Web 2.0 Services Review and News blog

Welcome..

2007-10-14T14:48:00.000+01:00

to our Web 2.0 NewsCenter.

EU seeks comment on loosening copyright rules

2007-06-15T18:21:00.000+01:00

Authors and composers have until July 9 to comment on proposed new European Union rules that would loosen restrictive territorial contracts for copyright registration on material transmitted via the Internet, satellite and cable.

The European Commission charged the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) in February 2006 with imposing anticompetitive territorial restrictions on authors and composers.

The restrictions concerned only material sent via the Internet, satellite or cable, the EU executive said.

CISAC offers a model contract used by 18 collecting societies in the 30-member European Economic Area (EEA), including the 27 European Union countries, the Commission said.

CISAC has proposed changing the contract, which covers 95 percent of copyright licensing in the EEA, to respond to the Commission's charges.

"The new contract lifts the membership restrictions and the exclusivity clause, according to which reciprocal representation is done on an exclusive basis for the respective territory of the collecting societies," the Commission said.

CISAC has proposed permitting authors and composers to transfer their rights to any collecting society, not just the one in their own country.

The confederation also said new wording would lift territorial restrictions that require commercial users to buy licenses for use only in the area covered by their local collecting society.

European music service wants to rob iPhone thunder

2007-06-15T18:20:00.000+01:00

A music service that lets consumers directly download an unlimited number of songs to their cell phones for a weekly fee is launching Thursday in Europe.

Britain's Omnifone said it had signed content deals with the four biggest music groups in the industry and had agreements with 30 mobile operators in a bid to steal the thunder of the much-hyped iPhone from Apple.

The service called MusicStation will be suitable for 75 percent of mobile handsets already available in the market and will launch first in Sweden on Thursday. It will then launch across Europe, the Asia-Pacific and Africa in the coming days and weeks.

Omnifone is targeting 100 million phones in a year and can offer over 1 million songs.

"It's hard to imagine a more compelling music experience on mobile than MusicStation," said Rob Wells of Universal Music Group's digital division. "It works on almost any phone, giving consumers the freedom to choose whatever device they want (and) it allows downloads wherever those consumers are."

Omnifone has also signed content deals three other major music groups: Sony/BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI Group

It will offer unlimited track downloads for about $4 (2.99 euros) per week, which includes data traffic charges.

Music on mobile phones has been around for several years, but most music on phones is currently ripped from CDs and files swapped on the Internet, not sold by operators over their wireless networks.

Blogger's ejection may mean suit for NCAA

2007-06-15T18:19:00.004+01:00

The eviction of a newspaper reporter from a baseball press box for blogging about a game while it was in progress has stirred a debate about First Amendment rights, intellectual property rights and contract law.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association, which on Sunday ejected Brian Bennett of The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., during the Louisville-Oklahoma State game at Jim Patterson Stadium in Louisville, contends it is merely enforcing long-established principles as they apply to a new technology.

But the newspaper is weighing a legal challenge on First Amendment grounds--the right to free speech as it applies to reporting news in a public place.

Jon Fleischaker, a lawyer representing The Courier-Journal, said Wednesday that such a challenge might be made, within the next 10 days, because the event took place at a public facility and because the eviction was enforced by the University of Louisville, a public institution that was the host university.

"We're just not sure whether there is enough official state action to properly be able to say there's a First Amendment claim," Fleischaker said in a telephone interview. "We're doing some work to see who's on first."

Scott Bearby, associate general counsel for the NCAA, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that the dispute "doesn't really have a First Amendment angle to it" and that the NCAA had a right to protect the contracts it establishes with television networks and its own Internet providers.

Bush administration attacks 'shield' for bloggers

2007-06-15T18:19:00.003+01:00

WASHINGTON--The Bush administration on Thursday blasted a congressional proposal that would shield a broad swath of news gatherers, including some bloggers, from revealing their confidential sources.

The latest draft of the Free Flow of Information Act would pose a grave threat to national security and federal criminal investigations by protecting far too large a segment of the population, a U.S. Department of Justice official told Congress.

A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.

"The definition is just so broad that it really includes anyone who wants to post something to the Web," Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing here. She also argued it would protect "a terrorist operative who videotaped a message from a terrorist leader threatening attacks on Americans."

Justice Department opposition has bedeviled Congress throughout its numerous attempts in recent years to enact federal shield laws. Supporters say such legislation is needed in light of high-profile cases involving New York Times reporter Judith Miller and what free-press advocacy groups characterize as a sharp rise in subpoenas to reporters in recent years.

Laws recognizing some form of "reporter's privilege" already exist in 49 states and the District of Columbia--but, crucially, do not shield journalists from federal prosecutors. The Bush Administration claims there's no evidence that source-related subpoenas to reporters are on the rise and argues that it already has robust internal guidelines, including a requirement that the attorney general personally approve such subpoenas and provide an appropriate balance between press freedom and investigative needs.

MySpace data helps nab seven sex offenders

2007-06-15T18:19:00.001+01:00

Texas police arrested seven convicted sex offenders after MySpace handed over identity details about the former members of the Internet social network, the Texas attorney general's office said on Thursday.

The seven, whose profiles on MySpace had already been removed under an internal program to weed out sex offenders prowling the News Corp.-owned site, were arrested for breaking parole or probation rules.

The arrests, which occurred during a two-week period, come after authorities in several states asked MySpace to hand over information on convicted sex offenders. The seven offenders had been convicted of sexually assaulting girls as young as 4 years old. Most victims were between 13 and 21 years old.

Six of the men were arrested because they had MySpace profiles even though their parole conditions banned them from using the Internet. One was arrested because he had failed to register as a sex offender with local authorities.

MySpace began working with authorities in May after tense negotiations over the legality of divulging its users' information.

"Texans will not tolerate criminals who prey on our children," Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said in a statement. "These convicted sex predators established online identities on a Web site that is popular with teenagers and children."

FAQ: What to do with your Yahoo photos

2007-06-15T18:18:00.001+01:00

It's time to find a new home for the more than 2 billion pictures stored on Yahoo Photos.

Even though the Internet company just refurbished Yahoo Photos with a glitzy new interface, it's shutting down the site beginning September 20.

The move shouldn't come as a surprise, given Yahoo's 2005 acquisition of photo-sharing powerhouse Flickr. But it does mean that millions of members will have to take action in the coming months if they want to preserve the pictures stored at the site--and that means things could get complicated.

Yahoo just fired up tools to let customers move their photos elsewhere, and CNET News.com has compiled some questions and answers to help users of Yahoo Photos understand the situation and make the right choices.

MySpace mini episodes, courtesy of Honda

2007-06-15T18:17:00.001+01:00

Years after Volkswagen challenged drivers to "Think small," another automaker, Honda, plans to run smaller commercials for a smaller car in smaller versions of television series.

Honda will be the sole sponsor of what Sony Pictures Television is calling the Minisode Network, which is scheduled to launch next week. Visitors to MySpace.com will be able to watch episodes of 15 vintage Sony series like Charlie's Angels, The Facts of Life, Fantasy Island and Who's the Boss, edited from their original lengths of 30 or 60 minutes each to an Internet-friendly 4 to 6 minutes.

To mirror the pared-down programming, Honda and its longtime agency, RPA, have agreed to run only 8 seconds of commercials with each episode, appearing before the shortened show starts.

Text message saves nimble-fingered teen

2007-06-15T18:15:00.000+01:00

A Malaysian teenager woken by a night-time noise dashed off a warning text message to her mother just in time to be rescued from an intruder who burst into her bedroom.

Alerted by the mother's screams, relatives rushed to the rescue, breaking down a door and scaring off the man, who escaped through the back of the house, the New Straits Times said.

Salima Mohamad Noor, 17, said a man broke into her bedroom and placed a knife at her neck just as she finished sending the message on her cellular telephone.

"I was terrified and started screaming when he threatened to kill me," the newspaper quoted Salima as saying. "He also said no one would come to my rescue as he had already locked my mother's bedroom door from the outside."

TorrentSpy ordered to start tracking visitors

2007-06-11T20:02:00.003+01:00

A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.

TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users' activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal.

The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy's attorney.

TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.

"It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users," Rothken said. "If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise."

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files.

Representatives of the trade group could not be reached for comment.

The court's decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling "unprecedented."

Jeweler to pay $400,000 in auction fraud settlement

2007-06-11T20:02:00.001+01:00

A Manhattan jewelry dealer who directed his employees to secretly place bids that inflated the price of goods his company auctioned on eBay has agreed to pay $400,000 to settle a civil fraud complaint, the New York attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, said Friday.

The settlement also bars the merchant, Ezra Dweck, and his company, the EMH Group, from participating in online auctions for four years, according to a statement by Cuomo's office. The settlement includes a $100,000 fine and $300,000 in restitution.

EMH deals in "large quantities" of diamonds, gold and platinum jewelry and supplies "most of the major U.S. chain stores," according to the company's Web site. Cuomo's lawsuit said Dweck listed items on eBay as having no reserve price--meaning they would be sold no matter how low the highest bid was--but that he distributed spreadsheets to employees instructing them on what bids they should place to drive up the final sale price. Cuomo said the company placed 232,000 bids totaling more than $5 million over a one-year period.

The deceptive practice of insiders posing as bidders, known as shill bidding, has a long and notorious history in traditional auction markets. It has become a growing concern for the operators of online markets and regulators.

Snapshots that do more than bore friends

2007-06-11T20:01:00.005+01:00

Few sentences in the English language are more dreaded than this seemingly innocent offer: "Oh, I must show you the pictures from my vacation." Who wants to see endless shots of a friend lounging by a pool or in front of a monument, or--worse yet--their kids doing the very same things?

But, of course, those very same shots can be extremely useful when researching your own trip. How big is that pool? What, exactly, does the room at that five-star hotel you're thinking of booking look like? What's the crowd like at the so-called hot restaurant? It's good to have documented evidence from someone who has been there.

And recently, photo-sharing sites like Yahoo's Flickr.com and SmugMug.com have begun to let users add another dimension to their travel photos. Through a technology called geotagging, users can add GPS data to their pictures, which can then be plotted on a digital map. This not only allows users to see exactly where a photo was taken, but, when uploaded to an Internet map, users can also quickly browse a trove of photos that were taken nearby, providing a kind of scattershot collage of a place.

Editor's departure captured in just a Flicker

2007-06-11T20:01:00.003+01:00

Call it a bit of a "video killed the radio star" moment, circa 2007: John Curley, who had been a deputy managing editor of The San Francisco Chronicle, announced that he was let go from the newspaper by posting the news on Flickr, the photo-sharing Web site.

"I leave with great sadness, but not a trace of bitterness," Curley wrote in his entry on Tuesday, which included a picture of his desk at the newspaper before he packed. "We all know what is happening to the newspaper industry, and it is not pretty."

One of the biggest things happening to the newspaper industry is that people are flocking to Web sites like Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo, for news, gossip and friendship, and turning to newsprint less often. Even Flickr, once primarily a site for swapping images, has become more of an online community: in this case, dozens of people turned out to post comments of solidarity on Curley's page.

"Off you go to something greater, man," wrote someone who calls himself Razorbern and uses as his icon a picture of a chimp in a suit and hat.

Watchdog group eyes YouTube

2007-06-11T20:01:00.001+01:00

For weeks, Ken Boehm blanketed the Internet as he hunted for video clips.

But the former prosecutor is no YouTube fan. Boehm is chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center, an independent watchdog group known for digging up corruption in the nation's capital.

The NLPC is perhaps best known for uncovering wrongdoing in a $21 billion deal between the Air Force and Boeing in 2003 that resulted in jail time for two Boeing executives. The group is looking beyond the Beltway and has begun examining copyright violations at Google, which owns the YouTube video-sharing site. Media companies are pressing Google to do more to stop users from uploading snippets of movies and TV shows. Many of YouTube's competitors have already adopted filtering technologies that screen pirated material. Content creators (see main story) have begun to demand that Google do the same.

Hollywood's YouTube frustration grows

2007-06-11T20:00:00.000+01:00

Google and its YouTube subsidiary are trying Hollywood's patience.

The search engine has made significant progress in recent weeks signing content partnership deals for YouTube. But a growing number of studio executives, irritated by no-shows at meetings and canceled test programs, say they are frustrated with Google's inability to scrub the site of copyright-infringing material. While CEO Eric Schmidt made big news in Las Vegas two months ago when he said the company was very "close to turning" on a system that will streamline the takedown process, when that system actually will be deployed is a mystery.

Adding to the agitation, copyright-filtering technology is already in use at smaller video sites such as Guba, Dailymotion.com and Eyespot. Even Microsoft has installed the features for which Hollywood is clambering on its Soapbox site.

Bon Jovi bundles iTunes album with Ticketmaster sales

2007-06-11T19:59:00.000+01:00

In what's being billed as a first, Bon Jovi is bundling a digital iTunes copy of the band's upcoming album, Lost Highway, with advance tickets for October concerts in Newark, N.J.

The stand, which begins October 25 and may be expanded beyond the initial five shows, will open the new Prudential Center in Newark.

The online presale program will be available exclusively to American Express cardholders beginning June 12 through June 14, and to the general public from June 15 through June 22. Tickets without the digital-album download will then be available for purchase by the general public beginning June 23.

Fans who purchase the Lost Highway Ticket Package will receive a code from Ticketmaster that enables them to download Lost Highway from iTunes beginning on its June 19 release. The ticket-album package will cost $9.99--the price of the album on iTunes--more than tickets later sold on their own. Album sales in the bundle will count toward the album's Billboard chart position, whose sales source is Nielsen SoundScan.

For those fans who have already preordered Lost Highway from Bon Jovi's Web site or iTunes, Bon Jovi and Ticketmaster have arranged for iTunes to provide a passcode that will enable them to purchase a single presale ticket for $9.99 less without adding the digital album.

Ask.com launches new Web search site

2007-06-05T15:04:00.001+01:00

Ask.com is expected to launch Tuesday a new search site that has analysts impressed, but it may not appeal enough to consumers to keep them coming back.

The company has struggled for years to compete with Google, which attracts nearly 50 percent of all searches. Ask ranks fourth behind Yahoo and Microsoft but just ahead of AOL, with just more than 5 percent market share, according to research firm ComScore.

"It's all about search engine loyalty," said Charlene Li of Forrester Research. "Will it move the needle? I think it will, primarily because it is a different interface. It will definitely get people now using Ask to use it more often than any other search engine."

Barry Parr, a Jupiter analyst, had a similar take. "I don't think this change alone is going to bolt them into being a top-tier player. On the other hand, I think a lot of people are going to find that this is a good experience for them and that it is something they enjoy using," he said.

Ask now features a new design and re-engineering, with a simple white homepage default, customizable backgrounds, new video search powered by Blinkx and the ability to view video previews merely by moving the cursor over the thumbnail image. The new site lets users listen to music clips by clicking on the song title, and to enlarge images by rolling the cursor over the thumbnail. Search results are based on the searcher's location, providing local businesses and events, and those results can be saved into a folder for sharing with others, and images can be filtered by size, type and other criteria.

// Ask.com is pretty good :D

iPod-compatible music site to offer free Web play

2007-06-05T14:56:00.002+01:00

Lala.com, a Silicon Valley-based digital music start-up, said Monday it is launching an iPod-compatible online music service that offers free online song play in a bid to get customers to buy music downloads.

The start-up is launching the service with artists from the fourth-largest music company, Warner Music Group, which will sell songs and albums without copy protection software known as digital rights management.

To prevent illegal distribution, downloads will be possible only to an iPod.

Lala is also in talks with other major record companies to expand the service with more music, the company said.

Lala is free and does not carry advertising. The company hopes to make up for licensing costs of playing the music online with sales of songs.

"We believe over the next two years we might lose $40 million," founder Bill Nguyen said. Licensing fees could be $160 million over that time.

"We expect up to 70 percent of people will be freeloaders just listening to the music but around 30 percent will be buying music," Nguyen said.

Lala is backed by Bain Capital and Ignition, which so far have invested $14 million over two rounds. The company is still raising money.

Lawyer ratings site not without objections

2007-06-05T14:56:00.001+01:00

A venture-capital backed Web site called Avvo.com that launches Tuesday claims to offer a "game-changing" alternative to the Yellow Pages for anyone interested in hiring a lawyer.

Avvo's plan is ambitious: to award a numeric score to every attorney in the United States, along with a profile, client recommendations and peer endorsements.

"It's the most critical piece of guidance that we provide," Mark Britton, a former vice president at Expedia who is Avvo's chief executive, said about the numeric score. "It's our assessment of how good a job that lawyer is going to do for you." Avvo says it has received $14 million in funding, including money from Benchmark Capital and Ignition Partners, co-founded by Microsoft alum and Avvo board member Brad Silverberg.

Melodeo: We'll stream iTunes to your phone

2007-06-05T14:55:00.001+01:00

Melodeo on Tuesday said it plans to help music fans stream their iTunes digital-music playlists to mobile phones.

Privately held Melodeo, which already delivers Web-based audio clips to phones, said the service--now in test mode--will enable consumers to listen to digital music on the go without a portable player. It also will help listeners access songs in their iTunes library on more than one personal computer.

Melodeo is considering various revenue models for the service, which comes ahead of Apple's expected launch this month of its music-playing iPhone. The company could charge monthly fees or software download fees, or it could play audio advertisements, according to David Dederer, Melodeo's vice president for music services.

While consumers can buy songs through Apple for 99 cents per song, Melodeo is not selling copies of songs for consumers to store on their phones--it simply plays songs based on those stored in a customer's iTunes library.

Microsoft turns Ignition for music marketing

2007-06-05T14:54:00.000+01:00

Microsoft is introducing an initiative on Monday to promote emerging music acts across its digital properties.

Called Ignition, the program is designed to expose new artists and their music to consumers for an entire month by featuring exclusive content through Microsoft's multiple services, including MSN, Xbox Live and Zune.

The first participating act is U.K. band Maximo Park. Microsoft is providing the group's first single as a free exclusive download via the Zune Marketplace, making the music video available as a free download from the Xbox Live Marketplace and streaming the video on MSN.

The company will host online listening parties of the act's current album on MSN Music and provide a custom Web site dedicated to the band and its activities on the Zune.net site. And Microsoft is working with the band to produce custom content, such as artist-created playlists and "behind-the-album" commentary featuring track-by-track insights and observations by band members, all available via the Zune service.

Microsoft is demanding exclusive content and hands-on participation from the artists involved. "We don't want the same thing that is going out on MTV," Microsoft director of music marketing Christina Calio said.

Nabbing movie pirates with night vision goggles

2007-05-27T14:11:00.000+01:00

Malaysian cinemas have found a powerful weapon in their fight against movie pirates--military-style night vision goggles.

After showing people to their seats, trained ushers are strapping on the goggles and scanning darkened cinemas around the country to spot anyone trying to make illegal copies of movies with handheld video recorders or mobile phones.

The Motion Picture Association, which is training Malaysian ushers to catch the pirates, said cinemas had caught 17 people in the past two months, during which Hollywood studios released blockbusters like Spider-Man 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. "All of the cases were spotted with night-vision goggles," the association's Malaysia manager, Nor Hayati Yahaya, said Friday. "It's very successful."

Malaysia is on the U.S. watch list for movie and software piracy, but local authorities have launched a major crackdown on producers and retailers of illegal DVDs since the country began free-trade talks with the United States a year ago.

The association, which represents the big Hollywood studios, recently brought to Malaysia two dogs trained to sniff out DVDs--with stunning results. The two labradors, Lucky and Flo, have sniffed out more than a million DVDs and have broken a fake DVD ring.

Businesses aren't stuck on customized stamps

2007-05-27T14:10:00.000+01:00

Madison Avenue used to have high hopes for the lowly postage stamp.

For decades, advertisers imagined that if only the legal barriers against commercial images on postage stamps came down, they could do great things on envelopes.

Those obstacles went away last year, when Congress swept aside a law against advertising on stamps and the United States Postal Service authorized businesses to use postage for marketing purposes. The Postal Service renewed the program on May 16, but has yet to see a great deal of revenue from the stamps, which have so far been little more than a niche product.

European officials question Google's privacy policy

2007-05-27T14:09:00.000+01:00

A European Commission advisory group has raised concerns about how Google uses and manages users' search data.

A privacy advisory group composed of representatives from all of the European Union countries sent Google a letter expressing concern over the search giant's new privacy policy announced in March.

The issue surrounds Google's policy of anonymizing its server logs after 18 to 24 months. According to a Commission source, the advisory group is concerned with how the information is managed, rather than the length of time it is stored.

Google, which confirmed it received a letter from the chairman of the advisory group, said it will respond, as requested, before the group holds its next meeting in mid-June.

Google previously kept consumers' data as long as it was needed. The company now plans to keep server log data, but will enhance the ability to make it anonymous after 18 to 24 months.

British version of 'Lonelygirl15' to hit Bebo

2007-05-27T14:08:00.000+01:00

The creators of the online phenomenon "Lonelygirl15" have joined forces with social-networking site Bebo to create a British spin-off story that will use brands to help define the characters.

The organizers say the project will give advertisers the chance to pitch their products such as clothing or mobile phones at a younger audience who have moved in recent years from traditional media to the Internet.

The star of the show, to be called Kate Modern, will post a series of videos and have a profile on the Bebo site, allowing members to interact with her and fellow fictional characters.

The series follows "Lonelygirl15," the video diary of an American teenager named Bree that drew a huge following even after the revelation that Bree was in fact an actress and the diaries scripted by writers.

The president of Bebo International, Joanna Shields, told Reuters Television that the project would allow a small number of brands regular access to a potentially huge following.

"If we do (the advertising) tastefully and well and people see that it is successful, then it could be an opportunity for advertisers and brands to connect with this demographic," she said.

"Each time I connect with that character, the advertiser has a chance to send me a message."

Lonelygirl15 has received more than 50 million hits on the Internet and has occasionally incorporated advertising.

In the British version, Kate Modern will be a 19-year-old art student living in central London, and the story will be set around the hip Carnaby Street.

The high price of creating free ads

2007-05-27T14:04:00.001+01:00

From an advertiser's perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.

But look at the videos H.J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.

In one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz's product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.

Heinz has said it will pick five of the entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far it's safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of, say, the classic Carly Simon "Anticipation" ad where the ketchup creeps oh so slowly out of the bottle.

Consumer brand companies have been busy introducing campaigns like Heinz's that rely on user-generated content, an approach that combines the populist appeal of reality television with the old-fashioned gimmick of a sweepstakes to select a new advertising jingle. Pepsi, Jeep, Dove and Sprint have all staged promotions of this sort, as has Doritos, which proudly publicized in February that the consumers who made one of its Super Bowl ads did so on a $12 budget.

Microsoft says has all it needs for ad business

2007-05-24T15:17:00.001+01:00

Microsoft said on Wednesday it does not need to buy Yahoo to gain scale in online advertising, because it has "all the pieces" it needs to build a successful ad business.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Yusuf Mehdi said the world's largest software maker is already bigger than Yahoo in terms of users of its Web services like e-mail and instant messaging.

Last week, Microsoft said it would acquire Aquantive for $6 billion to gain a foothold in the online advertising business dominated by its rivals Google and Yahoo.

Still, some Wall Street analysts said Microsoft needed to buy an established Internet player such as Yahoo to gain scale to take on Google.

When asked by Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto whether there would be assets from Yahoo that could help Microsoft, Mehdi said, "From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces."

Several newspapers reported this month that Microsoft was considering a deal worth an estimated $40 billion to $50 billion to acquire Yahoo. A source close to the situation subsequently said at the time that any talks had cooled.

Key senator urges rejection of XM-Sirius deal

2007-05-24T15:16:00.005+01:00

The chairman of the U.S. Senate's antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday urged regulators to block Sirius Satellite Radio's proposed acquisition of XM Satellite Radio Holdings.

Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin said he had sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission calling on them to oppose the deal on grounds that it would cause "substantial harm to competition and consumers."

"Such a result should be unacceptable under antitrust law and as a matter of communication policy," Kohl wrote to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and the Justice Department's antitrust chief, Thomas Barnett.

Sirius plans to buy XM in an all-stock deal worth about $4 billion. The deal would combine the only two providers of satellite radio service in the United States and has sparked concerns among some U.S. lawmakers and consumer groups.

The deal is currently being reviewed by both the Justice Department and the FCC, which issued both satellite radio licenses in 1997 on the condition that the two companies would never merge.

Although they can exert political influence over the agencies generally, lawmakers have no direct input into the decisions about individual merger reviews.

Net taxes could arrive by this fall

2007-05-24T15:16:00.001+01:00

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

If that doesn't happen, other taxes may zoom upward instead, warned Sen. Michael Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "Are we implicitly blessing a situation where states are forced to raise other taxes, such as income or property taxes, to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue?" Enzi said. "I want to avoid that."

Can video save the book-publishing star?

2007-05-24T15:15:00.001+01:00

What Oprah Winfrey did for novelists on television, Simon & Schuster is hoping to do with online videos.

Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corp., is planning to launch in early June an Internet video channel that will feature about 40 short videos of authors talking about their books and what gave them inspiration, as well as walking through the settings of their novels and explaining the context of their stories. The videos will be shown on a site called Bookvideos.tv. They will also be available at Simon & Schuster's site and hosted on one or more major online video sites, the company said.

"I'm 60 years old and I have 11 books in print," said Marianne Wiggins, whose The Shadow Catcher, a fictionalized account of the life of photographer Edward Curtis, will be among the Simon & Schuster videos. "My readers want to see who is the wizard behind the curtain. If I read a book I'm spending at least three to four days with that author in my mind. I want to know who that person is."

With book sales flat and Internet usage, particularly for video, rising fast, it was inevitable that the publishing industry would turn to the Web to help boost sales. From 2002 to 2006, sales for mass-market paperbacks dropped 1.6 percent while books sold in retail stores, including fiction and non-fiction, rose only 3.7 percent, according to figures released this week from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

Site to screen silver films

2007-05-24T15:14:00.000+01:00

Turner Classic Movies plans to launch an online video destination devoted to classic films.

Dubbed the Media Room, the video portal will live on the TCM.com site when it launches on June 1 with more than 3,000 pieces of video content in the form of short films, movie clips, trailers and interstitials from TCM programming.

The launch will feature the online premiere of the 1937 romantic comedy Living on Love in its entirety. In the future, Media Room will offer features in a widescreen Cinemascope format and without letterboxing, which is designed to duplicate the cinematic experience.

Films that will later be available on the portal include 1933's Rafter Romance, 1938's A Man to Remember and 1933's Double Harness--all of which are from the Lost and Found programming series made up of RKO titles from the 1930s that were lost and rediscovered.

While TCM's Media Room content will be updated daily and drawn from the cable network's television programming, it also will offer people the ability to create playlists and search for content based on an actor, director or filmmaker.

The portal will expand TCM.com's existing interactive movie database, which features content related to more than 130,000 titles from the Turner Entertainment catalog as well as licensed content from American Film Institute's catalog of features, the Internet Movie Database and other sources.

Teenager today, tech exec tomorrow

2007-05-24T15:13:00.000+01:00

PALO ALTO, CALIF.--A handful of enterprising teens have a message for parents and the media: the Net is not all MySpace or Facebook horror stories.

In the crowd here at the "Next Generation Tech: Tech Plugged" conference, some teens are talking up their Web start-ups and technology inventions, a sign that--like the average cell phone user--the profile of a tech entrepreneur is getting younger and younger.

Ben Casnocha, for example, kicked off SD Forum's half-day event at Hewlett-Packard by talking about how he started an e-government software company at age 14. A San Francisco Bay Area resident, he got the idea from a sixth-grade class assignment in which he helped to clean up the dirty seats at the 49ers football stadium. With virtually no way to complain about the condition of the seats, he set out to create a complaint-and-resolution Web site. What ultimately resulted from the project was Comcate, a Web-based software company for public agencies to handle customer service.

Now 19, Casnocha sits on Comcate's board, promotes his advice book, My Start-Up Life, and travels around the country talking to college kids. Casnocha believes technology has created a golden age of entrepreneurship among his generation.

Google testing in-stream video ads on publisher sites

2007-05-23T21:19:00.001+01:00

Google is running a limited test that will allow select advertisers to run video ads inside of video clips on some U.S. publisher Web sites in Google's AdSense program. Under the AdSense for Video test, which began on Wednesday, revenue will be split between the Web site publisher and Google. Details were not disclosed. Advertisements will play on the publishers' Flash players and not on YouTube or Google hosted videos. Publishers can select which videos to monetize and track the performance of the ads, as well as choose where the ads will appear within the video. Ads will be 30 seconds or shorter and can be made skippable.

Google ran two pilot tests previously that allowed publishers to choose video clips with bundled ads to display on their sites as part of an AdSense video distribution and sponsorship that involved Epicurious.com, The Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast LX Networks. Google also offers click-to-play video ads to its AdSense publisher network.

Report: Google buying FeedBurner for $100 million

2007-05-23T21:18:00.003+01:00

TechCrunch is reporting that Google is about to close a deal to acquire RSS management firm FeedBurner for $100 million in cash. The report cites a "source close to the deal." The transaction is expected to close in two to three weeks, TechCrunch says. FeedBurner was founded in 2003 and has raised about $10 million in venture capital funding. FeedBurner allows blog owners to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers. A Google spokeswoman said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation. Representatives at FeedBurner did not return calls seeking comment.

What is extent of 'Second Life' problems?

2007-05-23T21:18:00.001+01:00

The blogosphere is in a bit of a tizzy Wednesday about problems plaguing the virtual world, Second Life. The question is: Are the problems people are worked up about new, or ongoing? And does that matter?

The main issue raised in the original blog entry on Gamer.Blorge.com was that Second Life is experiencing six hours of downtime. And to hear other blogs, like TechCrunch position it, this is kind of a noteworthy occurrence.

The truth is that Second Life frequently down on Wednesdays, because that's when its publisher, Linden Lab, releases updates to its client software.

And it's true that some users are upset today about the downtime. But they're also upset every time the "grid" goes down for the several hours it takes to complete an upgrade. After all, there are countless businesses that can't sell things, and countless people who can't get in-world to do whatever it is they want to do.

For many longtime Second Life users, the issue this raises is not about any individual shutting down of the grid, but rather that it has to happen so frequently. The Second Life software is built in such a way that the constant bug fixes, updates, new features and such can really only be implemented through these periodic updates, and the unfortunate side effect is semi-regular downtime.

There's no question it's annoying. But is it news? Not really.

On the other hand, there was news out of Europe that police in Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands are looking at Second Life and trying to decide whether in-world stalking should be prosecuted as a crime.

Google service chases what's hot and what's not

2007-05-23T18:05:00.004+01:00

The art of trend-spotting is set to take a more scientific turn as Google, the world's top Web search company, on Tuesday is expected to unveil a service to track the fastest-rising search queries.

Google Hot Trends combines elements of Zeitgeist and Trends--two existing Google products that give a glimpse into Web search habits, but only in retrospect based on weeks-old data.

Hot Trends, a list of the current top-100 fastest-rising search trends, will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update, the company said.

What's hot and what's not will be knowable to the masses in ways pioneering social philosophers could never have imagined.

"There are events going on all the time that most of us aren't aware of happening," Amit Patel, a Hot Trends software engineer and an early Google employee, said in an interview.

From news to gossip, the profound to the truly inane: baffled Google users seek the meaning of the phrase "motion to recommit" in the latest congressional debate, or search the phrase "I who have nothing"--the title of a song sung by a recent contestant on televised competition American Idol.

China stepping back from proposed blog rules

2007-05-23T18:05:00.001+01:00

China will back down from a plan to require bloggers to use their real names when they register blogs, following an outcry over the proposal from the Internet industry, official media reported Tuesday.

Instead, the government will promote a "self-discipline code" that will encourage, but not mandate, bloggers to register under their own names, the report said, citing draft guidelines published by the Internet Society of China.

"The ISC, with the backing of the Ministry of Information Industry, is trying to rally industry players to sign up to the self-discipline code for the promotion of a less rigorous real-name system," state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

China, the world's second-largest Web market with some 140 million Internet users, already censors Internet content.

Some government departments had advocated the use of real names as a way to stop slander, pornography and the spread of what the ruling Communist Party sees as "harmful information."

China already routinely blocks Web sites for political content that runs counter to the government's views and restricts participation in online discussion groups.

CNN, Internet Broadcasting to share online news

2007-05-23T18:04:00.002+01:00

CNN and Internet Broadcasting Systems announced Tuesday that they have formed a strategic partnership to share online news content.

Through the deal, CNN will have access to content from Internet Broadcasting, a publisher of online local news that runs network TV station Web sites for broadcasters such as Hearst-Argyle Television, NBC, Cox Television and Post-Newsweek Stations. The CNN Web site will contain local news from Internet Broadcasting on its front page as well as in its U.S. news and weather sections.

Additionally, Internet Broadcasting sites will begin to stock national, international and political content from CNN. Ad placements from CNN.com will also become part of Internet Broadcasting's marketing packages.

Joost hires scouts to lure Hollywood programs

2007-05-23T18:04:00.001+01:00

Joost, the Internet television service backed by global media players, said on Tuesday talent scouts Creative Artists Agency will help it lure big-name Hollywood programming to its service.

Joost, which was founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, who also started Web telephone calling company Skype, already has signed up name-brand programming and top advertisers for its service, although it remains in test mode.

The Luxembourg-based company offers 150 broadcast-quality television channels over the Web across a range of genres from films to soccer to cartoons to documentaries.

Joost aims to combine TV-like viewing with the wide choice and user control of the latest generation of Web services.

It is seeking to offer whole TV shows from both established producers and independent professional video makers, in contrast to YouTube, the world's most popular online video watching service, which specializes in short, user-generated programs.

Music industry offers deal to small Webcasters

2007-05-23T18:03:00.001+01:00

Facing an outcry over imminent royalty fee increases for Internet radio operators, the music industry body that lobbied for the changes has attempted a peace offering.

SoundExchange, the nonprofit group that collects the fees on behalf of hundreds of major and independent record companies, said on Tuesday that it would give "small" Webcasters the option of paying "below market" royalty rates on the songs they play--that is, by keeping the required royalty rates essentially the same as they are under a 2002 law called the Small Webcaster Settlement Act.

"The net result of this proposal is that small Webcasters would be guaranteed no increase in royalty payments for 13 years, from 1998 to 2010," SoundExchange general counsel Michael Huppe said in a statement.

Webcasters that fall in the "small" category would be required to pay 10 percent of all gross revenue up to $250,000 and 12 percent for all gross revenue above that amount. Those rates would hold until 2010 and be retroactive to 2006, SoundExchange said.

It was not immediately clear what the revenue cutoff would be in determining which businesses qualify as small, and SoundExchange representatives did not immediately respond to requests for clarification.

Politicians weigh renewal of Net access tax ban

2007-05-23T18:02:00.002+01:00

WASHINGTON--With only months left on a moratorium restricting state governments from taxing Internet access, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday began a debate over whether the ban should be made permanent or allowed to lapse.

At issue is the scheduled expiration on November 1 of a law, initially enacted in 1998, that says local governments generally cannot tax Internet access, including DSL (digital subscriber line), cable modem and BlackBerry-type wireless transmission services. The law also prohibits governments from taxing items sold online in a different manner than those sold at brick-and-mortar stores, but it does not deal with sales taxes on online shopping.

That's the way it should remain, some politicians said at a brief hearing here convened by a House of Representatives panel on commercial and administrative law.

Site offers classic books, one e-mail at a time

2007-05-23T18:02:00.001+01:00

Never had time to read Moby Dick and want something weightier than spam to read on your Blackberry on the way to work?

A new Web site is offering to send classic books in bite-size installments to your handheld device or e-mail every morning before you go to work, or whenever you want, for free.

The e-mails from Dailylit.com are designed to be read in under five minutes. Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days comes in 82 parts while Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina could take nearly two years of working days to read at 430 parts.

"Our audience includes people like us, who spend hours each day on e-mail but can't find the time to read a book," DailyLit co-founder Albert Wenger said.

The company was launched in May with a list of around 370 mostly classic titles, though the Web site has been operating on a trial basis for several months. Wenger told Reuters 50,000 people had signed up, registering for over 75,000 titles.

Since the books are out of copyright, the company can offer them for free, but it plans to expand and start charging a fee for newer titles licensed by major publishers within four or five weeks. The e-mails are free of advertising and the revenue model will depend on fees, sharing revenues with publishers.

Bondage Webmaster fights abuse conviction

2007-05-23T18:00:00.000+01:00

What happened, according to court documents:
Glenn Marcus' SlaveSpace.com relied on a novel business model: Finding sex slaves on the Internet, tying them up, whipping them and posting photographs of the process online. Membership to SlaveSpace.com started at $20 for 30 days of access.

Sometime in 1998, a woman named Jodi (referred to in court documents by her first name only) started hunting for information about what's known as BDSM--bondage, dominance/discipline, submission/sadism and masochism--and found Marcus in an AOL chat room. He went by the screen name "GMYourGod" and demanded absolute obedience.

Later that year, Jodi traveled to Maryland to meet Marcus and a fellow sex slave named Joanna. He whipped Jodi, with her consent, and carved the word "slave" on her stomach with a knife. The next month, she sent a petition to Marcus saying in part: "I am begging to serve you Sir, completely, with no limitations."

In January 1999, Jodi moved to Maryland to live with Joanna, and Marcus would regularly visit them from his home on Long Island. Occasionally the BDSM-and-sex sessions became severe: Marcus once burned Jodi with cigarettes all over her body. He put a whiffle ball inside her mouth and tried to sew her lips shut with surgical needles. Other encounters cannot be fully described in a mainstream publication.

Many of these incidents were photographed and uploaded to SlaveSpace.com, which Jodi spent much of her time updating, including writing diaries for the site. She referred to herself as "pooch" or "poochie" and wrote lengthy, rambling essays saying things like: "i need to serve Him, to please Him. i not only want to, i need to. i feel this so deeply, every single part of me feels this."

At some point around August 2001, they became estranged, but, according to Jodi, she felt unable to escape the relationship because she was afraid of Marcus. She later acknowledged staying in contact with him through 2003, even going camping with him.

Tracking an online trend, and a route to suicide

2007-05-23T17:59:00.000+01:00

From their nondescript sixth-floor office, Kim Hee-joo and five other social workers troll the Internet to combat a disturbing trend in South Korea: people using the Web to trade tips about suicide and, in some cases, to form suicide pacts.

"There are so many of them," said Kim, secretary general of the Korea Association for Suicide Prevention, a private counseling group working to decrease the number of suicides, which nearly doubled from 6,440 in 2000 to 12,047 in 2005, the last year for which government figures are available.

One of the recent Internet suicide pacts involved two women who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a one-room apartment south of Seoul.

In another, five young men and women who made a pact over the Internet and had failed in two previous suicide attempts drove to a seaside motel to discuss more effective methods. There, one member of the group had a change of heart and slipped out to call the police.

Newspapers want Google News' quarter

2007-05-23T17:58:00.000+01:00

For years now, newspapers have quietly watched Google index their headlines and offer users a synopsis of their stories without paying them a dime.

Google is supposed to make it easier for newspaper readers to find content online. But some in the industry are questioning whether it makes business sense to allow Google to use their material for free.

"If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?" Sam Zell, the new owner of the Tribune Company, asked reporters during a speech at Stanford University last month. The Tribune Company operates the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.

Zell didn't wait for the reporters to reply, according to The Washington Post. "Not very," he said.

At a time when anyone with a blog can compete against vast media empires for readership, newspapers may be taking a harder look at their relationship with search engines and sites that aggregate headlines. The question some analysts are asking of media companies is: what's taken so long?

YouTube's Finest

2007-05-22T16:42:00.001+01:00

Get the finest youtube vidz.. daily.

http://youtubes-finest.blogspot.com/

Are You Ready for Web 2.0?

2007-05-21T21:51:00.001+01:00

SAN FRANCISCO -- No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.

Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital.

Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an "architecture of participation" -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.

The theory has been percolating for some time. But it intensified last week when O'Reilly published an essay on the topic, as well as a graphic outlining the key categories of this new medium.

Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a company that sells collaborative wiki software to enterprises and that is hosting the Web 2.0 wiki, had a simpler definition for conference goers.

"Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people," Mayfield said.

The day was not without skeptics.

In a freewheeling conversation with Web 2.0 conference organizer John Battelle, InterActiveCorp CEO Barry Diller, who recently purchased Ask.com, dismissed the idea that citizens with blogs and video editing software were major threats to the entertainment industry.

Data mining goes mainstream

2007-05-21T18:37:00.003+01:00

Rodney Monroe, the police chief in Richmond, Va., describes himself as a lifelong cop whose expertise is in fighting street crime, not in software. His own Web browsing, he says, mostly involves checking golf scores.

But shortly after he became chief in 2005, a crime analyst who had retired from the force convinced him to try some clever software. The programs cull through information that the department already collects, like "911"and police reports, but add new streams of data--about neighborhood demographics and payday schedules, for example, or about weather, traffic patterns and sports events--to try to predict where crimes might occur.

"It sounded nutty at first," Monroe recalled, "but the more and more you get into it, the more sense it makes.”

The technology, for example, pointed to a high rate of robberies on paydays in Hispanic neighborhoods, where fewer people use banks and where customers leaving check-cashing stores were easy targets for robbers. Elsewhere, there were clusters of random-gunfire incidents at certain times of night. So extra police were deployed in those areas when crimes were predicted.

Google, Salesforce.com reportedly in alliance

2007-05-21T18:37:00.001+01:00

Google and Salesforce.com are in talks for an alliance that could help them compete better against Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Monday.

The companies are still working out details of a potential partnership, which is expected to be announced in the next few weeks, the paper said, citing unnamed sources.

The paper said one outcome could be a Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, whose customer-relationship management tools help salespeople track their accounts.

Google and Salesforce.com could not be reached immediately for comment.

Welcome to the era of gullibility 2.0

2007-05-21T18:36:00.004+01:00

On Wednesday, the digital age may have had its "Dewey Defeats Truman" moment.

Apple's stock took a tumble when popular tech blog Engadget posted a supposed "internal memo" indicating a significant delay in the releases of the much-anticipated iPhone handheld device and the Leopard operating system. The memo was a fake; Engadget had been fooled.

The blog later called the original post a "false alarm," and Apple's stock rebounded--though not to its preplunge levels. As TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington said in a post Thursday evening, "Many investors had lost a staggering amount of money in the amount of time it takes to brush your teeth."

For millions of online news junkies, gadget enthusiasts, and Apple stockholders, "Applegate" has become a reminder of a very old lesson: Don't believe everything you read.

The publication of erroneous rumors, incorrect facts--Dewey didn't actually defeat Truman, as we all know--and pranks that were taken too seriously (War of the Worlds, anyone?) has plagued the media industry since its earliest days. It's no secret, however, that the Internet and blogging have changed the landscape entirely.

With push-button publishing, publications no longer have a day's wait to break news--a two-minute call to confirm a scoop can mean that another site breaks the news first. With the availability of so much information, and the ability to immediately connect with so many people and then broadcast a message, the online world has also proven to be a formidable engine for rumors. Some are true. Some aren't. Either way, the Web audience's appetite for gossip seems inexhaustible.

Firefox and the anxiety of growing pains

2007-05-21T18:36:00.003+01:00

If the open-source software movement were an upstart political campaign, Chris Messina would be one of its community organizers--the young volunteer who decamps to New Hampshire, knocking on doors, putting up signs.

In 2004, Messina, a 26-year-old Web entrepreneur from San Francisco, found his dream candidate in Firefox, the open-source Internet browser that is a rival to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Unlike the other candidate he volunteered for that year, Howard Dean, Firefox is still racking up victories. And unlike Dean, the people behind Firefox have a dilemma: what happens--and what is owed to volunteer contributors--when an open-source project starts to become successful?

Some 1,000 to 2,000 people have contributed code to Firefox, according to the Mozilla Foundation, which distributes the Firefox browser. An estimated 10,000 people act as testers for the program, and an estimated 80,000 help spread the word.

In 2004, with the release of version 1.0, Firefox became the dream of techies like Messina. Much in the way he helped coordinate supporters for Dean online, he got behind Spread Firefox, a campaign to rally the open-source base behind the browser.

That effort culminated in a fund-raising drive to advertise Firefox in The New York Times. The ad, a double-page spread designed by Messina, ran on December 16, 2004.

"It was 10,000 people, putting in like 5 bucks to--I don't know what the highest was," he said. "It was in the spirit of the Howard Dean campaign."

When bad hair days lead to VC funding

2007-05-21T18:36:00.001+01:00

For many entrepreneurs in the first dot-com boom, the name of the game was "portal-matic." Spin a wheel, pick a niche interest group, build a comprehensive Web portal aimed at that group's needs and cash a venture capitalist's check.

While many of the venture-backed portals were quickly shuttered, some other sites, often built by amateurs, have survived. Thanks to a surging online advertising market and an Internet audience accustomed to clicking to find an authoritative voice on obscure topics, their reward may finally be coming.

Take NaturallyCurly.com for instance. The site, founded in 1998 by two journalists in Austin, Texas, as a resource for curly-haired people, has grown its readership to about 180,000 monthly readers, without marketing. More impressively, it has built a stable of hair care advertisers, like Aveda, Paul Mitchell and Redken, among others, and generated annual revenue in excess of $1 million (although the founders won't disclose how much).

Iran starts first women-only Net cafe

2007-05-21T18:35:00.003+01:00

Iran's first female-only Internet cafe has opened near Tehran aimed at creating an "appropriate atmosphere" for young women, a semi-official Iranian news agency said on Monday.

Under strict Islamic law introduced after Iran's 1979 revolution, men and women who are not related should not mix in public, even though this ban is often broken in practice, for example in several Internet cafes in the capital city.

Many young people in Iran are avid users of the Internet, some using chat rooms to socialize with the opposite sex.

"The atmosphere of most Internet cafes in the city is not appropriate for girls, therefore this Internet cafe has been started up in a complete female atmosphere," Mehr News Agency said.

Customers in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, will have access to high-speed Internet and free computer lessons, the news agency said, adding that the cafe is operated under the supervision of a student organization.

Iranian officials say strict rules on sex segregation as well as the Islamic dress code for women are aimed at protecting them and are not restricting their rights.

MySpace to provide sex offender data to state AGs

2007-05-21T18:35:00.001+01:00

MySpace.com has unveiled a plan for cooperating with the state attorneys general who have requested that the social-networking site turn over data pertaining to registered sex offenders.

According to a statement from the company released on Monday, MySpace will provide the Multi-State Attorney General Executive Committee data that it has gathered on registered sex offenders through its partnership with identity verification firm Sentinel Tech Holding.

The News Corp. unit said it has worked in conjunction with several lawmakers to develop a "process to expedite the delivery of useful information to enable the attorneys general to use in their pursuit of any of these individuals who are breaking the law."

Further details on the process have not yet been provided.

Earlier this month, the attorneys general from the states of Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania authored a letter to MySpace requesting that it provide the aforementioned information, citing concerns "that sexual predators are using MySpace to lure children into face-to-face encounters and other dangerous activities."

Game turns moviegoers into human joysticks

2007-05-20T21:07:00.001+01:00

Moviegoers have a new way to interact with theater screens, and it doesn't involve throwing tomatoes.

As part of a multimedia campaign to get people more involved with its Web news content, MSNBC.com has launched a game, called NewsBreaker Live, that plays in movie theaters. A motion-sensitive camera in the front of the theater measures how the audience is moving its arms. The camera then translates that collective motion to an onscreen paddle that players use to bounce a ball back up to the top of the screen to knock out blocks.

NewsBreaker Live is a version of a Web-based video game, NewsBreaker, that MSNBC.com is presenting on its site. In that game--a play on the old title Breakout--MSNBC.com headlines float to the bottom of the screen. When players hit 25 of the headlines with their paddle, they gain another life.
NewsBreaker Live

In the theater version, instead of a single player moving a paddle left and right with a keyboard, the entire audience controls the paddle together, moving it around by waving their arms.

'Starcraft II' warps into Seoul

2007-05-20T09:34:00.001+01:00

SEOUL--Crowds of fans and press file continuously into the Olympic Gymnastic Stadium in the Gangnam province of Seoul to await the announcement of Blizzard Entertainment's new game title.

The big-screen monitors onstage, which previously showed looped footage of tournaments held at last year's Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, now show only the logo for this year's event, which takes place today and tomorrow. The anticipation and excitement in the air from the crowds of fans and international press are palpable.

The announcement session is underway, and the lights are up. The Korean emcees are making announcements about the tournaments and music concerts that will also be held at the event. Blizzard Korea managing director Jungwan Han has taken the stage to deliver the opening remarks, greeting and thanking Blizzard fans worldwide for their support. He takes his seat, and the emcees briefly introduce Blizzard's top brass, including Mike Morhaime, Rob Pardo, and Chris Metzen.

NASA probes sinkhole as proxy for icy moon

2007-05-20T09:33:00.005+01:00

NASA is testing an underwater robot in one of Earth's deepest sinkholes in a first step toward searching for life on Jupiter's icy moon, Europa.

El Zacaton, near the Gulf coast of northeastern Mexico, is about 100 metres (328 feet) wide and more than 1,000 metres (3,280 feet) deep. It could easily hold the Eiffel Tower.

Scientists plan to map and take samples in the dark, water-filled fissure with the 1.5 tonne DEPTHX robot over the next two weeks as a prelude to the proposed navigation of Europa's ice-capped oceans in about 20 years.

The mission is the latest step in a 400-year-old endeavor to understand Jupiter and its distant moons.

"We're so sure there's water on Europa that the real question is whether there is also life, whether there's something in the ocean that bugs can eat," said Chris McKay of the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

"This robot is the ideal way to search," he said.

Lowered by a 60-tonne crane, the battery-powered robot, nicknamed "Clementine" for its round shape and orange color, will make daily descents into the vertical cave known in Mexico as a cenote.

Is Motorola's cell phone revamp enough?

2007-05-20T09:33:00.003+01:00

NEW YORK-- Motorola is adding considerable new features to its slick cell phone designs. But critics wonder whether the new phone capabilities will be enough to light a fire under the increasingly troubled consumer electronics giant.

Motorola, the second-largest handset maker in the world behind Nokia, has been struggling to regain its footing in an increasingly competitive market for the past several quarters. For the first quarter of 2007, the company reported a net loss as prices on phones continued to plunge.

Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander, who ended a bitter proxy fight with billionaire shareholder activist Carl Icahn last week, was on hand at an event here Tuesday to show off the company's five new handsets. Zander has been promising a new set of products that will help the company regain profitability.

Motorola's latest products, which will all be available this summer, clearly take the company in a new direction. Instead of concentrating solely on style and design, it has added more functionality such as 3G, or third-generation, network support and multimedia features.

Sizing up the coming robotics revolution

2007-05-20T09:33:00.001+01:00

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--When it comes to robots, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is one of the places in the world where the magic happens.

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic professor of robotics at MIT and the director of CSAIL. He is also the co-founder and chief technology officer of iRobot and one of the principal architects of iRobot's Roomba vacuum.

On Tuesday, RoboBusiness 2007, an international conference showcasing consumer, commercial and military robots, will convene in Boston. To gain insight on what's in the pipeline, CNET News.com sat down with Brooks, one of the leading experts on robots and artificial intelligence.

From his office at CSAIL, Brooks shared his thoughts on the best AI readily available today and the four things it will take for the magicians of science to match science fiction fantasies.

Are laptop bags to blame for rising thefts?

2007-05-19T21:57:00.001+01:00

Carrying a laptop in a laptop bag could increase your chances of joining the growing number of people falling prey to laptop thieves.

Just consider these police reports from some of the laptop thefts in the UK.
- While walking along the road [the victim] is approached from behind and knocked against a wall banging his head. Offender then pulls [the victim's] laptop case off his shoulder making good his escape.
- During the hours of darkness two unknown male offenders approach from behind, remove laptop case containing laptop and mobile phone from [the victim's] right hand. Offenders then make good escape with same in unknown direction.
- Offenders during darkness hours approach [the victim] while getting out of his vehicle and proceed to snatch laptop bag from his shoulder and make off.

'Shrek's' Princess Fiona lends a hand to HP's ad

2007-05-19T21:56:00.002+01:00

What does Princess Fiona, Shrek's fairy tale heroine, do with her personal computer? Tracks auctions on YeBay.

DreamWorks Animation SKG teamed with Hewlett-Packard Co. to promote both "Shrek the Third," which hits theaters today, and computers. Their unusual marketing campaign demonstrates the lengths to which companies are going to find customers in the fragmented media landscape.
"We're witnessing a shift in entertainment consumption and how people want to immerse themselves," said Anne Globe, head of worldwide marketing and consumer products at DreamWorks.
Palo Alto-based HP featured Princess Fiona in an ad for notebook computers that began airing May 10 on television — and on YeTube, a Shrek-inspired channel it bought on the video-sharing service YouTube.
But the YeTube channel also features other cross-promotions that use the movie's characters to subtly sell technology gear.
There's the usual YouTube fare — but this time it's performed by Shrek characters. DreamWorks animators created videos of Prince Charming conducting a puppet show and Gingerbread Man dancing a jig. The companies made five such videos.

Even Yahoo! Gets The Blues

2007-05-19T21:56:00.001+01:00

CEO Semel's next turnaround task: Boost morale and keep employees from leaving

It was a bit of good news that Yahoo Chief Executive Terry Semel really needed: Following a lengthy search, the Internet company on May 15 hired a new chief financial officer to succeed Susan Decker, now head of Yahoo's key advertising group. But the appointment of Blake Jorgensen, co-founder of investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners Group Inc., also fueled renewed speculation that Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO ) might be seeking to shed assets or even get acquired as it struggles to catch up with runaway rival Google Inc. (GOOG ) Yahoo's stock fell 1.7% on an up day for the market.

Internet Increasingly Censored

2007-05-19T21:55:00.000+01:00

The first comprehensive global survey of Internet filtering shows that online repression is on the rise worldwide.

A report released today by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) concludes that the scale, the scope, and the sophistication of state-based Internet filtering have all increased dramatically in recent years. The survey highlights the tools and techniques used by countries to keep their citizens from viewing certain kinds of online material.

ONI is a collaboration among four leading universities: Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto. The group's testing was carried out during 2006 and early 2007. ONI used a combination of tools that can remotely test filtering conditions within given countries. The group also relied heavily on local researchers who evaluated Internet conditions from inside certain countries. Some countries, such as Cuba and North Korea, were deemed too dangerous for either remote or in-country testing. But of the 41 different countries tested by ONI, 25 were found to block or filter online content.

Google creates uber search site

2007-05-19T21:54:00.000+01:00

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--In its biggest revamp ever to its home page, Google on Wednesday launched its version of universal search, a redesign that will list in one place search results from a variety of media.

Combined with its other new features, universal search not only makes it easier to find relevant information in one place, it will put even more pressure on Google's competitors.

Instead of using separate search pages for photos, video, news, archived news, scanned books and other sources relevant to, say, "Steve Jobs," Google's universal search users will find links to all of those sources in a single search attempt.

"Now with universal search we can provide a more holistic answer," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, said during a "Searchology" media event at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

HDTV is lame...

2007-05-19T20:29:00.000+01:00

Highdefinition Television already has got a follower: In 2015 the first test broadcasts of Super Hi-Vision starts in Japan.

Unlike the Full HD resolution of 1920x1200 pixel, Super Hi-Vision supports awesome 7680x4320 pixel.

Top 10 HDTV Myths: Fact vs. Fiction, Hi-Def Style

2007-05-19T20:03:00.001+01:00

High-definition television (HDTV) has evolved from an early-adopter indulgence to a mainstream technology in less than a decade. Enthusiasm for HD everything is driving the sales of flat-panel TVs and has inspired a next-gen DVD format war. It’s showing up in camcorders and on your local TV news.

Yet HDTV remains a widely misunderstood technology, muddled with misconceptions and half-truths born of marketing mumbo jumbo and senseless jargon. The advertised specifications read like bewildering mathematical equations with “variables” such as 1080i, 720p, 4:3, 1080p and 16:9. To clear the air of confusion we’ve examined some of the most wrongheaded bits of received wisdom in the world of HD.

'What is a Web site?' judge says he's fully computer literate

2007-05-19T20:01:00.002+01:00

A British judge who said he didn't really understand the term "Web site" is fully computer literate and was merely trying to clarify complex evidence for the benefit of the court, the judiciary said on Friday.

The remark by Judge Peter Openshaw during a trial on Wednesday made headlines around the world.

"The trouble is I don't understand the language. I don't really understand what a Web site is," he told a London court during the trial of three men accused of inciting terrorism via the Internet.

In a statement, the Judicial Communications Office did not dispute that Openshaw had been accurately quoted. But it said the remark by the judge, now in his fifth week presiding over the trial, had been taken out of context.

"Trial judges always seek to ensure that everyone in court is able to follow all of the proceedings. They will regularly ask questions, not for their own benefit, but on behalf of all those following a case, in the interests of justice," it said.

Digital tech for the disabled

2007-05-19T20:01:00.001+01:00

Every year since 2003, the South Korean government has commissioned designers to come up with technologies to help enable people with physical disabilities to work with computers and other electronics devices. The government then picks the most promising prototypes and builds more prototypes to conduct feasible testing.

These are the 10 prototypes chosen this year by the Ministry of Information and Communication and Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity & Promotion. If testing goes well, they could make their way to homes and offices.

This is the SenseView, an enlarged-view tabletop reader, which produces an extra-large view of images and documents on a computer screen monitor for people with low vision.

Software for kindergarten Beethovens

2007-05-19T20:00:00.000+01:00

Child prodigies are rare in any artistic pursuit, but new music composition software is making it easier for parents and teachers to raise a little Beethoven.

Sibelius, a well-known maker of software that's used by musicians as well as composers on Hollywood films like Casino Royale, last week released the latest in a line of music software designed for children ages five to 11. With a game-like design and graphics, the software teaches children the basics of instruments, music theory, notation and composition, and then lets them create their own songs by dragging and dropping musically infused shapes, instruments, characters or animations.

It's so easy that a kindergartner can compose a song, say educators, and that's something they believe will go far to make music aficionados of kids. That shift could have ripple effects on an already transformed music industry thanks to the digital age. Instead of downloading pirated music, more kids may begin to create their own sounds, educators say.

"Students are able to do things now that were all but impossible before except for the truly gifted and talented, which is to compose their own music," said Sandi MacLeod, coordinator for the Vermont MIDI Project, a 12-year-old music composition project involving more than 7,000 students grades two to 12 from 40 schools in the state that use Sibelius and its kids software, Groovy.

YouTube doubtful of Pentagon explanation for blocking sites

2007-05-19T17:01:00.001+01:00

YouTube's co-founders on Thursday challenged the Pentagon's assertion that soldiers overseas were sapping too much bandwidth by watching online videos, the military's principal rationale for blocking popular Web sites from Defense Department computers.

"They said it might be a bandwidth issue, but they created the Internet, so I don't know what the problem is," CEO Chad Hurley said with a hearty laugh during an interview with The Associated Press.

Hurley, Chief Technology Officer Steve Chen and YouTube spokeswoman Julie Supan emphasized that the online video company is trying to work with the Pentagon in hopes the military will reverse course or at least partially repeal the ban.

NBC strikes deal with YouTube

2007-05-19T16:59:00.000+01:00

Just months ago, NBC Universal was demanding that clips of its shows be removed from YouTube. In the time since, YouTube has emerged as an Internet tour de force, and now NBC has changed its tune.

A network representative confirmed a report Tuesday in The Wall Street Journal that NBC has plans to upload promotional video clips of some of its TV shows, including "Saturday Night Live" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." The entertainment company, owned by General Electric, will advertise on YouTube and promote the site on some of its TV shows. Financial details were not disclosed. A YouTube representative did not return calls for comment.

The craze over sharing homemade videos on the Internet is beginning to draw some big-time Hollywood players. On Monday, Warner Bros. announced that Internet video site Guba has started selling downloads of the studio's movies and TV shows. Guba is the first among the video-sharing sites to offer full-length movies.

Microsoft opens up on Web strategy at Mix '07

2007-05-19T14:54:00.002+01:00

Microsoft's strategy in the new world of ad-supported online software is, in some ways, business as usual: use aggressive business terms to undercut rivals, and cozy up to developers.

At the company's Mix '07 conference in Las Vegas on Monday, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and other Microsoft executives are scheduled to lay out the elements of Microsoft's "software plus services" push, its approach to making money from hosted Web services while keeping customers tied to its desktop software.

Analysts: Microsoft's after Google's ad business

2007-05-19T14:54:00.001+01:00

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft may be older and bigger than Google, but it's Microsoft nipping at Google's heels and not the other way around, according to two Gartner analysts who closely follow the moves of the companies.

By offering free Web-based productivity applications, Google is looking for an additional vehicle for advertising revenue and trying to distract Microsoft from focusing on its own core search advertising business rather than hoping to grab Microsoft's big corporate IT dollars, David Smith, a vice president and Gartner Fellow at research firm Gartner, said during a session at the Gartner Symposium ITXPO conference here on Wednesday.

Despite reports to the contrary, Google isn't going after Microsoft as much as Microsoft is gunning for Google, he said.

"Microsoft is clearly going after the advertising world" and has pledged to invest $2 billion to do so, he said. But he said the company is at a "critical point."

Wired but not Web 2.0? That's normal, study says

2007-05-19T14:53:00.000+01:00

Although most U.S. adults have a cell phone, a computer and Internet access, a study says only a small percentage are participating in Web 2.0 activities.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released on Sunday a study (PDF: A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users) of people's "evolving relationships to cyberspace."

Pew found in a survey that 73 percent of U.S. adults own a cell phone, 68 percent have a desktop computer, 30 percent possess a laptop, and 73 percent connect to the Internet, but that very few use them to express themselves publicly via Web 2.0 applications.

The study defines Web 2.0 users as people who take advantage of technology "to express themselves online and participate in the commons of cyberspace," including maintaining a personal Web site, blogging, vlogging, remixing media or sharing new-media creations.

Only 8 percent of U.S. adults are "deep users" of Web 2.0 features, the study found, though many American adults do own the gadgets that enable those functions and use the devices to express themselves privately.

Ad giant to scoop up 24/7 Real Media

2007-05-19T13:04:00.001+01:00

WPP Group plans to buy 24/7 Real Media in a $649 million cash deal, bringing the latter's digital marketing technologies to the advertising giant.

WPP's announcement on Thursday comes just one month after Google said it will acquire online ad company DoubleClick in a $3.1 billion deal. Google's deal led to speculation that there would be an acquisition boom in the advertising technology market. Earlier this month, there were rumors that Microsoft would buy 24/7.

The deal will tie WPP's traditional mix of marketing, advertising, public relations and branding with 24/7's search-based ad serving, monitoring and analytics technologies.

"Our clients and therefore our industry are becoming more technology driven," Martin Sorrell, WPP chief executive, said in a statement. "24/7 Real Media significantly enhances our capabilities, technological resources and talent."

Ads that are too fast for a fast-forward button

2007-05-19T13:03:00.001+01:00

A broadcast network will soon offer advertisers two more ways to try holding the attention of viewers throughout those commercial breaks that consumers love to hate.

One idea is to run quickie commercials of only 5 seconds each. The other is to schedule a series with no commercial breaks at all and instead incorporate sponsors' products into each episode.

Executives of The CW Television Network outlined their plans yesterday as they offered Madison Avenue a preview of their prime-time lineup for the 2007-2008 season.

The proposals are the most recent to be advanced by the major networks, broadcast and cable, as they grapple with the problem of keeping viewers from changing channels during commercials--or, if the viewing is being done on digital video recorders, from fast-forwarding through the spots.

Google CEO talks new media politics

2007-05-19T13:02:00.000+01:00

NEW YORK--During a keynote address at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum Friday morning, Google CEO Eric Schmidt looked up at the crowd and said, "This looks like a Google meeting."

The reason, he said, was the abundance of open laptop screens, BlackBerrys and other gadgets among the audience. "At most Google meetings no one is actually looking at the speaker; they're all basically online," he said."Speaking as an older person, this bothers me, but I have given up."

This always-on nature of the Internet generation and its effect on the global political landscape was the focus of Schmidt's presentation, which was held in the form of a conversation with Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist and author of The World Is Flat.
"George Bush never could've been elected president if he'd been at Yale now and there'd been cell phone cameras around."
--Thomas L. Friedman, columnist

While the discussion ranged from the Thai government's ban on YouTube earlier this year to the widely circulated video of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards spending an arguably excessive amount of time having his hair blow-dried, there was a recurring focus on whether or not the "connected world" is necessarily a good thing. Google, with its mission to compile all kinds of information and make it accessible and searchable, has become an icon of that connectivity.

Fake E-Mail Results in Angry Apple Shareholders

2007-05-18T23:45:00.000+01:00

Apple stock dropped 2.2% today in mid-afternoon trading as Engadget published news based on a faked e-mail inside Apple. 'Apparently an internal memo was sent to several Apple employees--and forwarded to Engadget--around 9am CT today saying that Apple issued a press release with the news that the iPhone was now scheduled for October, and Leopard was delayed until January. About an hour and a half after that e-mail went out, a second e-mail was sent--this time officially from Apple--saying the first e-mail was a fake, and that the delivery schedule for the iPhone and Leopard had not changed.

INQUIRER Top 10 Greatest Ever Technology Names

2007-05-18T23:36:00.000+01:00

NOW THAT Windows Server 2008 has been officially named, the codename Longhorn will retreat to being just another future slab of steak, one more leather jacket.

That’s a shame because Longhorn is an outstanding name. It’s evocative, American, masculine, muscular, traditional, rural. It’s a name that communicates with the solar plexus like Sibelius’s second or the sudden glimpse of a mountain when mist clears.

Unlike Windows Server 2008, although to be fair to Microsoft, it recognises its essential dullness in a mockumentary video.

Why do companies ditch these powerful codenames? It’s a shame because there have been some corkers, so let’s recall them as part of our Top 10 Greatest Ever Technology Names.

10. Compaq’s Wildfire. Wildfire was the codename for a range of Alpha-based servers. Good name, except for INQUIRER founder Mike Magee, who, in another plaice, was on the receiving end of a cease-and-desist letter from Messrs. Sue, Grabbit and Run suggesting the moniker could wreak havoc with a similarly named brand.

9. IBM’s Butterfly. Think of the butterfly, a delicate, silken-winged haunter of English country gardens. A lovely name for lovely notebook PC and apt too, as it evoked the keyboard that would open out when the screen was lifted. But IBM decided to call the shipping product the ThinkPad 701C and the product didn’t sell. However, so beloved by connoisseurs was the Butterfly, that a kaleidoscope of web sites pays tribute to the ill-fated, tragic even, one-season wonder.

... read the full article at the inquirer

Google's new Universal search

2007-05-18T23:33:00.000+01:00

Google made an announcement a couple days ago that they've released what they call Universal Search. Universal Search is basically a tighter integration of image, video, blog, news, and other search services into the main search results. Marissa gives more background on the concept here. For those of us paying attention to this space on a daily basis, it's not really anything too earth shattering. They've been integrating different types of results into the main search off and on for years. This announcement simply lets us know that they're serious about it and will continue to try to deliver the best results possible, regardless of whether it's a web page, video, product search, or whatever.

As a searcher, I think this is great--as long as they get it right. I don't want a bunch of irrelevant or useless stuff, but if it's what I'm looking for, that's perfect. As a search marketer, this emphasizes the importance of optimizing your presence in not just the Google web page results, but also in product search, local search, video, images, blog search, and everything else. Smart marketers are already using all these--now there will just be more competition for those top spots.

Google's "new" Universal search - Search Trends

Layer-Ads

2007-05-18T23:10:00.000+01:00

Geld verdienen mit Layer-Ads.

First-quarter digital camera shipments up 6 percent

2007-05-18T23:03:00.001+01:00

Digital camera shipments increased 6 percent to 4.9 million in the first quarter of 2007, market researcher IDC said Wednesday.

Top leaders were Canon at 21 percent of the market, Sony at 16 percent and Kodak at 13 percent. Samsung jumped from 4 percent in the year-earlier quarter to 11 percent this year, propelling it to a fourth-place finish, IDC said.

Kodak fared better, shipments increasing 5 percent--the first growth in five quarters, attributable to its emphasis on compact cameras costing between $200 and $300, IDC said. Nikon, though, didn't fare as well.

"Nikon was seventh with a share of 7 percent, down from 13 percent a year ago," said IDC analyst Christopher Chute. "They did well with DSLRs (digital single-lens reflex cameras), but no so well with compacts."

FCC approves the iPhone

2007-05-18T23:02:00.001+01:00

Apple's iPhone took one step closer to launching Wednesday, as the company received permission from the Federal Communications Commission to sell it in the U.S.
t's not like that permission was ever really in doubt. But the FCC requires anyone who makes a phone or wireless device for use in this country to pass some basic tests that ensure the device isn't putting out harmful radiation, or death rays, or other emissions that could cause problems. The FCC also publishes those documents on its Web site, which has led to the discovery of unannounced products in the past. That's part of the reason why CEO Steve Jobs preannounced the iPhone in January.

The iPhone is known as the "A1203," at least for testing purposes. All those years of homework must have paid off, for the iPhone A1203 passed the tests with flying colors. An Apple representative told Reuters that the iPhone remains on track for a late June arrival.

Console mods find dead end at Xbox Live

2007-05-18T23:01:00.000+01:00

Microsoft is cracking down on Xbox owners who modify their consoles.
The company is blocking modified Xbox 360 systems from connecting to its online multiplayer video game service, Xbox Live.

According to a blog posting from Microsoft's Games Global Marketing team, when owners of a modified console try to log onto the service, they will be blocked, although they will not have their accounts banned.

"We will continue to enforce this rule to ensure the integrity of our service, the protection of our partners and the benefits of our users," the blog states.

...read the full article [ here ]

Podcast: What's behind Microsoft's Aquantive grab?

2007-05-18T23:00:00.000+01:00

In its largest deal ever, Microsoft announced plans Friday to acquire digital marketing and services company Aquantive for $6 billion. CNET News.com's Leslie Katz talks with reporter Ina Fried about what the buy could mean for Redmond.

Plus, Hewlett-Packard is adding two new members to its board; Advanced Micro Devices is prepping a new energy-efficient notebook chip and chip platform that could help it compete with Intel; and a professor at Purdue University is working to produce hydrogen from a reaction between water and an alloy of aluminum and gallium.

Quantifying Microsoft's biggest purchase ever

2007-05-18T22:59:00.000+01:00

Aquantive who? The company Microsoft is acquiring for its highest purchase price ever may not even register on the radar of most consumers.

But it's a well-known entity in the online advertising industry and can give Microsoft some much-needed--even if pricey--ad-serving technology, some industry experts said. Microsoft said it was buying Aquantive early on Friday, shocking many observers with a $6 billion purchase price, which is three times the amount it has paid for any other company and an 85 percent premium on Aquantive's closing stock price on Thursday. It is also double what Google agreed to pay for DoubleClick last month. Aquantive's stock rose nearly 80 percent after the deal was announced.

...read the full article [ here ]

SimExchange aims to predict video game market

2007-05-18T22:58:00.000+01:00

Last week, Brian Shiau sent out an e-mail predicting what the NPD Group, the perceived authority on the performance of the video game market, would report about the industry's April console sales when it delivered its assessment Thursday.

It turned out that Shiau's predictions weren't perfect--on average he was about 15 percent off on the sales of Nintendo's DS and Wii, Sony's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable and Microsoft's Xbox 360. But he also wasn't that far off predictions from Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter, one of the most quoted industry analysts, who himself had been about 10.6 percent off sales on the same consoles.

And a month earlier, Shiau's predictions had actually been better than Pachter's. Shiau had been off by about 15.8 percent, while Pachter had missed by 34.9 percent.

...read the full article [ here ]

Microsoft to buy Aquantive for $6 billion

2007-05-18T22:49:00.000+01:00

In a bid to boost its presence in advertising, Microsoft said Friday that it will pay $6 billion to acquire Aquantive, a digital marketing and services company.

The deal is Microsoft's largest ever, highlighting the importance of supporting more-advanced advertising products and technologies across areas including media planning, video on demand and Internet Protocol television. Aquantive produces the Atlas Media Console and Drive PM tools for advertisers and publishers, and owns interactive ad agency Avenue A Razorfish.

"The advertising industry is evolving and growing at an incredible pace, moving increasingly toward online and IP-served platforms, which dramatically increases the importance of software for this industry," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. "Today's announcement represents the next step in the evolution of our ad network from our initial investment in MSN, to the broader Microsoft network including Xbox Live, Windows Live and Office Live, and now to the full capacity of the Internet."

... read this Interesting Article at cnet news

Technology 'fingerprints' valid credit cards, flags bogus ones

2007-05-18T22:47:00.000+01:00

The way the particles land on a given credit card magnetic stripe are as unique as individual snow flakes or human fingerprints. So says a Magtek, a company that has developed a product, MagnePrint, for recording the unique magnetic media signature for all credit and debit cards scanned through its readers. The first scan by a MagnePrint reader creates a template against which all subsequent scans are compared.

... read the full article on cnet news

BitTorrent user loses appeal in movie piracy case

2007-05-18T22:46:00.001+01:00

A Hong Kong man, believed to be the first person convicted of downloading pirated movies using BitTorrent file-sharing technology, lost his appeal on Friday in the territory's highest court.

Chan Nai-ming, who used the alias "Big Crook" on the peer-to-peer BitTorrent network, was found guilty in October 2005 of copyright infringement and attempting to distribute three Hollywood movies using the popular file-sharing software.

While people have used BitTorrent technology for years to download movies undetected, Chan was caught red-handed by a Hong Kong Customs officer in January 2005.

The three movies Chan was convicted of pirating were Daredevil, Miss Congeniality and Red Planet in what the Hong Kong government has called the first conviction of its kind in the world.

... Read the Full Article on cnet news

Missing-girl Web site gets 55 million hits

2007-05-18T22:44:00.000+01:00

A Web site set up to help find a missing British 4-year-old girl who disappeared from a holiday villa in Portugal 15 days ago has received more than 50 million hits, its operator said on Friday.

...read the full article on cnet news

Google launching 'Universal Search'

2007-05-18T22:41:00.000+01:00

At Google's Searchology press event right now, Marissa Mayer just announced a feature we're all going to appreciate: "Universal Search." Google is finally going to display results from various "silos" of search on one page. In other words, you'll no longer have to search books, videos, pictures, and the Web separately. The new Google search will display everything on one page.

Mayer also showed how videos from Google and YouTube will even play in the Google search results. Very cool.

You'll still be able to drill into data types ("corpuses"), but Google will only display links to the most relevant ones for each search.

...read the whole article at cnet news

Sony rumored to be marching after Club Penguin

2007-05-18T22:37:00.000+01:00

Several blogs, including PaidContent, reported today that Sony is in "advanced talks" to buy ClubPenguin a social networking and online game site geared toward kids that was launched in October 2005. The price is reported as in the ballpark of $450 million.

The subscription-based (six dollars per month) ClubPenguin takes the form of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), where children play games, amass virtual goods, and interact with each other, all while participating as penguin avatars. According to PaidContent, the site rakes in about $60 million in revenues and is already profitable despite being fewer than two years old. In March, ClubPenguin had 4.5 million visitors.

...read the whole article at cnet news.

Google Pack!

2007-05-15T17:37:00.001+01:00

Google Pack is a free collection of essential software:

Essential: Enjoy safe, useful software for your computer

Simple: Download and install everything in just a few clicks

Customizable: Choose only the software you want

Up to date: Get updates and new software via Google Updater

Google Pack includes:

Google Desktop
Picasa
Google Toolbar
Google Photos Screensaver
... and so much more optional useful software!

Get it today!

You can download it over the banner at the top of the page.

StartAid

2007-05-05T22:51:00.001+01:00

Start page and social bookmarks manager.

LinkedFeed

2007-05-05T22:49:00.001+01:00

Another ajax startpage...

Zooomr

2007-05-05T22:48:00.004+01:00

Yet another good photo sharing site.

Chuquet

2007-05-05T22:48:00.003+01:00

Memetracker along the lines of Memeorandum and Blogniscient.

Qoop

2007-05-05T22:48:00.001+01:00

Photo printing service.

Zillow

2007-05-05T22:47:00.002+01:00

Home valuation service.