. In the first three months of this year, PalmOne experienced a 26 percent drop in PDA shipments, compared to the first quarter of 2004, according to a study released earlier this month by Gartner Inc. That came despite a sharp increase in shipments for PDAs with integrated WLAN (wireless LAN) and cell-phone capabilities, in particular the BlackBerry device from Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), Gartner said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:17 PM
Power outage hits eBay
By Martyn WilliamsA power outage at one of eBay Inc.'s major hosting facilities in the San Francisco area hit the popular online auction service late Monday, it said. The outage resulted in the site becoming unavailable, according to a notice posted on a secondary server just after 9p.m. PDT Monday. About an hour later, a second message was posted detailing the reason for the site failure and letting users know that parts of the site were again available.
"We will keep you updated on progress, and we appreciate your patience," it concluded.
It's not the first time eBay has suffered such problems although the Monday outage isn't nearly the company's worst. The site has in the past been unavailable for periods of up to 22 hours, according to eBay's most recent financial report.
"Any unscheduled interruption in our services results in an immediate, and possibly substantial, loss of revenues," it said in the report. Interruptions can also cause a delay in the roll-out of new features because engineering staff are otherwise occupied dealing with the site trouble and outages can also harm the business of eBay's customers, it said.
EBay had 147 million registered users across its U.S. and international sites at the end of March this year of which 60.5 million were counted as active users.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:16 PM
Sprint to work with Intel on mobile WiMax
By Stephen LawsonSprint Corp. has agreed to work with Intel Corp. to help get a mobile form of WiMax off the ground, signalling the mobile operator's interest in the technology for potential high-speed wireless services. The agreement, announced last Thursday, calls for collaboration on the development of technology based on the emerging IEEE 802.16e specification. That standard, which is not expected to appear in generally available products until 2007 or 2008, is designed for WiMax services that customers can use while on the move. The companies will work together on product specifications, interoperability tests and equipment trials, according to a joint statement.
In its initial form, which is expected to hit the market around the end of this year, WiMax is designed to deliver speeds comparable to DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable modem service to stationary client devices over a range of 3-10 kilometers (about 2-6 miles). The IEEE 802.16e specification would extend WiMax to mobile devices across coverage areas with a typical radius of 3 kilometers. Intel has been an aggressive backer of WiMax and is betting big on the mobile version, which the company envisions being built in to notebook PCs and other mobile devices just as Wi-Fi is today.
WiMax is one of multiple technologies that Sprint is considering for high-speed Internet and multimedia services on its so-called MMDS (Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Service) radio spectrum, a band around 2.5GHz, the company said in a statement. Once Sprint has completed its planned acquisition of Nextel Communications Inc., the combined company will hold most of the MMDS spectrum in the U.S. Sprint at one time used those frequencies for fixed wireless data service, and Nextel has run trials of mobile broadband technology from Flarion Technologies Inc., but neither carrier has committed to using a particular technology with this spectrum in the future. WiMax can be adapted to many different frequencies, including 2.5GHz.
Sprint currently is building out a 3G network with EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized), a form of CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology designed for typical throughput of about 300K bps (bits per second) to 500K bps to each customer.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:16 PM
Sun buys Tarantella for $25 million
By Peter SayerSun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to buy Tarantella Inc., a vendor of tools to secure remote access to applications, for about US$25 million in cash, the companies said Tuesday. The deal still requires approval from regulators and Tarantella shareholders, but the companies expect to complete it by the end of September.
Tarantella, based in Santa Cruz, California, developed its Secure Global Desktop software to make it possible to deliver access to enterprise applications over the Web. It sells the product online, through its own sales force and through a network of resellers including, in the U.S., Tridex Systems Inc. and Prime Care Technologies Inc.
Directors and executives at Tarantella, between them holding 4.7 percent of Tarantella stock, have already accepted the deal, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That filing also indicates that Tarantella has agreed not to solicit other bids for the company, and that it will pay Sun compensation of $1.2 million if it terminates the merger.
Sun, of Santa Clara, California, will pay Tarantella up to $2 million in six stages while the deal is closing, in return for licenses and engineering support from Tarantella for its Secure Global Desktop software.
A Sun spokeswoman declined to comment further ahead of a conference call the companies have scheduled for 1:30 p.m. PT Tuesday.
Tarantella cancelled a conference call previously scheduled to take place Thursday, after the release of its financial results for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2005.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:15 PM
May 09, 2005
In-flight Internet to launch over the Pacific
By Paul KallenderJapan Airlines Corp. (JAL) will Tuesday start offering The Boeing Co.'s in-flight Internet service on flights between Tokyo and New York, the first time the service will be available for transpacific travel, the airline said on Monday. The Connexion by Boeing service will be initially available on alternate days on flights JL005/JL006, with the service becoming available daily by the end of June, according to Geoffrey Tudor, a spokesman for the airline.
Connexion by Boeing is a satellite-delivered data service that enables airline passengers to access the Internet via wireless LAN-compatible PCs.
The connection speed is typically about 5M bps (megabits per second) downstream from the Internet to the aircraft, and 1M bps upstream from the aircraft to the Internet. The service supports e-mail, Web browsing, and corporate network access via a VPN (virtual private network), among other features, according to JAL.
Access will be available throughout the aircraft and will cost US$29.95 throughout the flight, or for $9.95 for the first 30 minutes and $0.25 for each additional minute, JAL said. A $10 discount will be available until July 15, 2005, the airline said.
JAL was the first Asian airline to reach an agreement to introduce the Connexion by Boeing service, introducing it on its Tokyo-London route in December 2004. Two Boeing 747-400 aircraft are equipped to provide the service on the Tokyo-London route, JAL's Tudor said.
"We will gradually be expanding the service to more of our major business routes, but we haven't got a fixed timetable yet," he said.
Connexion by Boeing entered commercial service in May 2004 with Lufthansa AG, which began offering it on flights between Europe and the U.S. Other airlines using the service include Scandinavian Airline System.
The service is increasingly available from Asian airlines. All Nippon Airways Co. Ltd. began offering the service on flights between Tokyo and Shanghai in November. The airline plans to extend the service to its Tokyo-Los Angeles and Tokyo-New York routes, according to Boeing. Singapore Airlines Ltd. will start services on some routes during the middle of this year.
Boeing has also signed deals with Taiwan's China Airlines Ltd., and with South Korea's Asiana Airlines Inc. and Korean Air. Korean Air will be offering the service on selected flights between Seoul and the U.S. in May, according to Boeing.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:06 PM
Microsoft to unveil new mobile software
By Scarlet PruittMicrosoft Corp. is set to unveil Tuesday the next version of its Windows Mobile operating system, codenamed Magneto, according to sources familiar with the situation. The launch corresponds with Microsoft's Mobile & Embedded DevCon event taking place in Las Vegas this week, where company Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates will make a keynote address on mobile development strategies.
Details of the new mobile OS have been scarce, but an online review of a leaked version of the software cites improved navigation and contact functions, as well as a significant expansion in Microsoft Office for PDA capabilities. The newly named Office Mobile includes changes to Word and Excel and the emergence of PowerPoint Mobile, according to the review at www.mobile-review.com.
Earlier this year Microsoft tried to silence other sites that offered leaked information on its forthcoming mobile software. It sent letters to electronics news site Engadget.com, Windows fan site Neowin.net and smart phone information Web site Modaco.com, claiming that by posting screen shots and details on the unreleased software, they were violating the company's intellectual property rights.
Neowin and Modaco removed their articles, but Engadget left its article in place, claiming that the information was not stolen, but taken from other sources on the Web.
Microsoft is holding a press event in London on Tuesday to announce a new worldwide product launch, but representatives for the company remained tight-lipped about whether it was regarding Magneto.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:06 PM
NTT DoCoMo to target US with $100M venture fund
By Martyn WilliamsNTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cell phone network operator, will soon open a new U.S. venture capital subsidiary, it said Monday. DoCoMo Capital Inc. will be based in San Jose, California and will begin operation on July 1, according to a company statement. It will focus on investing in mainly U.S.-based venture companies developing advanced mobile communication technologies.
The company is expected to invest about US$100 million over 10 years, said Masanori Goto, a spokesman for NTT DoCoMo in Tokyo.
It's focus will be on the research and development field and through its activities NTT DoCoMo hopes to shorten technology development times and lower its research and development costs, he said.
The new unit is the carrier's second major venture capital subsidiary in the U.S. In 1996, it established DCM Investments Inc., which is based in Boston and targets telecommunication-related companies and venture funds.
NTT DoCoMo opened a Japanese venture capital unit in 1999. In late 2003, it invested US$10 million into a venture fund jointly operated with Gobi Partners Inc. that targeted mainly China-based high-tech companies.
In addition, NTT DoCoMo has recently been putting money into ventures in Thailand including a $1.9 million investment in digital mapping provider MappointAsia (Thailand) Co. Ltd. and about $546,000 in location-based service provider Mobile Innovation Co. Ltd.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:05 PM
Siemens continues search for cell phone partner
By John BlauSiemens AG said Wednesday that it is still in talks with companies about forming a partnership for its mobile phone manufacturing unit or selling it, after a German business newspaper reported that Motorola Inc. had backed out of a deal at the last second. Siemens declined to comment on a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, saying that Motorola had pulled out of the talks and that no other company was lining up to take over the business.
Wolfram Trost, a spokesman for the company, said the Munich-based electronics giant continues to negotiate with several companies and that it hopes to reach a decision soon. "As we have said before, we have three options to deal with the handset unit: cooperate with a partner, sell the unit outright or close it," Trost said. "Closing is the worst option because of the jobs and know-how that would be lost. Cooperation is our preferred option."
Last year, rumors surfaced that Siemens was close to reaching a partnership agreement with China's Ningbo Bird Co. Ltd. The company has a distribution agreement with Siemens in China.
Siemens' mobile phone unit continues to bleed money, having posted a loss of €143 million (US$195 million as of Dec. 31, 2004, the last day of the period being reported) in the first quarter, which ended Dec. 31, compared to a profit of €64 million the year before.
The first-quarter loss followed a loss in the fourth quarter of €141 million. Siemens attributed that loss to competition from lower priced handsets and quality problems that delayed the rollout of the company's new 65 series of mobile phones.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 04:04 PM
May 05, 2005
R-Rated Cell Phones
By Anush Yegyazarian, PC WorldLate last year, Playboy launched IBod, a collection of videos and still images you can download and play back on your Apple IPod, either singly or in a slide show. More recently, Playboy has introduced a similar collection for Sony's PlayStation Portable gaming handheld. It's but a short step from there to a Playboy offering for your cell phone. The rising interest--on the part of adult-content providers and others--in offering video on cell phones has prompted the CTIA, a telecommunications industry group, to prep a voluntary rating system for mobile phone content. Few details on the rating system are available as yet since it's a work in progress, but the CTIA has said it will develop the rating system with the aid of a third party. The CTIA is also consulting with other industry groups that have voluntarily rated their own content, including the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and computer game companies.
The rating system guidelines likely will debut sometime midyear, and are expected to distinguish content appropriate to the over-18 crowd from content for general consumption. Later, content distinctions will be more refined; I anticipate different ratings for content for kids, teens, and adults, or even more subgroups.
You can argue that rating systems rarely work--and having seen my share of kids and teens in R-rated films or playing games rated for mature audiences, I'd have to agree. However, in my opinion, this particular rating system could actually do what it's meant to do: Keep adult content out of children's hands while allowing adults the freedom to see or hear what they choose.
Why should this system succeed when others have failed? Because if it's implemented at the carrier level--which would make the most sense--it would remove control from handsets and place it with a central server, making it harder for kids to disable the filtering.
Carriers see ratings on content before they ever send it to a handset, and can automatically lock out anything the account owners (presumably the adults of the household), wish to keep from being displayed on a specific phone. To be most efficient, content restrictions should be imposed on a handset-by-handset (or number by number) basis, so that phones belonging to parents and college-age users could display more adult content than those used by children or younger siblings, even if all these phones are billed to the same account.
Of course, enterprising teens could still try to impersonate their parents and get restrictions lifted from their phones, but that possibility could be minimized with a few precautions at the carrier end, such as requiring passwords or personal ID numbers and an additional security question to change account settings. You need some proof of identity, plus a credit card, when you buy a cell phone, so we're already getting screened for age when we set up an account.
Mark Desautels, vice president of wireless Internet development for the CTIA, says carriers will determine the specific mechanism through which account holders have access to restricted content. This could be done through a preset permission method, as I've described above, or users could be required to use a credit card or a PIN any time they want to access restricted content. Rated content will include audio and music, video and still images, games, and lottery or online gambling to start; it's not a rating system for the whole Internet, Desautels says.
Vendors and carriers already censor our wireless content to some extent. You don't see the full names of certain songs when you're looking for a ring tone because titles that use obscene language are modified. And now that you can get ring tones with words instead of just electronic Musak, the offerings also get scrubbed of offensive lyrics. Some songs aren't even available because their lyrics can't be sanitized.
An effective rating system wouldn't just affect offerings of Playboy-style adult content. As cell phones get higher-quality screens, and as high-bandwidth 3G and 4G (third- and fourth-generation) networks are deployed, like EDGE and UMTS, a range of mainstream video content will actually be watchable. Today, I don't think I could stand trying to watch a full 30- or 60-minute episode of a favorite TV show on a mobile phone because of unreliable connections and slow frame rates. But in a year or two, I might well change my mind. If so, Tony Soprano could be making a call to my cell phone, along with the women of Sex in the City. An effective rating system would let me subscribe to those programs, while keeping my cousin's junior high school-age kids away.
Of course, if such content does become available, we'll all have to brush up on our public etiquette and make sure we're a little more careful about what we do with our cell phones and where.
Effective covers a lot of ground when it comes to rating systems (or products, for that matter). For a system to be effective, it must start with centrally controlled filters, as I mentioned above. You also need cooperation from any content provider you do business with--which means they will all have to rate their content and tag it in some way so that any carrier understands what's got a green light for all ages, what's for teens only, and what's for adults. Since some self-filtering has been going on already, it may be that vendors will be eager to cooperate in order to get more choices in front of consumers--which, they hope, will entice us to pay for more content.
Standardizing a tagging and filtering system is the next hurdle. The fact that the cell phone content ratings initiative comes from an industry body could bode well for achieving agreement on a single set of guidelines, but it must be network-independent and work on all carrier and provider server software.
If the first guidelines are available midyear as planned, carriers could start implementing them late this year--so one hopes these issues will be resolved quickly. The next step is a more refined rating system that might well involve filtering at the household level. Clay Owen, spokesperson for Cingular Wireless, says his company is working on tools that would allow users to get more control over content, though there is no release date as yet. I guess we'll all have to wait to see (and hear).
Last year, several cell phone companies got together and proposed a directory service for cell phone numbers. As I wrote in September, the proposal is controversial because of privacy and monetary concerns. Who would be listed? Would you have to opt-in, or worse, opt-out? Who would have access to the numbers? Why should I be charged for a call made by someone who doesn't already have my number?
A U.S. Senate bill (S. 1963) that would codify some of the proposed guidelines got through committee, but did not go further. However, the Wireless 411 plan has been postponed to next year, though it was supposed to have already debuted. And there's a new bill in the House of Representatives (H.R. 1139) that gives existing users an opt-in choice while giving new users an easy opt-out mechanism when they get cellular service. It also forwards a call without disclosing the recipient's phone number; and it gives recipients a chance to accept or reject calls on a case-by-case basis, which limits the impact on your pocketbook. We'll have to see if this bill gets any further than its predecessors.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:41 PM
May 04, 2005
Singingfish seeks multimedia content deals
By Juan Carlos PerezAmerica Online Inc. is pushing forward with plans to make its multimedia search engine Singingfish a popular online destination, an effort that began in December. Before then, Singingfish primarily powered audio and video search for third-parties through licensing of its technology. Consumers could run searches on the Web site, but it wasn't designed nor promoted for that type of use.
Since redesigning the site to make it attractive to consumers in December, daily queries on Singingfish.com have increased from 700,000 to 800,000.
The Industry Standard recently caught up with Singingfish Vice President and General Manager Karen Howe, who talked candidly about her efforts to reach out to content owners -- particularly within parent company Time Warner Inc. -- to automate the inclusion of their content in the search engine's index.
Until now, most of the content in Singingfish's index has been captured by sending out its spiders to the Web, but automated feeds accomplish the same with less effort and in a more organized manner.
Beyond automating content feeds, Singingfish is also talking to Time Warner units about its ability to be a platform to package and distribute their content to consumers in various ways that could generate revenue for content owners.
After all, Time Warner owns large producers of television shows, movies and music such as HBO, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Turner Broadcasting System and New Line Cinema. As this type of content gets digitized, its owners are realizing consumers are willing to pay for multimedia just like they do for music.
Below are excerpts from the interview:
TIS: Since you're part of AOL, could you take advantage of Time Warner audio/video content and package it in special ways? In other words, as part of the Time Warner family, would it be easier for you to tap into that and strike up deals of that type?
Howe: Every Time Warner business unit is separate and they have to manage their content in what makes the best business sense for them. What makes it easy for us is being part of the same company. I can pick up the phone and I know who to call. Sometimes that's 90 percent of the battle. And the other part is they call me back. That's even better.
So being able to talk to people and discuss the pros and cons of doing an RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feed is so much easier because we're part of the same family. Also, so many of their assets are digitized and they are starting to be much more creative in their approach in terms of promotion and getting the content out to a broader audience; there's a much broader general interest in pursuing that. Because of the relationship we have, the business process to get these agreements done is pretty straightforward.
TIS: Will you pursue this type of agreement as a priority?
Howe: Yes, it's definitely a priority to pursue content licensing deals from the standpoint of getting feeds into the index. It grows the index in a very simple, more efficient way. It's less expensive to do it this way than by spidering, which takes up a lot of resources. [With automated feeds] the content provider has more control over what gets surfaced and what doesn't, and how it gets displayed, so it's much better for them also. And it results in a much better end user experience, which is what we're after.
TIS: Will deals like this give you an advantage over competitors?
Howe: It gives us a very solid leg up. Because we're in the same entity, we understand their workflow, their business process, [and can offer] different ways of partnering, different ways of displaying the business model. If you're not in the [Time Warner] family, you're not going to get there.
TIS: Do those Time Warner units view Singingfish as a potentially good outlet for distributing their content in different ways or with different business models? Or are you not necessarily on their radar screens right now?
Howe: We're in the radar screen. We've done a fair amount of outreach to individuals who run big operations [within Time Warner.]
There's a mindshift that has occurred from "protect the content at all costs and don't let it out." ... to "we have digital [content] and what do we do about it?" If you're talking to the CTOs [chief technology officers] of these organizations, which is what I'm doing, then you're able to intersect at a pivotal point in the whole process. I have the [search engine] platform and it's understandable and it's something they know they absolutely need to participate in because it will contribute towards their business success because this is the way for people to get to the online content. You don't remember which studio released a movie. But if you type in the movie name, which is what you remember, [in a search engine] then you can get to the online content.
TIS: Do these Time Warner business units realize Singingfish can help them generate revenue by linking users with the content they're looking for?
Howe: They are in the process of educating themselves very quickly about what's possible for online because they understand that they don't control the channel changer. They understand that the end user does in fact decide what he's going to participate in and when. So the end user controls the access as opposed to a programming model where at 7 p.m. you have to watch this because it's the only time when it's on. The end user is taking more control over when they are accessing content.
TIS: Is Time Warner in general also supportive of you also striking this type of deal outside of Time Warner?
Howe: I think they do fundamentally understand that because being an exclusive channel isn't that appealing. You lose your credibility.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:49 PM
Time Warner Q1 profit goes flat, despite modest growth
By Sumner LemonDespite a modest increase in overall revenue, Time Warner Inc. Wednesday said its first-quarter profits were flat compared to the same period last year. Time Warner's first-quarter revenue was US$10.5 billion, up 3 percent from the same period last year when the company reported revenue of $10.2 billion.
However, that modest increase in revenue didn't translate into higher profits for the company. Time Warner reported its net income for the period was $963 million, a gain of less than 1 percent over the year-ago period.
Time Warner's AOL Internet division had a tough quarter, with a drop in the number of domestic subscribers dragging the group's revenue down by 3 percent to $2.1 billion.
AOL had 21.7 million Internet subscribers as of March 31, 2.3 million [M] fewer than the same period last year, Time Warner said. As a result, AOL's revenue from subscriptions was down by 8 percent compared to last year. However, that drop was partly offset by an increase in advertising revenue, which increased due to rises in revenue from paid search and the acquisition of Advertising.com, the company said.
Despite lower revenue, AOL was more profitable during the first quarter of 2005 than it had been during early 2004. Operating income for the division rose 17 percent to $324 million, Time Warner said.
Time Warner's Cable and Networks division both showed relatively strong growth during the first quarter. Cable revenue and operating income both rose 10 percent compared to the same period last year, Time Warner said. Revenue from the company's Networks group rose 4 percent while operating income rose 7 percent, it said.
Looking ahead, Time Warner said that its outlook for the year remains unchanged. The company expects to see its adjusted operating income, which excludes depreciation costs and debt payments, to show growth in the high single digits. The company's adjusted operating income for 2004 was $9.9 billion.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:49 PM
Google cuts price of Urchin Web analytics service
By Juan Carlos PerezGoogle Inc. has slashed the price of the Web analytics hosted service it acquired when it bought Urchin Software Corp., Google announced Tuesday. Urchin On Demand, which tracks Web site usage, now costs US$199 per month, down from $495 per month, a 60 percent reduction.
In addition to the price drop, Urchin On Demand has been enhanced by increasing the number of Web sites it can monitor per subscription and by integrating it with Google's AdWords advertising network.
Urchin On Demand now can track usage of up to 50 Web sites per subscription, whereas before it could only track one Web site per subscription. Independently of how many Web sites are getting monitored, a subscription covers a maximum of 100,000 page views per month. Subscribers have the option of adding one million more page views for an additional $99 per month.
Another enhancement is Urchin On Demand's ability to import a subscriber's account data from AdWords to help him determine the return on investment of his AdWords ad campaigns.
Urchin On Demand tracks how visitors arrive at a Web site and what they do there. The hosted service can identify whether users were referred to the Web site via a search engine, an external link or an ad placed by the Web site owner to attract traffic. The latter type of metric is useful for letting Web site owners know how effective their different ads are.
Based on the usage information it collects, Urchin On Demand can generate a variety of reports that Web site owners can use to improve their Web sites.
Google is offering a 15-day free trial of Urchin On Demand. More information is available at http://www.urchin.com.
The capabilities in the Urchin On Demand hosted service are also provided in an Urchin software product whose price hasn't changed since the company's acquisition, said Salar Kamangar, director of product management for AdWords. The Urchin software's base module costs $895, according to information on Urchin's Web site. That base module can be extended with optional modules, such as one for e-commerce reports that costs $695 and one to track ad campaigns that costs $3,995.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:48 PM
Microsoft recruits bloggers to preview Longhorn
By Joris EversRevving its Longhorn marketing engine, Microsoft Corp. is forming a team of bloggers who will get early access to prereleases of the operating system and will be asked to review the Windows XP successor. Microsoft Longhorn Evangelist and blogger Robert Scoble on Sunday started soliciting nominations for "Team 99" on Microsoft's Channel 9 Web site for developers. The team is named after the highway that leads into Whistler, British Columbia, where the future operating system's namesake Longhorn Saloon is located.
Team 99 should start with about 20 people, including some developers and some "super users," according to Scoble. All members will have to sign nondisclosure agreements because they will get access to early versions of the software and other information before it is publicly released, Scoble wrote in his Channel 9 posting.
While not billed as a beta or early adopter group, Team 99 members will be asked to provide Microsoft feedback on Longhorn. "They'll tell us where we're screwing up, what we're doing well, and will be the world's top authorities on Longhorn," Scoble wrote.
A Microsoft spokesman confirmed the existence of the Team 99 project.
Word of the Team 99 initiative comes as Microsoft starts talking up Longhorn again. Last week the software maker released a prebeta version of the Windows XP successor for the hardware community and earlier in April the company's Windows Chief Jim Allchin went on a media tour to promote the operating system.
Soliciting the help of bloggers to evangelize Longhorn is one of Microsoft's new strategies for educating the developer community, said Michael Cherry, a lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft Inc. in Kirkland, Washington.
"Microsoft in the last little while has been working very hard looking at alternative methods of getting out information to developers. This is to me just another attempt," he said. "Hopefully the bloggers will be people who can look at Longhorn and assess its feature set in their particular interest and communicate about it."
Microsoft unveiled Longhorn in late 2003 at a conference for developers, but then reined in its ambitions for the operating system last year, hoping to release it in late 2006. Microsoft clipped some of Longhorn's key features, most notably the unified storage system called WinFS, and went silent on Longhorn until a few weeks ago.
Thomas Smith, manager of desktop engineering at a large Houston-based company that he asked not to be named, thinks the Team 99 members might have significant influence on Longhorn development.
"I think this group will have a large enough voice that it could really make a difference," Smith said. He is interested in joining and nominated himself on the Channel 9 Web site, but he is not a blogger, which according to Scoble's rules disqualifies him for Team 99.
Longhorn is slated to be widely available by the end of next year. A first official beta version, meant for software developers, is due by the end of June. A second beta, meant for IT professionals, is also planned, but Microsoft has not given a timeframe for that version. A second Longhorn-themed Professional Developers Conference is scheduled for September.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 12:41 AM
May 03, 2005
360 to import content from non-Yahoo services
By John RibeiroYahoo Inc. plans to add the capability to import content, such as photos and music, from non-Yahoo applications to its new Yahoo 360 social networking and blogging service, according to an executive of the company. "Some of the things that people very much want to do is to share content from other sources outside of Yahoo," said Paul Brody, director of community products at Yahoo, in an interview Saturday. "[Yahoo] 360 right now does a great job of allowing you to share the content you might have already on Yahoo."
The Yahoo 360 service entered a limited beta period in late March and is available to users invited by Yahoo to try it out. The service lets them publish blogs, share content and post pictures, and also control who can visit the site. It currently allows users to include content from other Yahoo services such as Yahoo Photos and Yahoo Music, Brody said.
To expand that capability, Yahoo 360 initially will allow users to include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from other sources, according to Brody, who said Yahoo wants its Yahoo 360 service to be an "open" product. "If you have content anywhere on the Internet, you should be able to share it with friends and family through Yahoo 360, " he said.
Yahoo 360 will be made widely available to the public in the next few weeks, at which time the capability to share non-Yahoo content will also be included, Brody said.
The beta period is designed to help Yahoo gather feedback from users to improve the service. For example, as a result of the feedback, Yahoo is working to give bloggers greater flexibility in customizing their blogs, and also to give them features such as "trackback," Brody said.
Early users also said they are interested in working with non-Yahoo applications, such as third-party instant messaging services, from within Yahoo 360, Brody said. That may take sometime, however. In cases in which application interfaces are not published openly, Yahoo may have to arrange sharing deals with companies offering the applications, he said.
Localized versions of Yahoo 360 will be launched soon in some countries in Asia and Europe, according to Brody. The Yahoo blog service is already available in some countries like Japan and Korea.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:11 PM
Cabs with a view
By Johan BostromTaxi trips in some of the major metropolitan areas of the United States are about to get much more interactive, thanks to an advertising company that plans to roll out hundreds of wireless multimedia systems in cabs across the nation over the next few months. Interactive Taxi, a subsidiary of Targeted Media Partners LLC, plans to install interactive devices in the backseats of 850 cabs in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, according to company CEO Corey Gottlieb.
The units consist of a wirelessly networked multimedia computer controlled by a touch screen.
Interactive cabs have been available in the United States for years now, but technical limitations have curbed their popularity, Gottlieb says. "We used to have 40GB hard drives in the trunk, but they were too big and also vulnerable to bumps," he adds. "Upgrading was also complicated."
Today the whole unit is mounted in the partition between the driver and the backseat and offers passengers news, restaurant listings and other information. The touch screen is connected to a 2GB flash drive running on Windows Embedded XP that receives updates from a central database.
Advertising is not the only force driving multimedia devices into cabs. By this fall, almost 13,000 cabs in New York City will have similar interactive devices, thanks to new regulations from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission. "In November of this year, each medallion cab must be equipped with vehicle location technology and an interactive passenger information monitor," says Allan Fromberg, public relations chief of the City of New York Taxi and Limousine Commission.
The devices will help the Commission keep tabs on the location of New York's cabs, which will enhance the security of cab drivers and also make it easier for passengers to recover items left behind.
So, what do the drivers themselves think about the high-tech gadgetry? "It's cool," says Ted Ross, a Boston Cab driver.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 03:10 PM
May 02, 2005
Longhorn organizes against Google
By Scarlet PruittMicrosoft Corp. may have a keen interest in search, but its next-generation Windows operating system looks to be more of a threat to super-organized executive assistants than to Google Inc. Although the software maker has been steadily investing in search, its upcoming operating system, code-named Longhorn, is taking a new tack when it comes to helping users locate desktop files.
In Longhorn, Microsoft is "moving away from search" and concentrating on how people organize and find documents, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of Windows Client Business Group.
"We're hoping our users never say they can't find a file again," Goldberg said during an interview in London on Thursday.
Longhorn will not tie together desktop and Internet search capabilities, but instead focus on organization and offering users more ways to view their documents, Goldberg said.
This strategy may come as a bit of a surprise given that Microsoft introduced a desktop search tool late last year that offers tight integration with the Windows environment and applications. The MSN Toolbar Suite, introduced as a free beta in December, can search the Web from Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser, and includes tools to index and retrieve Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files, calendar items, contacts and e-mail messages from Microsoft Outlook.
While the software maker faces numerous challengers in the desktop search market, including Google, Ask Jeeves Inc., Yahoo Inc. and America Online Inc., when launching Toolbar Suite Microsoft said it planned to win over users with its Windows integration.
Now there appears to be a question as to how Longhorn, due out in the second half of 2006, fits with Microsoft's search efforts.
Goldberg said he believes that the way in which people gather information will change, and users will spend less time searching the Web. Instead, they will use tools like RSS (really simple syndication) feeds and XML (Extensible Markup Language) to have information they want pushed to them, he said.
With that in mind, Microsoft has been working on making data stored on PCs easier to find by offering Longhorn features such as virtual folders and keywords, Goldberg said. Users will be able to create virtual folders based on keywords, allowing them to drop in related documents saved in various places on their computers. All documents associated with clients, for example, could be dragged to a virtual "client" folder although they are located in different company files, Goldberg said.
Longhorn will also have a dialog box in the start panel where users can type a program or file name and the software will find it without the user having to open applications, he said.
Users hunting for a document will also be able to click through various folders, without opening and closing each one to locate it. Instead, a list will appear across the top, telling the user how far down the folder chain they've clicked. Users will also be able to see how many documents are in a folder without opening it, Goldberg said.
All these visualization and organization features are Microsoft's way of solving the "where did I save that?" conundrum, without relying solely on a powerful search engine.
Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, said that while better organization will certainly help users locate desktop items, people are still going to want to search the Web. And he dismissed the notion that users will be performing fewer Web searches because they'll have more information pushed to them.
"That is not going to happen. People aren't going to subscribe to just what they want, because they don't know what they want," Sullivan said.
While the official release of Longhorn is still a ways off, Microsoft's decision to play up organization rather than search could be because that's where the company feels more comfortable, Sullivan said.
"It seems like they are saying that desktop search is not going to be the trump card we're banking on," Sullivan said.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 02:42 PM
AOL's AIM to get an extreme makeover
By Juan Carlos PerezAmerica Online Inc. (AOL) is giving its AIM instant messaging software a complete overhaul, including a major redesign of the user interface and a remodeled underlying code architecture. The user interface is being altered to take into account that instant messaging now goes beyond simple PC-to-PC text exchanges and also includes video and audio communication, as well as connections with wireless devices.
Meanwhile, the code architecture is being transformed to integrate into the product some important software advancements that have become available in recent years.
An early beta version of this next-generation AIM, code-named Triton, is now available for free download at http://beta.aol.com/.
"This [early] beta is the first of many steps we're taking to improve this application. Over the coming months going into the fall what you'll see is that every few weeks there will be an incremental improvement made to the product," said Chamath Palihapitiya, vice president and general manager of AIM and ICQ at Dulles, Virginia-based AOL. "By the end of the fall, it will be more than a beta, more of a full product that we feel comfortable upgrading people to and recommending as a next step for AIM."
Before Triton exits its beta, or test, phase, there will be one last upgrade to the current AIM 5.9 software, an initiative that isn't related to the Triton project.
AOL is designing a light and clean Triton interface that makes it easier to organize multiple simultaneous AIM communications. AOL noticed that users often are communicating with nine or 10 people simultaneously, using text messaging with some, and voice chat and video chat with others, Palihapitiya said.
To that end, the Triton user interface features tabs to easily toggle among ongoing sessions with multiple people and among different communications options, such as text messaging, voice chat, file transfers or online games.
"We really needed to find a way for people to organize [their AIM experience]. The Triton user interface helps you eliminate a lot of the clutter and lets you organize your communications a lot more effectively," Palihapitiya said.
Regarding the underlying architecture, AIM is getting rebuilt "from the ground up," baking into it the latest networking, code development and code compiler technologies, with the ultimate goal of extending the functionality of the application and making it easier to use, Palihapitiya said. "It allows us to do a lot of configuration and quality of service and management on behalf of the user so that all they have to do is decide: Who do I want to reach and how do I want to communicate with them," he said.
Other specific new features in Triton include:
-- Multiparty voice chat, whereas the current AIM software only supports one-to-one voice chat;
-- an IM Catcher feature that intercepts messages from senders not on the user's contact list and lets the user preview the message and decide whether to accept it, ignore it or report it to AOL as an unsolicited commercial instant message, or spim.
Downloading the Triton beta will not remove AIM 5.9 from users' machines, nor should users remove AIM 5.9 manually either, since the Triton beta lacks some key AIM features, such as live video instant messaging and file transfer, and, as is common with software in test phase, it has bugs; a list of these "known issues" can be found at the AOL Beta site. This current Triton beta only works on Windows XP PCs.
Posted by Chad Dickerson at 02:41 PM