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Updated: 6-16

TechCrunch

Israel’s LabPixies Offers Highly Awesome Widgets

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Tel Aviv, Israel based LabPixies, which was founded in March 2006, was one of the early players in the exploding widget space. They’ve stayed small and focused on building really useful or really entertaining widgets, and have mostly kept a low profile. And while you may not have heard of the company, you’ll probably have heard of at least one of the widgets they’ve built, such as the official New York Times crossword widget.

The company competes with a small army of highly funded widget startups: Slide, Rockyou, Goowy, Clearspring, Gigya and Widgetbox, among others. 41 million people a month view their widgets, the company says, generating 750 million total widget views. At first they built widgets solely for the iGoogle platform, but have expanded to include Netvibes, Live.com and other platforms.

I’ve embedded a few of my favorites below - The New York Times crossword puzzle, Space Invaders, Defender and a Babylon language translation tool. The company also offers interactive advertising widgets that are a lot more interesting than normal ads.

The company has created all of this with very few resources. They’ve self financed to now with advertising revenue, and just closed a small $1 million round of financing from angel investors in Israel. They have ten employees.
Gadget by LabPixies.com Gadget by LabPixies.com Gadget by LabPixies.com Gadget by LabPixies.com
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NYTimes Article Reverberates Through Yahoo; Who’s Their Next CEO?

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When blogs and regional newspapers trash Jerry Yang it’s one thing. But when the New York Times does it, people really notice. Public lynchings like this are few and far between from that bastion of traditional journalism.

Yesterday’s article by Joe Nocera, titled “ Oh Jerry, It’s No Longer Your Baby” was a stinging condemnation of Yang. It’s presented as a memo from Nocera to Yang, with the subject “Shafting Yahoo’s Shareholders” and outlines the many ways Yang has failed Yahoo’s shareholders and employees.

In reference to the recently announced Google search deal, the article says “You’ve chosen to become a pawn of the most dominant company on the Internet. How exactly is that going to lead to a brighter future for Yahoo?”

Nocera also condemns Yang for purposefully killing the Microsoft negotiations even thought the deal was in the best interests of shareholders, watching as key employees walked out, and generally running with his emotions rather than taking care of business.

The article ends with “Jerry, you’re a billionaire because people all over the world bought your stock, and trusted you to do right by them..It doesn’t matter that you would like Yahoo to remain independent, or that you can’t stand Microsoft. Your feelings aren’t supposed to get in the way of your fiduciary duty…A takeover by Microsoft was your last, best hope of rewarding your long-suffering shareholders. Now that opportunity is gone…I would be taking odds that your days as Yahoo’s C.E.O. are numbered. It’ll be better for everyone to have someone in that role who understands who he’s supposed to be working for. Wouldn’t you agree?”

From what we hear from multiple sources close to Yahoo, this article may be the final straw - whether the board backs Yang or not, this is just too much negative press for the company to overcome. A fresh start is now a necessity for moving forward.

Yang will step down, our sources say. It may be next week or it may be next month, but it’s going to happen.

Who Will Be Yahoo’s Next CEO?

But who in the world would take the job given the state of Yahoo today? It would have to be someone there already, no outsider would want the job. Right? Well, maybe not.

President Sue Decker is considered to be too close to Yang, and lacking in operational experience. Other Yahoo execs are also unlikely candidates.

But the names of two ex-Yahoo’ers are being tossed around as people who may consider the job, and who may be able to fire up the troops enough to give Yahoo a fighting chance. Those people are Jeff Mallet, Yahoo’s former President. And Dan Rosensweig, Yahoo’s former COO.

Jeff Mallett

Jeff Mallett joined Yahoo as employee number 13 back in 1995, when the company was still privately held. He was there for seven years as President and COO. In the early days of Yahoo, Yang called himself, Mallett and former CEO Tim Koogle the “Three Amigos.”

Mallet moved on to other projects after he left Yahoo. He’s one of the owners of the San Francisco Giants, makes angel investments and was most recently the Chairman of SNOCAP, which sold to Imeem in February 2008.

Old time employees remember Mallett’s days as the golden age of Yahoo - at one time the company was worth $100 billion under his tenure.

Dan Rosensweig

Dan Rosensweig is another former Yahoo exec - he was COO until he left the company in December 2006. His departure was rumored to be largely driven by a power struggle with Decker, which he lost.

Rosensweig is now an Operating Principal at Quadrangle Group, a $6 billion private equity firm. My guess is that he’d strongly consider taking the job if offered - he’d relish the chance to show that he should have won that power struggle back in 2006.

Tim Koogle, Yahoo’s CEO before Terry Semel took over in 2001, would likely be another candidate to consider. But he’s long retired, and now ( literally) sells high end real estate in Mexico with his wife. He may once have been part of the Three Amigos with Yang and Mallet, but don’t look to him to come and save Yahoo.

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Arrington Talks Yahoo/Google/Microsoft

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Mike’s been busy this week, breaking the news of the Yahoo/Google deal and then expressing one or two opinions on Yahoo’s business judgment as well.

If you’re still unsure about how he feels about the deal, check out the clip below where he talks to Gabriel Slate on local San Francisco station KRON4.

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Why Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space

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The post below is written by Robert Scoble, a top blogger and the founder FastCompanyTV.

Robert has been one of the earliest adopters of cell phone video, which offers the ability to stream live to the Internet, with the primary tradeoff being relatively poor video quality. He’s extensively tested all of the major emerging services in this area, including Kyte, Qik and Flixwagon, among others.

This is a post I didn’t want to write. Why? For the last six months I’ve been using Qik’s live video service off of my cell phone. I’m the top user there, with most views, most videos, and all that. I’ve used that service to take videos inside the first production Tesla, Annie Leibovitz as she showed us around her latest photos of famous people, Google press conferences, Ansel Adams’ son at the top of Glacier Point in Yosemite, Bono at the World Economic Forum, and more than 700 other videos as well.

Qik has done something remarkable: it put a TV studio in my pocket. I can get live video onto the Internet faster than I can make a phone call (Qik takes two clicks to start streaming, a phone call takes 12 clicks on my phone’s keypad). Even better, while doing a video you can watch live and you can send text chat messages to my phone while I am filming. While we were racing around Santa Monica in Elon Musk’s new Tesla (he’s the chairman of the board and was giving us a killer demo) we had hundreds of people watching my cell phone along with Jason Calacanis’ phone, which was shooting the same view from his Corvette alongside. As Elon was driving we had hundreds of people asking questions about the new Tesla. This was interactivity the world had never seen.

At the same time a company in Israel, FlixWagon, has been competing with Qik. I liked FlixWagon too. The quality on their video was slightly better than Qik’s although I went with Qik because they had a better live experience, at least on my phone. Other cell phone videographers, though, like Sarah Meyers loved Flixwagon. When I visited Israel recently I interviewed the Flixwagon guys and they are whip smart and really nice too.

Which gets me to why this is the post I never wanted to write. I have been treated absolutely wonderfully by the Qik team. They call me often, make sure I’m having a great experience, and have fixed many of the problems I have been having as I push their service into places it simply wasn’t really designed for. My interview with Annie Liebovitz, for instance, was done in a museum that had absolutely no wifi or cell phone service. So, I used up every bit of memory on my phone and gingerly carried my cell phone back outside where it started sending information again. I’ve had AT&T’s 3G service die right in the middle of many of my interviews (most troublingly right in the middle of an interview with Sun Microsystems’ CEO Jonathan Schwartz) and Qik got on those problems quickly.

Anyway, back to the fight between Kyte, Qik, and Flixwagon over your cell phone video experience. Last year I was Kyte’s top user too. Why did I switch to Qik? Because I saw that cell phone video would let me extend my brand into places no other video network was letting me get to. I was the only one doing cell phone videos from the World Economic Forum, for instance, something that got me a lot of attention and followers. I told Kyte’s CEO, Daniel Graf, tons of times over the past seven months to get video streaming into his product. At first he resisted, thinking it wasn’t that big a deal, but on Friday I finally tested it out on my cell phone and was impressed enough to give Kyte a second look.

That led me to this post. Here’s why I think Kyte will dominate over Qik and Flixwagon:

1. The distribution system that Kyte has built is much better than either Qik or Flixwagon. Translation: the embeddable player that Kyte.tv has is much better than Qik or Flixwagon, more on that in a second.

2. The chat room that Kyte has built is much better than Qik or Flixwagon and can be participated in from other cell phones, something that Qik and Flixwagon can’t do.

3. The ability to mix videos from your webcam, live videos streaming from your web cam, recorded videos from camcorders, or from places like YouTube, along with both recorded and streamed videos from your cell phone goes way beyond what Qik and Flixwagon have done today.

4. Kyte.tv can play videos on an iPhone today. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.

5. Kyte.tv can play videos on a Nokia today. Both from your recordings and other people’s. Neither Qik or Flixwagon can do that.

6. Kyte.tv is partially funded and supported by Nokia. That might not sound like a big deal, but it is. Nokia is using Kyte’s service internally too, and I’m sure Nokia is giving Kyte better engineering support than it’s giving Qik or Flixwagon.

7. Kyte.tv is way ahead of Qik and Kyte in getting real mainstream celebrities like 50 cent on its service, which means its growth is way stronger.

Why do I say that Kyte’s distribution system is stronger? Well, the Kyte.tv player has some significant advantages over the Qik one.

1. When embedded it can be set to play the latest video, or a specific video. Qik can only play the specific video you embedded in (I hear they are changing this, but even if they do the second part makes this not as useful). Flixwagon’s gadget lets you show your blog’s readers other videos you’ve done, but not the chat.

2. The chat room is always the same. This makes interactivity much quicker on the Kyte.tv video player. Many of my Qik videos don’t have any comments, or only have one or two. This makes those videos seem lame. Compare to Kyte, though, where everyone talks about you all day long, and it is a better place. Plus Kyte’s chat is much nicer and can contain video and audio comments (Qik can only have text comments) and Kyte’s can come from Facebook or other Nokia phones. Major win for Kyte here. I love participating in Kyte’s chat room from my cell phone because I can leave audio comments. I’ve gotten in some interesting conversations done with nothing but audio from other people. Audio is a lot easier to do from your cell phone than text or even video, particularly if you have a crappy cell phone camera or you don’t want to look like a dork out in public holding the cell phone up to take video of you.

3. I like the Kyte player on Facebook better than anything that Qik or Flixwagon has done yet. Kyte’s can be branded to yourself and you can make your own customized Facebook app for your own Facebook profile. So, TechCrunch can have its own Kyte app, which is much better for branding purposes.

Add all these together and I don’t see how Qik or Flixwagon can beat Kyte anymore in the cell phone video game. What do you think?

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Our Home Town

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About noon Friday here in California, I happened to click on a Summize tab substituting for Twitter’s Track functionality and monitoring the use of my Twitter screen name. Someone named Scrabo had tweeted “Rumor here at NBC is that Tim Russert passed away”. A minute later another: “@stevegillmor Brokaw getting ready to go on air.”

Turning on NBC, then MSNBC, then CNN, I found nothing: reports on flooding in the Midwest, breaking news about a bomb attack in an Afghan prison, a strange obliviousness on the NBC outlets. Something about the first tweet resonated - “here at NBC” - and I went back to the computer and Summize, finding another tweet directed at me that said Wikipedia was already updated with the news. Jumping to the New York Times, a single line at the top of the home page. Finally, at 12:33 Tom Brokaw broke into programming with the news.

Today Summize has “Tim Russert” at the top of the Trending Topics list, with “Russert” third. The tweets continue to roll in 20 hours after the fact, even now at 9am Pacific at some 200 per hour. Twitter’s international audience lets the story follow the sun, but Russert’s fame is largely U.S. centric. Clearly we have lost what many consider the soul or conscience of our political process at the head of the stretch leading to November.

That same presidential race is the likely culprit in Twitter’s recent collapse and partitioning into minimal services. As the company scrambled to get some coherent strategy in place to keep users from tipping into a stampede away from the service, Twitter’s API was gated, the Web UI was dynamically stripped of pagination, @replies, and sometimes even the array of follow icons as event swarms stressed the servers. Most significantly, IM services over XMPP were the first to disappear and not yet fully restored, and with that the service known as Track that I was emulating with the third party Summize client when Russert collapsed.

We may look back at Monday’s Steve Jobs keynote at the WWDC as the point where Twitter stabilized enough to survive. Because of the intense developer interest in creating applications for the iPhone 3G product, the conference was sold out and, like Twitter services, the media gated to only a certain number from each outlet, whether blogger or mainstream. Missing the cut, I went to Plan B as I’ve often done when trips took me away to New York or CES during Apple rollouts.

As the event began, I followed Qik reports from Mike Arrington, page refreshes of photos and text from EnGadget, Techcrunch, Gizmodo, and Cnet, and a live video aggregation of various Ustreams and commentary from Leo Laporte’s TwiT Live. As Jobs took the stage, a video stream captured a murky view of the stage from too many rows back, but the audio proved unmanageable. Laporte’s chat stream produced a URL to a more stable audio feed that held up throughout the rest of the keynote. Arrington produced two short Qik videos of key sections that surfaced as Qik servers restabilized.

The net effect was exhilarating; a bootstrapped symphony of virtualized Steve Reality Distortion Field funneled through the MacBook AIR that I route every bit of my real time digital life through. Throughout, Twitter remained up except for a ten minute period when Jobs announced the 3G device’s price, and as the event retreated into the past Twitter services unseen for weeks began to reemerge.

Much has been made of the fanaticism spurred by social media events and seminal products such as the iPhone - the swarming of the early adopters, the trivialization of Twitter as a toy, you know the drill and the comments on this post will likely personalize the pushback. But an event such as Russert’s death and the emotional shock wave it produced put the lie to the notion that this stuff is echo chamber or A-List or whatever. 30 minutes before the world knew about this tragedy, someone I don’t know reached out and established a connection based on mutual affinity.

The magic of Twitter, and Ustream, and Qik, and all the social tools just now emerging, is this incredible, subtle, hacked, user-controlled information network, that in a million ways and micro-communities, performs as efficiently and professionally as the greatest media empires on Earth. In fact, the two have merged as we gain access to the tools of the trade while the trade gains access to our hearts and minds. Track will return, and with it a flowering of this new media revolution where the new boss is the same as the old boss: Us. And you’ll see Tim there in the front row, if you look closely.
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Hey Microsoft, How ’bout We Do That First Deal You Offered?

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The devil is in the details, and the details of the Yahoo-Google search advertising deal reveal the desperate, possibly neurotic state of Yahoo these days. Quite simply, it looks to me like Yahoo is effectively paying Google off to step in and (1) keep Jerry Yang, Sue Decker and the current board of directors in power, and (2) avoid a desperation deal with Microsoft for as long as possible, or longer. It’s not even clear to me that Google wants this deal, based on the terms. It almost looks like they’re just doing Yahoo a favor, and trying to keep them out of Microsoft’s hands.

My guess is, Yahoo is wondering exactly why they didn’t take that Microsoft acquisition offer back when it was on the table. Those were the days that Yahoo was a key asset in the Microsoft/Google war, and most of their best employees hadn’t bailed. Of course, that was $15 billion ago, and that offer appears to be long gone.

I’ll get more specific below, but the combination of a basically non-binding agreement combined with a complex termination clause and associated termination fee to Google, suggest that the deal is little more than a favor to Yahoo, with a payoff to Google for their trouble. And there are some other agreement oddities mixed in that are probably driven by both companies strong suspicion that at least a few politicians intend to make hay by trying to kill this deal. The Department of Justice, which will review the agreement for compliance with Antitrust laws, is going to have massive commercial (Microsoft) and governmental (Congressional members up for reelection) pressure to find things to object over.

I’m not going to quote language in the half dozen press releases, leaked internal memos and blog posts that all parties have now published. The actual language of the agreement Yahoo signed with Google tells me everything I need to know about why both sides did the deal, and what they think is likely to happen next.

Microsoft’s Last Offer

Microsoft last offered Yahoo a combination stock, asset and business deal that sources with knowledge of the situation summarize as follows:

- Microsoft to acquire 16% of Yahoo’s outstanding stock from existing stockholders for $8 billion, or $35/share.

- Microsoft to acquire all of Yahoo’s search and search marketing assets - servers, code, advertisers, third party publishers, intellectual property and employees (perhaps 3,000 of them) for $1 billion in cash plus a guaranteed CPC rate that is higher than what Yahoo can generate itself.

- Yahoo gets increased search revenue from the deal over what they generate now, and get to remove people and operational costs of search.

- Yahoo agrees not to touch the search or search marketing businesses directly ever again. All their searches are controlled by Microsoft.

Here’s what I think of this deal - it stinks. Microsoft isn’t marrying Yahoo, they’re just getting her pregnant, setting her up in a nice apartment and telling her not to talk to any other guys.

But either way, Microsoft is signaling that their offer remains open. And Yahoo can probably pick and choose parts of it to accept, within reason.

The Google Deal

Forget the flowerly language about how this deal “strengthens Yahoo’s competitive position” (Yahoo press release) or “is good for competition” (Google blog post). Both are flat out lies. The deal crushes any notion of a competitive search advertising market and turns Yahoo’s search and search marketing efforts into the undead.

The deal allows Yahoo to put Google ads along side their own, presumably to maximize revenue to Yahoo. Google’s good at the top search terms (probably 80% or so of revenue potential), but Yahoo thinks they do fine in the long tail. The problem, of course, is that they’ll show Google ads for all the good stuff - and advertisers will go to Google to bid for those ads. More advertisers will leave the platform, further degrading Yahoo’s core search economics.

The four year deal (which Yahoo can extend to ten years) seems great on the surface. It’s non-exclusive and doesn’t require Yahoo to place any ads.

But the non-exclusivity isn’t real, because there’s no one else out there that can compete with Google’s search ad rates anyway. And while there is no requirement for Yahoo to place any number of ads, if they don’t generate at least $83 million in revenue to Google every four months Google can terminate the deal.

And then there’s the matter of the extremely complicated $250 million (minus any net revenues Google received from running advertisements) termination fee should Yahoo merge with anyone else (with easier triggers for mergers with Time Warner, News Corp. or Microsoft). If Yahoo merges with anyone Google can terminate the agreement and force Yahoo to pay them $250 million. Time Warner, News Corp and Microsoft only have to acquire 35% of Yahoo’s stock to trigger this position.

But then things get a little neurotic. If Microsoft acquires between 15% and 35% of Yahoo, Google can terminate but not collect the $250 million fee. Over 35%, Google gets the fee.

I’m calling this the “If our shareholders or the government kill this deal, as is highly likely, then we get to try things with Microsoft and don’t have to pay you off” fee.

If you want to wade through the language yourself, the summary is here.

Bottom Line

Yahoo has pissed off shareholders and a looming meeting - they can’t ignore reality much longer. And reality says Yahoo’s future is bleak. They continue to lose market share, they have serious brain drain and morale has never been lower.

The Microsoft search deal seals their fate permanently, and I can understand why they didn’t want to do it. This Google deal is their only alternative at this point. They can get out of it at any time, simply by not serving Google’s ads. But as long as it’s live they’ll see their advertisers flow to Google instead of their own search platform, and they have to pay a hefty fine if they end up selling themselves to a third party.

Microsoft may yet get their hands on Yahoo, or at least the parts of Yahoo they want, simply by default as shareholders continue their revolt and/or the government puts a stop to the madness. Or not, and Google gets a long term pass to transition Yahoo’s remaining advertisers over to their own platform plus a hefty termination fee if Yahoo gets sold off at some point.

Either way, Google wins. Or Microsoft wins.

But Yahoo has lost.

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Orgoo To Offer True Webmail To Existing Social Networks

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Social networks are, first and foremost, vehicles for personal expression and interaction. But for all the wall posts, direct messages and pokes, one means of communication is conspicuously missing: email ( Yahoo understands this, if little else). Apart possibly from the phone numbers you keep on your mobile phone, there is no better electronic indication of your social graph than your email address book.

Aside from emailing out notifications to lure users back, however, social networks opt for their own proprietary messaging systems. Unfortunately, these systems are much less powerful than email, and they’re certainly not as ubiquitous. Virtually everyone on the internet has an email account, but only a fraction of the digital populace happens to be part of the same social network as you.

Orgoo, a startup that has built an email-centric web interface for communications (see our coverage from 2007), thinks it can bridge the divide between email and social networking by pulling them together into a unified experience.

They will offer a white label solution to their webmail product marketed specifically to social networks looking to keep users on their sites for even longer periods of time. The result: Gmail and Facebook in one (or Hotmail and Friendster, if you’d prefer).

Orgoo integration into a social network would basically bestow upon that network webmail functionality. Users could send and receive email messages from any POP or IMAP-enabled account just a page away from their friends’ profiles and favorite social apps.

A range of synergies is also possible. When you receive an email from a friend in your network, you could see their current status message or recently added pictures. If the sender isn’t your friend but is part of the social network, you could be presented with an option to add them as a friend or view commonly shared friends.

There’s been talk that email is the true social network, since the people you email most must be the most important to you. That’s rubbish, of course. How are you going to check out that cute girl in class using email? Or share your favorite music and photos with several friends without annoying the hell out of them?

No. Email - no matter how advanced it gets - isn’t going to supplant Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. But that doesn’t mean the social networks shouldn’t embrace email more tightly. Imagine the page view increases if users began checking their email messages along with their friends’ profiles. And the development cycles that would be saved by social networks that would otherwise need to replicate email functionality with their own messaging systems.

The benefits of integrating something like Orgoo wouldn’t necessarily stop at email. Orgoo would like to white label its instant messaging and video chat capabilities as well. The former would be particularly appealing to networks other than Facebook, which already has on-site instant messaging. None of the networks, however, has really embrace video communication yet.

Despite the potential mutual benefits of Orgoo integration (Orgoo itself would enjoy access to large, well-established user bases), the startup has a tough sell to make. Social networks will only reluctantly put so much of their users’ experience into the hands of a separate company. I imagine we’ll see smaller networks in the long tail implement Orgoo before any of the big players, such as MySpace, which was hypothetically mocked up in the shots accompanying this post.

Check out Zenbe and Xobni for two other attempts to blur the lines between email and social networking.

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Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming

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Blog search engine Technorati, which was simultaneously pitching a sale through Montgomery & Co. as well as a new venture round, raised $7.5 million in a fourth round of financing according to a regulatory filing. Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mobius Venture Capital and FG Incubation.

I spoke with Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra this evening, who confirms that a venture round has been closed and says that the company will make an announcement next week that includes more information.

It’s also clear that the company is refocusing its business. We believe they are launching a blogger-focused advertising network based on documents we published in February. The company has, however, considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. We’ll know more next week.

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Upcoming Conferences From Our Sponsors

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Stay out the summer heat and get into these cool summer conferences.

Supernova starts this Monday. It’s June 16-18 in San Francisco, CA. TechCrunch readers automatically receive a $200 discount here.

Come join TechCrunch as we co-host the Mobile Connections forum with Kevin Werbach Monday at 5:15 pm at the Mission Bay Conference Center.

Sun Microsystems is hosting an Open Source Business Intelligence Summit on June 26, 2008 in Menlo Park, CA.

They are creating a forum to learn about the challenges and benefits of implementing an Open Source strategy. It is also a chance to understand how to develop next generation applications based on Open Source technology and how Sun can help you take advantage of it for your commercial success.

The detailed agenda is here and key topics include:

- Open Source as an emerging paradigm

- Culture and community of Open Source and its buyers

- Open Source products and technologies from Sun

- Open Source impact on Database, Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse environments

Speakers include:

- Mark Madsen, award winning IT architect, analyst and consultant

- Ian Murdock, champion of Developer and Community Marketing

- Zack Urlocker, former VP at MySQL

Free admission to the conference is extended on an invitation basis here. To request to attend the conference, register here (and tell them TechCrunch sent you).

OReilly’s Velocity Conference, June 23-24 in Burlingame, CA. Use “vel08tech” for a 15% registration discount. Email freeticket [at] techcrunch [dot com] if you’re interested in securing a free ticket. OReilly will select one name at random next Thursday, June 19 at 5 pm pst.

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Loopt Now Available For BlackBerry Users

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Mobile social network Loopt is making a big push this summer.

CEO Sam Altman already took stage at last week’s Stevenote prior to the unveiling of iPhone 3G. He was there to present the friend tracking software Loopt has been developing in time for the iPhone App Store launch on July 11th.

But while Altman describes Loopt’s iPhone version as the company’s best ever, he’s not overlooking the fact that many smartphone consumers still prefer the BlackBerry (and may even go for the BlackBerry Bold over the new iPhone). So Loopt is releasing software for BlackBerry devices as well, available here.

As with the iPhone, the BlackBerry software is free of charge. But unlike the iPhone, it will work on a variety of networks: Sprint, Alltel, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

See here for a full list of supported phones. Competitors include Whrrl, Brightkite, Zyb, and several others.

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Microsoft’s Letter to The Troops: Our Yahoo Offer Was Better

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Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, sent the following letter to Microsoft employees today. He outlines the deal that Microsoft offered Yahoo, and argues it would have been better for Yahoo than the Google deal. Specifically, he estimates Microsoft’s offer would have added $1 billion to Yahoo’s operating profits. (In contrast, the Google deal is expected to add $800 million in revenues, and less than that in operating profits).

The letter reveals that the three components of the deal Microsoft offered Yahoo were:

1. Microsoft would have invested $8 billion in Yahoo! at $35/share;

2. Microsoft would have purchased Yahoo!’s search assets for $1 billion, and assumed the operations and R&D expense while returning data back to Yahoo! for use in their advertising business; and

3. Microsoft and Yahoo! would have entered into a long-term search partnership, where Microsoft would have provided favorable economics to Yahoo! search, including a three-year guarantee of higher monetization than Yahoo!’s Panama paid search system currently provides.

Here is the full text of the letter.

From: Kevin Johnson
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 2:20 PM
To: Platforms & Services Division; APSP FTE - Adv & Pub Solutions Platform; Employees.all.corpXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Cc: Executive Staff and Direct Reports
Subject: Update on our Yahoo! discussions

I wanted to take an opportunity to provide my thoughts and perspective on the conclusion of our discussions with Yahoo!, and its announcement of a commercial agreement with Google.

As I shared in my mail on May 18 (see attached), we have better options than a full combination with Yahoo! at the price it suggested, and we have moved forward on our strategy to grow our online business.

Let me share a little background with you. When we made our original proposal on February 1st to combine with Yahoo!, we offered a 62% premium that was based on a desire to reach an agreement in short order. The faster we could reach an agreement, the sooner we could begin the regulatory process and create value through this combination.

In a March 10th meeting in Palo Alto, we explained to Yahoo! management the importance of reaching an agreement by the end of April in order to have an opportunity to complete the regulatory process by the end of this calendar year. Because we could not come to an agreement on price by the end of April and given our concerns about Yahoo!’s business performance, we elected to withdraw our bid and pursue better options for Microsoft.

During the last few weeks, we spent a considerable amount of time with Yahoo! discussing an alternative proposal around search. Specifically, this search proposal had three components:

—Microsoft would have invested $8 billion in Yahoo! at $35/share;

—Microsoft would have purchased Yahoo!’s search assets for $1 billion, and assumed the operations and R&D expense while returning data back to Yahoo! for use in their advertising business; and

—Microsoft and Yahoo! would have entered into a long-term search partnership, where Microsoft would have provided favorable economics to Yahoo! search, including a three-year guarantee of higher monetization than Yahoo!’s Panama paid search system currently provides.

This partnership would have created a stronger competitor to Google, providing greater choice and innovation for advertisers, publishers and consumers. This approach could have been implemented quickly and would have simplified the integration process for both parties. It would have also established the basis for a long-term Internet partnership between Yahoo! and Microsoft.

We believe this proposal would have created compelling value for Yahoo! and its shareholders in at least three ways:

—New Transfer of Cash to Yahoo! Shareholders. This proposal would have transferred $9 billion from Microsoft to Yahoo!, which could have been used by Yahoo! to reward their shareholders.

—A More Profitable Ongoing Business. This proposal would have resulted in higher operating income on an annual basis for Yahoo!, with our projections more than doubling Yahoo!’s operating income in the first year of operation, and increasing it by more than $1 billion above its current operating income level.

—A More Compelling Search Offering. The combination of the search platforms would have unlocked new R&D innovation, eliminated redundant engineering efforts and allowed for greater scale in serving our customers.

Taken together, we believe that our proposal would have created total value for Yahoo!’s shareholders in excess of $33 per share.

Unfortunately Yahoo! has chosen a different course, and yesterday announced an agreement that would start to consolidate over 90% of the paid search advertising market in Google’s hands. This will make the market far less competitive. There are many experts who suggest that a host of legal and regulatory problems lie ahead for Google and Yahoo!.

Regardless of Yahoo!’s decision, we will continue to move forward on our strategy in online services and advertising.

Since my mail on May 18, we have been making great progress. At our advance08 conference, we announced Live Search cashback and Live Search Farecast, and the initial response to these user experience and business model innovations in search has been very positive. On June 2nd, we also announced a distribution deal with HP, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, to install a Live Search-enabled toolbar on all HP consumer PCs planned to ship in the United States and Canada, beginning in January 2009.

We look forward to sharing more milestones and details on our plans as we head to MGX and our Financial Analyst Meeting in July.

I remain confident in our assets, plans and people to succeed in building our online business. Thanks again for your commitment and focus.

Regards,

Kevin Johnson l President Microsoft Platforms & Services Division l

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Next New Networks Looking For Next New CEO

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Web video production house Next New Networks is looking for a new CEO. Founder and current CEO Herb Scannell, who will remain as chairman, announced it on the company’s blog. Previously, Scannell was vice chairman of MTV Networks and president of Nickelodeon, where he launched the career of SpongeBob SquarePants. (Not that he’s looking for a SpongeBob type to fill his shoes, necessarily). Next New Networks runs 16 different video Websites, including Barely Political and Channel Frederator, all creating original online video.

So what kind of candidate is Scannell and his investors (Goldman Sachs, Spark Capital, Velocity Interactive) looking for? Scannell writes in his post:

Thus far, we’ve been video-centric, built our network model, and got distribution and advertising up and running. Now, I want to see us go beyond video by building up our web capabilities in key categories, and move the company to make our sites and new offerings even more robust for communities to gather and interact. Hence, I plan on bringing in someone as CEO who has “been there, done that” in building a web business, and who will work with me as Executive Chairman.

Blogs are becoming an executive recruiting tool for startups. Last year, SocialText founder Ross Mayfield used his blog to similarly announce that he wanted to find a CEO to take his company to “thenext level.” Four months later, he found his replacement. (He remains chairman and president)

How long will it take Next New Networks to find a new CEO? If you’ve been there, done that, and want to do it again, send Herb your resume.

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Get Ready For A New Platform War. Google Gears Drives Straight At Microsoft’s Profits.

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Google launched Gears last May, and for the first year of its release it was considered a minor, niche product that a few developers and users may take advantage of to allow offline access to web applications. You can probably recall the arguments at the time: who needs offline access, connectivity is everywhere anyway, not enough apps will support this etc. It wasn’t until a year later and only a few weeks ago, that Google revealed its ace card: Gears-powered messaging for MySpace that is super-accelerated. Google had entered the race to provide the new web API, and for a year almost nobody had noticed.

The browser of the future is likely to become the virtual machine that hosts almost all applications. In this scenario the operating system becomes transparent, so Microsoft has something to protect (the source of its profits), as does Adobe, who currently provides the most common and consistent web virtual machine with Flash. Google has made no secret of its plans to target and harm Microsoft, and they know that the best way to go about that is to make the operating system irrelevant by moving up a layer and turning the browser into a standard, but powerful, virtual machine for applications.

It is hard to convey in a review how Gears can change and accelerate the functions of a web application. With browser-based Javascript, functions in MySpace such as listing and sorting emails or filtering through a list of friends felt very slow; the loading bar would freeze as the hourglass spins while your browser makes multiple requests back to the server. With a quick install of gears, a click on a confirmation box and a couple of seconds of loading time, the same functions that would previously almost drive a user insane now feel like they are part of the browser itself. What Google showed us Gears could do with the MySpace integration woke almost everybody up to the true intention of the product: this was no longer about offline browsing, but a shot aimed directly at Adobe and Microsoft.

At last count, Google had a suite of 28 different web-based applications, all being used by millions of people all over the world. The technology they use to implement their web applications has always been standards-based HTML, CSS and Javascript. The choice of Ajax may be because it is simply the best solution, but it may have more to do with the fact that almost every alternate web development technology stack is produced and controlled by a direct competitor. Google strongly backed the development of the open source Firefox web browser and supported open web standards as their technology stack of choice. They did this because their web applications depended on it, and a weak Firefox could possibly result in a revived Internet Explorer that would hand over control of the web back to Microsoft.

Previously, using only browser-based Javascript to power web applications wasn’t a problem for Google. That was, until their competitors took a step forward and released their respective second generation web platforms in the form of Flex/AIR and Silverlight. Microsoft and Adobe had taken a big step forward in terms of what could be done with web based applications, with desktop-like interfaces and functionality. It wasn’t going to be too long before competitors big and small would be using competing technology platforms to build competing applications that would make the Google app suite look like it was stuck in the 90’s.

The choice for Google was clear: either give up on browser-based Javascript and standards development and take up one of the new technologies, or stick with it and progress the core web technologies forward to the point where they are a viable alternative. The problem for Google was that while there were new standards and planned browser features that would soon introduce rich web technologies, the progress in developing these standards was so slow that it would be years before they would see wide-spread adoption. The new HTML standard, HTML5, was specifically aimed at extending the capabilities of web applications within native browsers, without the need for an added proprietary runtime. Those same functions and other additions would form the basis for the new Google web API.

With slow standards development blocking the path to better and faster, yet still free and open web application development, Google decided to take on that market itself through Google Gears. The idea was simple: bring forward the features of tomorrow’s web technologies into today’s browsers. The specific features mostly came from the new HTML5 specifications that standards bodies had been spending years working on. Instead of waiting for them to hit production, Google simply implemented them as best they could by extending the browser through a plugin. They would sacrifice standards in the short-term (and essentially ‘figure it out later’) in order to bring their web applications up to a rich next-generation standard from where they could stand up to Flash and Silverlight.

Gears would be developed by a group of 30 or so developers as part of the open source group in Google. In an ironic twist, the group is led by Vic Gundotra, who prior to Google led developer evangelism at Microsoft. The small group of developers set out to mark out and preserve Google’s interests in Javascript and an open browser virtual machine. On paper they would seem out-gunned by the larger groups and budgets that Microsoft and Adobe were pouring into their respective platforms. To help boost their case, they have detached Gears from Google (literally also – the project is now called just ‘Gears’) and released the code under an open source license.

The first release would focus on a few features proposed in HTML5 that were considered most important: client-based structured and object storage. Because of the choice to implement client-storage first, Gears would be framed as an offline application solution for the next year, which if not intentional, certainly served them well as competitors likely didn’t notice the broader goal. Google could have developed and released their own browser, there was speculation and rumors in blogs stating exactly that, but the browser market was competitive, tedious and generally a pain. Besides, even after having developed a new browser they would have to wait for critical market mass while they drove users to adopting it, and there would still be the other 70, 80 or 90 percent of the market not using their browser who might still want to use Google apps.

The shortcut was to skip past the browsers and add a new layer above them – the Google web layer. All the popular browsers provide mechanisms by which developers can extend their functionality, so all Google had to do was to developer a plugin for each browser. It could have its new web API on potentially 100% of desktops without asking users to switch and most importantly, in a manner much faster and less painful than entering the browser market. Browsers would now do all the boring bits: rendering HTML, presenting an interface, user options etc. while Google leveraged what was there and dashed ahead.

Today Gears supports a whole host of new features, some that it has in common with the other next generation web API efforts from Microsoft and Adobe while others are a result of their own innovation. Function calls available to developers include background processes (no more hourglass), client-side image manipulation, location-awareness, better file uploading and a local database inside the browser.

There are two sides to the adoption of a new API and development platform: one side is user support, and in this case it requires a plug-in to be installed; the other side is developer support, and with Gears it couldn’t be easier as the applications are the same as any other in using browser-based Javascript, it just provides developers with a whole lot more they can do in the browser. Javascript and web developers have nothing new to learn and users are only a plug-in away (with the inevitable upcoming bundling deals, not even that). It took Flash 5 or 6 years to become common enough for developers to target it with confidence, with Google backing it, Gears could take less than half that time.

In this race Google has nothing to lose but a lot to gain, and in a single shot has kick-started the standards-based and open-source alternate new web API. Unlike their competitors they don’t have an interest in controlling the platform nor directly profiting from it. They are instead seeking to maintain the current status quo: Javascript in the browser for most applications and Flash or another alternate when you need just a little bit more.

It has been a long time since the last platform war, but each time that technology experiences one you can see the biggest companies fall and the smallest companies prosper. Add open source to the equation and the result may still be that no single company dominates. With so much at stake and such large companies involved, we are surely about to witness a long and protracted battle. Only time will tell if the Google approach to taking the web forward will work.

This post is part of a series written by Nik Cubrilovic on the Next-Gen Web, read other posts here.

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Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists (500 Invites)

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Even if they could, few people have the time to write a book. But what if they could Twitter one? For all those aspiring novelists out there, Quillpill might be the app to get them started.

Twitter clones have been cropping up all over the web in recent months with most of them replicating the “What are you doing?” concept in one way or the other.

Quillpill takes a totally different approach by wanting to know what stories you would like to tell. The site is primarily aimed at aspiring authors and readers of fiction. Quillpill is currently in private beta but available to the first 500 Techcrunch readers to sign up by sending an e-mail to techcrunch[at]quillpill[dot]com.

In order to compose a so-called book, users first choose a title and then submit posts with a maximum of 140 characters. Entries belonging together are displayed one below the other in a thread-like structure. Authors are able to create any kind of text-based content over time, including diaries, short stories, poems or even novels. Here is an excerpt from one called Saijo City Notebook by Eric Rice:

I remember reading in school about the controversy about broadcasting
public executions– a quaint and kitsch idea, considering the failure.

Televised executions came and went, as fads do, because the interest
wasn’t there. The ratings sucked. In otherwords, death was canceled.

Why are entries limited to 140 characters? The answer is simple: Founders Derek Maune and Elissa Rose have their eyes on the mobile web. The Twitter-like approach makes it possible even for owners of low-end mobile devices to blog stories wherever they want, regardless if a PC is around or not. In addition to the regular web site, Quillpill is available in an optimized mobile and iPhone version (”ipill”). The founders claim the service can also be used on video game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, the DS or the Sony PSP.

Quillpill does a lot of things right. The site’s most superficial selling point is a strangely futuristic, yet beautiful design. The threading mechanism is straightforward, allowing for an easy read for people who are often on the road. The minimalist interface lets users create books very easily. As of now, there isn’t even a help section on the site, and it’s not really needed.

With all essentials covered and no major competing service suited to serial fiction around, the question is if Quillpill’s underlying concept will actually work. It remains to be seen whether writers will embrace the concept of composing texts one thought at a time, on small keyboards and mini screens. At least as important, a critical mass of readers must be ready for “cellular storytelling” in order for Quillpill to become a scalable business.

Japanese readers began saying yes to mobile publishing quite a while ago. Books written on cell phones are selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Japan. The founders say this phenomenon actually triggered the development of Quillpill. Consequently, the site will be released almost simultaneously in the US and Japan (as “Kyupi”). Future enhancements such as exporting content to different formats or a reward system for popular stories are planned to be implemented into both versions at the same time. Tokyo-based web consultancy Genkii is currently in the process of localizing the service into Japanese.

As of now, using Quillpill is completely free, but a paid subscription system is planned. Readers will also be able to purchase Quillpill books as ebooks or hard copies through the site itself or via print-on-demand services. Just like Twitter Japan, the Japanese version will be additionally monetized with display ads.

Quillpill was founded by Kansas-based Synthetic Entertainment in January 2008 and has been self-funded, costing about $30,000 so far.

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Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit Behind Stealth Startup DotSpots

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Serial entrepreneur Farhad Mohit is at it again. Back in 1996, Mohit founded BizRate, one of the first consumer review sites, and then shopping search engine Shopzilla. He sold both to E.W. Scripps for $570 million in June 2005.

Now he has a new super stealthy startup called DotSpots. The startup raised a seed round of $300,000 last September from Mohit and HitForge, the angel fund run by engineers. (HitForge is also an investor in WeGame and Mesmo.tv). In his LinkedIn profile, Mohit hints that DotSpots:

will make my other ideas to date look like child’s play…

Not much else is known about DotSpots other than that it wants to apply crowd wisdom to every piece of information out there, beyond shopping and product info. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

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Google’s $83 Million Escape Clause: SEC Filing Spells Out Details Of Yahoo-Google Deal

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In a new filing with the SEC, Yahoo spells out the terms of the search-advertising agreement it announced yesterday with Google. Most of the filing fleshes out known details about the agreement. But it also discloses something Jerry Yang and Sue Decker didn’t want to talk about yesterday. The deal includes an $83 million escape clause for Google:

Google may terminate the Services Agreement if, after ten months after the Services are first launched, and each month thereafter, the gross revenues recognized by Google under the Services Agreement are less than $83,333,333 for the four prior calendar months.

In other words, Google has a minimum guarantee of serving at least $83 million worth of ads through Yahoo on a rolling 4-month basis, or else it can walk away. That’s a pretty tiny threshold, considering that Yahoo’s quarterly U.S. revenues are $1.3 billion. The amount comes to about one percent of Yahoo’s total projected revenues for 2008. (When Yahoo president Sue Decker was asked about minimum guarantees yesterday during a conference call, she wouldn’t comment).

There is another clause that lets both companies out of the agreement without penalty to avoid antitrust lawsuits or other similar actions. But Google negotiated a $250 million kill fee if the agreement is terminated within two years because of a “change in control” of Yahoo (i.e., a sale). Update: A change in control is defined as occurring if more than 50 percent of Yahoo’s shares are purchased by another company (in the case of Microsoft, News Corp., or Time Warner, that threshold is lowered to 35 percent). Curiously, the agreement provides loopholes for a change of control “triggered by” Microsoft acquiring more than 15 percent of shares on the open market or more than 5 percent of shares acquired directly from Yahoo or buying any part of Yahoo representing more than one percent of its annual revenues. If any of this happens, Yahoo does not have to pay the fee If Yahoo is acquired by Microsoft, it doesn’t have to pay the fee. Thus, this single clause means that anyone other than Microsoft might have to pay up to $250 million more to buy Yahoo.

If the Services Agreement is terminated by either party within 24 months of the Effective Date as a result of a Change in Control of Yahoo! (other than a Change in Control triggered only by Microsoft …), Yahoo! is required to pay to Google the sum of $250,000,000

The agreement also explains Yahoo’s discretion in deciding how, when, and where to display Google ads. It also goes into how the deal is structured. There are two portions. Google is to pay Yahoo both a variable and fixed percentage of the gross revenues it generates through the deal. The variable percentage is based on monthly targets, presumably on top of a fixed percentage. The actual percentages of the revenue split was not disclosed:

Under the Services Agreement, Yahoo! has sole discretion to choose which search queries to send to Google and is not obligated to send any minimum number of search queries. Yahoo! also has sole discretion to decide on which pages to display ads provided by Google through its AFC Services. In addition, the Services Agreement is non-exclusive, and expressly provides that Yahoo! is not prevented from implementing any other advertising, promotion or marketing service or monetization method, including any that are the same as or substantially similar in nature to the Services or displaying comparable advertisements. Yahoo! also has sole discretion with respect to the placement and location of ads generated from the Services, the number of ads requested and the formatting of ads. Additionally, Yahoo! may serve its own ads or third-party ads alongside Google ads.

Google will pay Yahoo! a percentage of the gross revenues generated from AFS Services on the Yahoo! Properties, with such percentage adjusting based on specified monthly gross revenue thresholds, and with respect to the Yahoo! Partner Properties will pay a similar percentage of gross revenues less a separate specified percentage. Google will also pay Yahoo! a fixed percentage of gross revenues generated from AFC Services on the Yahoo! Properties and a fixed percentage of gross revenues for AFC Services on Yahoo! Partner Properties.

The full text of the agreement follows:

Item 1.01. Entry into a Material Definitive Agreement.

Services Agreement
On June 12, 2008 (the “Effective Date”), Yahoo! Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Yahoo!”), and Google Inc., a Delaware corporation (“Google”), entered into a Services Agreement (the “Services Agreement”), pursuant to which Google will provide Yahoo! with advertisements through Google’s AdSense for Search service (the “AFS Services”) and AdSense for Content service (the “AFC Services” and together with the “AFS Services,” the “Services”) for display on web sites and other applications owned and operated by Yahoo! and its subsidiaries (the “Yahoo! Properties”) and certain of Yahoo!’s business partners/affiliates (the “Yahoo! Partner Properties”). The Services Agreement applies to properties within the United States and Canada.

Under the Services Agreement, Yahoo! has sole discretion to choose which search queries to send to Google and is not obligated to send any minimum number of search queries. Yahoo! also has sole discretion to decide on which pages to display ads provided by Google through its AFC Services. In addition, the Services Agreement is non-exclusive, and expressly provides that Yahoo! is not prevented from implementing any other advertising, promotion or marketing service or monetization method, including any that are the same as or substantially similar in nature to the Services or displaying comparable advertisements. Yahoo! also has sole discretion with respect to the placement and location of ads generated from the Services, the number of ads requested and the formatting of ads. Additionally, Yahoo! may serve its own ads or third-party ads alongside Google ads.

Google will pay Yahoo! a percentage of the gross revenues generated from AFS Services on the Yahoo! Properties, with such percentage adjusting based on specified monthly gross revenue thresholds, and with respect to the Yahoo! Partner Properties will pay a similar percentage of gross revenues less a separate specified percentage. Google will also pay Yahoo! a fixed percentage of gross revenues generated from AFC Services on the Yahoo! Properties and a fixed percentage of gross revenues for AFC Services on Yahoo! Partner Properties.

The initial term of the Services Agreement commenced on the Effective Date and will continue for a period of four years thereafter. Yahoo! may, at its option, extend the term of the Services Agreement for up to two additional periods of three years each. Either party may terminate the Services Agreement upon notice to the other party (i) in the event of an uncured material breach of the Services Agreement by the other party, subject to dispute resolution procedures and certain limitations; (ii) in the event of a Change in Control (as defined below) involving either party; (iii) 120 days after the Effective Date in order to avoid or end a lawsuit or similar action filed on competition law grounds if the terminating party has taken all actions required under the Services Agreement with respect to regulatory matters and defending such action is not commercially reasonable for that party (taking all factors into account); or (iv) if a court of competent jurisdiction has entered an order enjoining the implementation of the Services Agreement. In addition, Google may terminate the Services Agreement if, after ten months after the Services are first launched, and each month thereafter, the gross revenues recognized by Google under the Services Agreement are less than $83,333,333 for the four prior calendar months.

As defined in the Services Agreement, the term “Change in Control” means (a) a merger, consolidation, statutory share exchange, recapitalization, restructuring or business combination involving directly or indirectly a party or a subsidiary of a party in which voting securities of the party outstanding immediately prior to such transaction do not continue to represent more than 50% (or 65% in the case of a transaction involving Microsoft Corporation (“Microsoft”), Time Warner Inc. (“Time Warner”) or News Corporation (“News Corp”), in each case together with their respective affiliates) of the voting power represented by the outstanding voting securities of the surviving entity immediately following the transaction; (b) any “person” or “group” becoming the “beneficial owner” (as such terms are used or defined in Sections 13(d) and 14(d) under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended) of more than 50% of the voting power of the then outstanding voting securities of the party, except that, in the case of Time Warner and News Corp, the percentage will be 35% instead of 50% and, in the case of Microsoft, the percentage will be 15% instead of 50% and a Change in Control will also be deemed to occur if Microsoft (i) beneficially owns 15% of the voting power of the party or (ii) acquires directly from a party any equity or voting securities of that party representing (or having a right to receive in the aggregate) 5% or more of the total equity value of the party or 1% or more of the party’s annual revenues on a consolidated basis); (c) approval by the stockholders of a party of a plan of liquidation or dissolution; (d) the sale or disposition of all or substantially all the consolidated assets of a party; or (e) at any point in time, Yahoo! no longer owns and, with respect to the U.S. and Canada, controls a majority portion of Yahoo!’s technology and intellectual property assets that in the 12-month period prior to that time had been owned by Yahoo! and used by Yahoo! to provide services in the U.S. and Canada for either its algorithmic search or search advertising business. The Services Agreement also permits Google to suspend performance of the Services under certain circumstances, including a pending Change in Control of Yahoo! involving Microsoft, Time Warner or News Corp and a change in a majority of the board of directors of Yahoo! following an annual or special meeting of stockholders if a majority of the new directors did not serve on Yahoo!’s board immediately prior to such stockholder meeting and were nominated or solicited for by Microsoft, Time Warner or News Corp or, solely with respect to Yahoo!’s first two annual or special meetings held after the Effective Date where the election of a majority of directors is before Yahoo! stockholders (but not later than September 1, 2009), by any other person or group.

If the Services Agreement is terminated by either party within 24 months of the Effective Date as a result of a Change in Control of Yahoo! (other than a Change in Control triggered only by Microsoft either (x) acquiring beneficial ownership of voting securities representing more than 15% of the voting power of outstanding Yahoo! voting securities or (y) acquiring directly from Yahoo! equity or voting securities representing 5% or more of Yahoo!’s total equity value or 1% or more of Yahoo!’s consolidated annual revenues, unless Microsoft becomes the beneficial owner of more than 35% of the voting power of such securities within such 24 month period), Yahoo! is required to pay to Google the sum of $250,000,000, which payment will be reduced by one-half of an amount equal to (a) all gross revenues received by Google pursuant to the Services Agreement through the date of termination less (b) the amount equal to Yahoo!’s share of such gross revenues during the same period.

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Massive Destruction Of Shareholder Value, Employee Morale and Internet Balance Of Power

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I don’t believe that there is anything Yahoo could do at this point to further destroy their business that would surprise me.

At 1:35 pm EST yesterday we posted that we believed Yahoo would announce a search marketing deal with Google, essentially ending their negotiations with Microsoft and, pending government approval, sealing Google’s monopoly position in search marketing. Twenty-five minutes later a massive sell off of Yahoo stock began - the company lost billions in market valuation over the course of the next hour as the market made it’s bets on the news.

At 3 pm EST Yahoo announced that all talks with Microsoft were formally off, and the stock fell further. It eventually climbed back a little, but by the end of the trading day, $3.6 billion had been removed from the pockets of Yahoo stockholders. Well after trading ended, Yahoo confirmed our original report that they’d signed a deal with Google to hand over much of their search marketing business.

The deal terms announced with Google appear to be fairly innocent - a non-exclusive arrangement that let’s Yahoo take Google’s ads if and when they choose to, and put them alongside their own ads, and/or other third party ads. But the truth is that this will cause even more advertisers to flee Yahoo’s platform. Which will drive auction-determined ad rates down. Which will drive Yahoo to take more Google ads. Which will…

It’s a vicious cycle and they will have no choice, as a public company, but to rely more and more on Google as time goes on.

Our sources inside Yahoo had interesting things to say about the general state of things at the office today as Yahoo’s stock price fall apart. “Unclear what’s happening” said one vice president. “Fucking train wreck, total chaos” was the less eloquent observation of a more junior employee.

When I accused Yahoo of playing the crazy card in their negotiations with Microsoft, I never thought these people were actually insane. Handing Google a monopoly in search marketing was just a ploy, I thought. A way to get Microsoft to bid a little higher than $31 per share.

But it turns out I was wrong. Yahoo’s hatred of Microsoft runs so deep that they were actually, in the end, willing to destroy the future of their company just to keep it independent for a short while longer. They’ve ignored the wishes of their shareholders, employees and many now former key employees in killing that deal. And apart from Google, CEO Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker and possibly Tim O’Reilly, I don’t believe there is anyone in the world that is happy with what has happened.

As much as everyone still has lingering doubts about Microsoft after their hardball monopolistic practices of the nineties, it’s clear that they, along with Yahoo, were the only force counterbalancing the massive presence of Google in search marketing.

Without them, Google would continue to keep the lion’s share of search marketing dollars to themselves, and distribute next to nothing to third party publishers. But Microsoft and Yahoo were both willing to fight for some of those deals, at least pushing Google’s profits down a little. Now, with Yahoo taken out of the game, it’s unclear that Microsoft can fight Google on its own. How long will they pour profits from Windows and Office into trying to compete in search?

The delicate power balance among the big players was disrupted today in a big way, and the consequences will be felt over the coming months and years. We needed a competitive market in search to ensure the health of the Internet. Now, it’s nearly impossible to see how that can happen.

It took me about five minutes of watching Yahoo’s top two executives talk last month to realize that they had no fight left in them. The fact that they simply gave up wouldn’t matter so much if the only people hurt by their actions were their employees and stockholders. But that just isn’t the case, and now we all have to deal with the fallout.

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Google Speeds Up Mobile Search

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At Google, it’s all about speed. That’s doubly true for mobile applications. Google made some improvements to its mobile search, making it load faster on most mobile browsers. It does this by caching the page.

Google also added an iGoogle link to its mobile homepage. It also now allows you to customize and rearrange the widgets on the mobile version of your iGoogle start page so what you see on your mobile iGoogle can be different than what you see on your desktop. (You have to set this up from a regular computer, but can basically drag and drop widgets around to your liking).

This should make iGoogle a much more viable mobile start page. And, arguably, you need a start page with shortcuts to your favorite content on your mobile browser more than you do on your desktop. It’s just faster that way.

Below is a longish Google video with a demo of the new functionality (skip to about 1:44 in, when the actual demo starts:

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Facebook’s Second F8 Developer Conference Announced. How Will They Top Last Year’s Facebook Platform Launch?

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Facebook announced its second F8 Developer event earlier today, to be held in San Francisco on July 23, 2008.

It’ll be hard for them to top last year’s announcement of Facebook Platform at the first F8 event. Facebook Platform transformed the idea of social networking from an activity to a platform to engage users. MySpace’s Platform, Google Open Social, and even Yahoo’s new feel-good social strategy can all be linked back to that single event.

What will Facebook launch this year? I don’t know yet, but look for them to expand their open source offering, push the new profile product, and, I’m sure, have at least one new major announcement. There may even be a little celebrating over their new status as the largest social network in the world.

Update: We’ve been informed that Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin has said Facebook will launch Facebook Connect at F8 this year, although this has yet to be confirmed by the company. Its launch would certainly make sense given its intention to essentially extend the app platform into the broader web. Facebook may very well have been saving the initial announcement of Connect for F8 until MySpace surprised them.

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Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network

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It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets - MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4 years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.

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Redesign A First Step In Bringing Order To The MySpace Chaos

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Los Angeles based social network MySpace, which has 115 million monthly visitors worldwide (Comscore, April 2008), will be launching a redesign of its site next week. The first phase of the project, internally called “MySpace 2.0,” will launch on Wednesday June 18.

The changes affect five major areas of the service: homepage, navigation, profile editor, search and the MySpaceTV Flash player.

The screenshots above show some of the changes. The homepage will be significantly less cluttered, with the barrage of navigation links across the top whittled down to just five key links (home, mail, profile, music and myspaceTV). Other less used navigation functions will be available under a drop down menu. The 28 additional navigation links currently on the top half of the page will also be moved to the drop down menu.

Search is also being redone with a tabbed results page, reducing the need to search multiple times for different kinds of results. People search results are also being ranked, with friends first, then results for people you’ve worked or gone to school with, and then the remaining results. This makes a search for “Jeff,” for example, return meaningful results v. the mess you get today. MySpace’s new search technology is based on the open source Lucene project.

The other interesting area of the redesign is the Flash MySpaceTV player. MySpace says they will now offer 480p video when available. New features include a true full-screen mode and easier controls.

MySpace worked with San Francisco-based consulting firm Adaptive Path on design and information architecture elements of the project.

MySpace cites Comscore statistics in saying that 25% of all Americans visit the site monthly. It is the most trafficked website in the U.S., and 12% of all online minutes are spent on the site. 300,000 new users sign up daily.

MySpace has recently started to reap the benefits of focusing on the tech/developer crowd, a strategy that began last year. Big media, and blogs, are noticing the new and improved MySpace.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Yahoo Runs Into Google’s Arms

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Yahoo and Google have confirmed that they are indeed entering into a partnership around search advertising, a story we broke earlier today. Google’s blog post on the agreement is here.

—The deal is non-exclusive. Yahoo will be able to run Google ads alongside Yahoo ads or other ad providers.
—The deal is expected to add $800 million a year in revenues and $250 million to $450 million in operating cash flow.
—The deal only applies to paid search and contextual ads, not to algorithmic search.

This arrangement will no doubt intensify the scrutiny from Washington, where the Justice Department has already launched an investigation into antitrust issues arising from Yahoo and Google merely testing the waters for today’s partnership. Congress might want to hold hearings as well. Back in April, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney estimated that a Google deal could increase Yahoo’s cash flows by more than $1 billion a year. It turns it will be less than that. But given the antitrust scrutiny, the deal is necessarily structured in a creative way. As part of the deal, Yahoo can decide to go with Google only for those search queries where it will get the most bang for the buck.

On Wednesday, when asked by Fox News about the antitrust issues surrounding a possible search deal with Yahoo, Schmidt responded:

Well you are presuming that there’s an issue there.

If there were an issue, it’s perfectly possible that you can do commercial deals that look like outsourcing deals which are not exclusive and where industry structures allow everybody to win. If you look in the automobile industry and lots and lots of industries like that, you have suppliers who supply other people. So if there were a deal, it would be based on those sorts of principles.

As long as the relationship is competitive, it might pass regulatory scrutiny. That is, if Microsoft can bid for Yahoo’s search advertising business as well, then whoever can deliver the most cash to Yahoo will win the business. In reality, we all know who that will be: Google. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo can match the search dollars that Google can deliver.

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Liveblogging Yahoo-Google Conference Call

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Here are our notes from Yahoo’s conference call today discussing it’s new search advertising partnership with Google. CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker spoke and took questions

Jerry Yang: Our discussions with MSFt have concluded, after a number of meetings, including a meeting on June 8 in which chairman Roy Bostock and management participated. Discussed a number of transaction options. Microsoft stated unequivocally it didn’t want to buy all of Yahoo. Microsoft’s search offer is not in best interest of Yahoo stockholders.

The agreement with Google does not preclude a change of control agreement with a third party. Clearly it is time to move on.

Deal with Google strengthens competitiveness. The strategy is to capture the growth opp in the online ad market. Core to this strategy is the convergence search and display. We view an open strategy as the key to future success.

We have taken a number of steps already down this path. The commercial agreement with Google promotes growth and profitability.

We entered into a commercial agreement—yahoo will serv paid search ads from Google along Yahoo search results.

Panama continues to operate.

The deal is non exclusive. Paid listings can come from anyone else.

It is a 10 year deal, with a 4-year initial term, and two 3-year renewals at yahoo’s option. US and Canada only.

Both companies voluntarily agreed to delay implementation for 3 and a half months while Dept. of Justice reviews.

Expect $250 to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow. We believe there is $800 million revenue upside opportunity in US and Canada for search queries where upside opportunity exists.

See this as a natural extension of Right Media acquisition, and the upcoming ad management platform launch. Part of natural efforts to pursue an open marketplace. We believe an open marketplace is critical.

Sue Decker: We are really excited about the potential of what we are announcing. It allows us to do what we do best. And it gives Yahoo full control over all aspects of its business.

Hallmark of this agreement is its flexibility. It also enhances our options. Lets us determine whether and how we display Google’s paid search ads alongside ads from our own Panama marketplace. We will display Google paid search results where they deliver better value. We decide how much of our search inventory will display those ads. We keep unfettered control over the user experience.

Advertisers pay Google directly, Google will then pay us TAC for clickthroughs. Our advertisers continue to pay us for our ads.

AMP, new display ad platform, will be available next week. Recent announcements such as SearchMonkey, Search Assist, Buzz and others are showing success with consumers. We remain strong in algorithmic search.

Agreement also includes interoperability between Yahoo and Google’s instant messaging platforms.

Jerry Yang: Talks about how this will maximize stockholder value.

Q&A

Q: Will advertisers still want to buy Yahoo when they can get on Yahoo pages through Google’s advertising system? Why learn two systems? Any interest in serving yahoo ads on Google pages?

Sue: One thing we learned is that GOOG monetizes well for query ads, but not as competitive in the tail. So we want control in segments where we are comparable in terms of performance. So with this we get the best of both worlds.

We might look into helping them with display ads on Google.

Q: What percentage of search queries do you expect to show google ads?

Sue: There is a considerable amount we think we can continue to monetize in the head of the curve. [Doesn't answer].

Q: How much was the TAC split debated?

Sue: It is competitive.

Q: Do you think there are opportunities where partner sites will go to GOOG and bypass Yahoo, and are there minimum guarantees?

Sue: Yahoo Partner network is included in this deal. That will be an option. The deal does not extend to new partners that join our Publisher network. I can’t comment on financial terms in terms of guarantees.

Q: Is this a different set of advertisers, and is the $800 million annual?

Sue: The revenue opportunity is annual, based on current monetization numbers not future. We are open to third party networks in display in the way we are now with Google. We think an open approach will assure scale and the best advertising rates and the best match for consumers.

Q: What will be the biggest regulatory hurdle?

Yang: Given it is a commercial agreement, no regulatory hurdle. But we agreed with the Dept. of Justice on a voluntary basis to a 3 and half month review. We have engaged with Google to backfill our ad inventory.

Q: What revenue might you be cannibalizing?

Jerry: The ramp towards full implementation, we won’t be talking about that. We want to leverage this relationship to build a sustainable marketplace around Yahoo. As we learn of ways to create benefits for Yahoo advertisers, we will understand more as we get into it.

Sue: What we saw from testing was consistent. When we contemplate incremental cash flow as we ramp up, we contemplate how we may ramp that up in various verticals or queries where Google is strong and we don’t have a strong position now.

[That's it. Conference call is over].
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Yahoo Announces Non-Exclusive Search Agreement With Google

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Well, it was a little later than we expected, but Yahoo has announced a non-exclusive deal with Google around search and search advertising. Yahoo’s press release is below and their blog post is here.

Additionally, Google’s press release on the announcement can be found here and their blog post here.

Yahoo! to Strengthen Competitive Position in Online Advertising Through Non-Exclusive Agreement With Google

Agreement Advances Yahoo!’s Open Strategy; Enhances Ability to Compete in Converging Search and Display Marketplace

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, announced today that it has reached an agreement with Google Inc. that will enhance its ability to compete in the converging search and display marketplace, advancing the company’s open strategy. The agreement enables Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google alongside Yahoo!’s search results and on some of its web properties in the United States and Canada. The agreement is non-exclusive, giving Yahoo! the ability to display paid search results from Google, other third parties, and Yahoo!’s own Panama marketplace.

Under the terms of the agreement, Yahoo! will select the search term queries for which – and the pages on which – Yahoo! may offer Google paid search results. Yahoo! will define its users’ experience and will determine the number and placement of the results provided by Google and the mix of paid results provided by Panama, Google or other providers. The agreement applies to paid search and content match and does not apply to algorithmic search. The agreement also applies to current partners in Yahoo’s publisher network.

Yahoo! CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang said, “We believe that the convergence of search and display is the next major development in the evolution of the rapidly changing online advertising industry. Our strategies are specifically designed to capitalize on this convergence — and this agreement helps us move them forward in a significant way. It also represents an important next step in our open strategy, building on the progress we have already made in advancing a more open marketplace.”

“This agreement provides a source of funds to both deliver financial value to stockholders from search monetization and to invest in our broader strategy to transform display advertising and advance our starting point objectives with users,” said Yahoo! President Sue Decker. “It enhances competition by promoting our ability to compete in the marketplace where we are especially well positioned: in the convergence of search and display.”

Agreement Provides Attractive Economics and Enhances Search Monetization

Yahoo! believes that this agreement will enable the Company to better monetize Yahoo!’s search inventory in the United States and Canada. At current monetization rates, this is an approximately $800 million annual revenue opportunity. In the first 12 months following implementation, Yahoo! expects the agreement to generate an estimated $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow.

The agreement will enhance Yahoo!’s ability to achieve its goal to grow operating cash flow significantly, while at the same time providing flexibility to continue to invest in ongoing initiatives such as algorithmic search innovation and search and display advertising platforms. It gives Yahoo! complete flexibility to continue to use its Panama paid search results.

Significant Benefits Will Flow to Users, Advertisers, Publishers and Employees

Users will also benefit from Yahoo!’s ability to invest incremental operating cash flow in ongoing improvements to its search services, building upon recent major innovations such as Search Assist and SearchMonkey. Advertisers will continue to benefit from multiple marketplace alternatives including Panama, Google and others. Publishers will benefit from a winning combination of distribution, monetization and services to help them grow their businesses. The financial benefits will enable Yahoo! to broaden the scope of its investments and initiatives, enhancing Yahoo!’s ability to offer attractive career opportunities to its employees.

Terms of the Agreement

The agreement will enable Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google’s AdSense™ for Search and AdSense™ for Content services next to Yahoo!’s internally generated paid search and algorithmic search results. Yahoo may also run Google-supplied ads on non-search Yahoo web properties, as well as on current members of its partner network. The agreement has a term of up to ten years: a four-year initial term and two, three-year renewals at Yahoo!’s option. It applies to Yahoo!’s operations in the U.S. and Canada only. Advertisers will continue to pay Yahoo! directly for clicks served by Yahoo! from Yahoo!’s Panama and Content Match marketplaces. Advertisers will pay Google directly for each click on Google paid search results appearing on Yahoo! owned and operated network or certain affiliate sites. Google will share a percentage of such revenue with Yahoo!.

In addition, Yahoo! and Google agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services, bringing easier and broader communication to users.

The agreement allows either party to terminate the agreement in the event of a change in control of either party. The agreement also requires Yahoo! to pay a termination fee if the agreement is terminated as a result of a change in control that occurs within 24 months. The termination fee is $250 million, subject to reduction by 50 percent of revenues earned by Google under the agreement.

Although Google and Yahoo! are not required to receive regulatory approval of the deal before implementing it, the companies have voluntarily agreed to delay implementation for up to three and a half months while the U.S. Department of Justice reviews the arrangement.

Goldman, Sachs & Co., Lehman Brothers and Moelis & Company are acting as financial advisors to Yahoo!. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP is acting as legal advisor to Yahoo!, and Munger Tolles & Olson LLP is acting as counsel to the outside directors of Yahoo!.

Yahoo! will host a conference call to discuss the agreement with Google at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time today. To listen to the call live, please dial 877-391-6847 (reservation number 70308474#). A live audiocast of the conference call can be accessed through the Company’s Investor Relations website at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/index.cfm. In addition, an archive of the audiocast can be accessed through the same link. An audio replay of the call will be available following the conference call by calling 888-286-8010 (reservation number 84138579).

About Yahoo! Inc.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! is focused on powering its communities of users, advertisers, publishers, and developers by creating indispensable experiences built on trust. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

This release refers to operating cash flow (operating income before depreciation, amortization of intangible assets, and stock-based compensation expense, or OCF), which is a non-GAAP financial measure. The most comparable GAAP measure is income from operations. With respect to the OCF numbers provided in this release, the estimate of income from operations is the same as the estimated OCF, as the Company does not expect to incur any additional depreciation and amortization or stock-based compensation expense related to this agreement.

Forward Looking Statements

This release (including without limitation the statements and information in the quotations from management in this press release) contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties concerning Yahoo!’s projected financial performance as well as Yahoo!’s strategic and operational plans. Actual results may differ materially from those described in this press release due to a number of risks and uncertainties. The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the expected benefits of the services agreement with Google may not be realized, including as a result of actions taken by United States or foreign regulatory authorities and the response or acceptance of the agreement by publishers, advertisers, users and employees; the implementation and results of Yahoo!’s ongoing strategic initiatives; Yahoo!’s ability to compete with new or existing competitors; reduction in spending by, or loss of, marketing services customers; the demand by customers for Yahoo!’s premium services; acceptance by users of new products and services; risks related to joint ventures and the integration of acquisitions; risks related to Yahoo!’s international operations; failure to manage growth and diversification; adverse results in litigation, including intellectual property infringement claims; Yahoo!’s ability to protect its intellectual property and the value of its brands; dependence on key personnel; dependence on third parties for technology, services, content and distribution; general economic conditions and changes in economic conditions; and potential continuing uncertainty arising in connection with the withdrawal of Microsoft’s unsolicited proposal to acquire Yahoo!, and the announced intention by a stockholder to seek control of our Board of Directors, the possibility that Microsoft or another person may in the future make another proposal, or take other actions which may create uncertainty for our employees, publishers, advertisers and other business partners, and the possibility of significant costs of defense, indemnification and liability resulting from stockholder litigation relating to the Microsoft proposal. More information about potential factors that could affect Yahoo!’s business and financial results is included under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” in Yahoo!’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2007, as amended, and the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2008, which are on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and available at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. All information in this release is as of June 12, 2008, unless otherwise noted, and Yahoo! does not intend, and undertakes no duty, to update or otherwise revise the information contained in this release.

Yahoo! and the Yahoo! logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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Qik Strikes Back: Supporting The iPhone Next Week

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Not to be outdone by competitor Flixwagon, Qik has just released its own demonstration of live video streaming from the iPhone (see below).

The demo comes just hours after Flixwagon made a similar announcement. However, Qik is one-upping Flixwagon by promising to release its software next week, not further off in July. It will presumably work only with jailbroken iPhones as well, at least until the app store rolls around.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Slashdot

Clash of the Titans Over USB 3.0 Specification Process

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Ian Lamont writes "Nvidia and other chip designers are accusing Intel of 'illegally restraining trade' in a dispute over the USB 3.0 specification. The dispute has prompted Nvidia, AMD, Via, and SiS to establish a rival standard for the USB 3.0 host controller. An Intel spokesman denies the company is making the USB specification, or that USB 3.0 'borrows technology heavily' from the PCI Special Interests group." He does, however, say that Intel won't release an unfinished Intel host controller spec until it's ready, as it would lead to incompatible hardware."

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Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

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An anonymous reader writes "At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities."

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User Not Found, Email Drops Silently

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shervinafshar writes with an International Herald Tribune story explaining just why it is failed emails don't always result in a helpful error message for the sender, which also gives some insight into ways that email can be used to spy on recipients. "In last lines of the article, two companies are introduced which provide services that can 'spy' on your email reading habits. They also can 'call home' too: 'Some entrepreneurs have seen that uncertainty and offered senders the ability to obtain receipts that a given message has been read — without the recipient knowing that a confirmation has been sent back to the sender. ReadNotify, based in Queensland, Australia, started in 2000 and promised to report not only on whether a message was read, but also on how long it was opened for reading on the recipient's PC. It can also send the message in "self-destructing" form, preventing forwarding, printing, copying and saving.' IHT also is asking its readers to comment about these kind of services being against user privacy."

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A 30-Picowatt Processor For Sensors

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Roland Piquepaille writes "University of Michigan (U-M) researchers have developed an ultra low power microchip which 'uses 30,000 times less power in sleep mode and 10 times less in active mode than comparable chips now on the market.' It only consumes 30 picowatts in sleep mode, which means that a simple watch battery could power the chip for more than 200 years. Of course, this is not a processor for your next computer. It is designed for sensor-based devices such as medical implants, environment monitors or surveillance equipment. However, the design is very clever." Roland's blog has some more information, including a die picture of the chip, known as the Phoenix.

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Tin Whiskers — Fact Or Fiction?

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bLanark writes "Some time ago, most electronics were soldered with old-fashioned lead solder, which has been tried and tested for decades. In 2006, the EU banned lead in solder, and so most manufacturers switched to a lead-free solder. Most made the switch in advance, I guess due to shelf-life of products and ironing out problems working with the new material. Lead is added to solder as it melts at low temperature, but also, it prevents the solder from growing 'whiskers' — crystalline limbs of metal. The affect of whiskers on soldered equipment would include random short-circuits and strange RF-effects. Whiskers can grow fairly quickly and become quite long. Robert Cringley wrote this up this some time ago, but it seems that the world has not been taking notice. I guess cars (probably around 30 processors in a modern car) and almost every appliance would be liable to fail sooner than expected due to tin whiskers. Note that accelerated life-expectancy tests can't simulate the passing of time for whiskers to grow. I've googled, and there is plenty of research into the effects of tin whiskers. I should point out that the Wikipedia page linked to above states that tin whisker problems 'are negligible in modern alloys,' but can we trust Wikipedia? So: was the tin whisker problem overhyped, was it an initial problem that has been solved in the few years since lead-free solder came into use, or is it affecting anyone already?"

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Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality

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penciling_in writes "CircleID has a post by Richard Bennett, one of the panelists in the recent Innovation forum on open access and net neutrality — where Google announced their upcoming throttling detector. From the article: 'My name is Richard Bennett and I'm a network engineer. I've built networking products for 30 years and contributed to a dozen networking standards, including Ethernet and Wi-Fi. I was one of the witnesses at the FCC hearing at Harvard, and I wrote one of the dueling Op-Ed's on net neutrality that ran in the Mercury News the day of the Stanford hearing. I'm opposed to net neutrality regulations because they foreclose some engineering options that we're going to need for the Internet to become the one true general-purpose network that links all of us to each other, connects all our devices to all our information, and makes the world a better place. Let me explain ...' This article is great insight for anyone for or against net neutrality."

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Geohashing Meets an Angry Rancher With Firearms

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katicli writes "Geohashing, an obscure xkcd pastime which involves going to random coordinates generated by md5 hashing, the date, and the opening status of the stock market, appears to have just gotten far more interesting. The official wiki reports a warning for other geohashers intending to go to the spot designated for June 14th in the San Francisco area, as several avid fans of xkcd were met by an angry rancher and firearms."

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Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU

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Might E. Mouse writes "Reviews are hitting the net for the first Intel Atom-powered netbooks, and TrustedReviews has posted one for the ASUS Eee PC 901 20G Linux Edition. Has ASUS won the Atom(ic) war before it even started? With features like Wireless-N and a 6600mAh battery good for four to seven hours, that might well be the case. TR rated it highly, but I'm going to wait for their MSI Wind review before making a purchase — their first look at the Wind showed a better keyboard and larger storage." An anonymous reader notes that despite the increased capabilities, the 901 debuts at a lower cost than its predecessor.

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BPI Defends Anti-File-Sharing Partnership With Virgin Media

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MrSteveSD writes "The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has responded to criticism by Bill Thomson over its collusion with Virgin Media in targeting UK file sharers. BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor personally wrote to the BBC to set things straight, and he asserts that 'it's Mr Thompson, rather than music companies, who is stuck in the past.' Of course, Virgin Media customers who download music and TV legally often find their connections being turned down to unusable speeds due to Virgin's aggressive throttling policy." Mike also points out a blog entry that describes one of the letters received by a Virgin Media customer. In the letter were suggestions regarding the customer's router settings and anti-virus software.

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Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy

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modemac writes "Verizon has declared it will no longer offer access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet newsgroups to its customers. This stems from last week's agreement for major ISPs to cut off access to 'newsgroups and Web sites' that make child pornography available. The story notes, 'No law requires Verizon to do this. Instead, the company (and, to varying extents, Time Warner Cable and Sprint) agreed to restrictions on Usenet in response to political strong-arming by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. Cuomo claimed that his office found child porn on 88 newsgroups — out of roughly 100,000 newsgroups that exist.' In response, Verizon will cut its customers off from a large portion of Usenet, as it will only carry newsgroups in the Big 8."

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Anti-Technology Technologies?

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shanen writes "A story from the NYTimes about metering internet traffic caught my eye. I thought the exchange of information over the Internet was supposed to be a good thing? Couldn't we use technology more constructively? For example, if there is too much network traffic for video and radio channels, why don't we offset with the increased use of P2P technologies like BitTorrent? Why don't we use wireless networks to reduce the traffic on the wired infrastructure? Such technologies often have highly desirable properties. For example, BitTorrent is excellent for rapidly increasing the availability of popular files while automatically balancing the network traffic, since the faster and closer connections will automatically wind up being favored. Instead, we have an increasing trend for anti-technology technologies and twisted narrow economic solutions such as those discussed in the NYTimes article, and attempts to restrict the disruptive communications technologies. You may remember how FM radio was delayed for years; part of the security requirements of a major company includes anti-P2P software, as well as locking down the wireless communications extremely tightly — but there are still gaps for the bad guys, while the main victims are the legitimate users of these technologies. Can you think of other examples? Do you have constructive solutions?"

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MPAA Wants To Prevent Recording Movies On DVRs

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I_am_Rambi writes "At the request of theatrical film makers, the Federal Communications Commission on Friday quietly launched a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology that does this is called Selectable Output Control (SOC), but the FCC restricts its use. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs." The FCC is soliciting comments until June 25th.

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Darling Brothers, UK Indie Game Devs, Upgraded to CBE

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scriptedfun writes "The BBC reports that David and Richard Darling, the brother tandem who founded Codemasters back in the mid-'80s from their bedroom, were recently made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for their 'services to the computer games industry.' Their story is definitely inspiring for modern-day independent game developers." Naming such honorees annually is one of the perks of being Queen.

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RIAA Says "Wanna Fight? It'll Cost You!"

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jeiler writes "Ars has the details on an RIAA strategy to double the cost of settling copyright infringement suits for students who try to quash the group's subpoenas in court. In a nutshell: settle early, pay $3,000; try to quash the subpoena and the settlement cost rises to $8,000."

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Westinghouse Commits to Green Plug's Universal A.C. Adapter

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Ian Lamont writes "Westinghouse is the first major electronics manufacturer that has publicly committed to using a 'smart power technology' that will let people use a single universal adapter to power their laptops, cell phones and other electronics. The universal adapters, which use a technology developed by a startup called Green Plug, will act like a hub that several devices can plug into, and will also shut off the power supply when the device is turned off or has finished charging. The first are expected to go on sale in early 2009 for under $100, according to Westinghouse's CTO. Eventually, Westinghouse and other manufacturers that use the technology could stop shipping adapters with their products, because customers may already have universal adapters at home. However, some manufacturers may not be inclined to use universal power adapters: the article notes Apple gets supplementary revenue from the sale of proprietary connectors for the iPod and other devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBC News | Technology | UK Edition

More than chips

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By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Intel, the world's biggestmaker of silicon chips wants everyone to know that it can do more than just make chips. Even though this product makes billions for the business, Intel's chief technology officer and head of research Justin Ratner told the BBC that it wants to change the image people have of the company. "The public perception of Intel as an innovator has been really limited to 'oh yeah there's that sticker on my pc and there is an Intel thing in there'. "What we generally do is ubiquitous but most people aren't aware of how our inventions have changed the world." And to drive the point home, the Silicon Valley company opened its doors to journalists to show off a myriad of projects that its researchers believe willgo on to have an impact on our daily lives. Over 70 projects ranging from healthcare to visual computing and from wireless mobility to the environment are just some of the areas where the company is investing part of its $6bn in research. "The sampling of projects on display here, and the doubling of our R&D investment over the past 10 years, will speed scientific discovery, improve health care, better the environment, advance visual computing and bring a rich and wireless internet experience from the device of our choice anywhere in the world," boasts Mr Ratner.
INTELLIGENT PHOTO AND VIDEO SEARCH
Digital cameras have turned most of us into snap-happy photographers.The problem is we tend to upload the images onto the computer and leave them there in an untidy jumble. The same with video. Intel's China Research Centre believes its intelligent photo and video search technology will help us organise ourphoto and video libraries into useful albums. Lin Chao says the software they have developed"uses microprocessors to mine pictures and videos for common key factors. "The statistical algorithm is a probabilistic system that finds correlations between the different points of an image.The points can bemapped on animals, faces or cars, the key aspects of the concept.Then it will statistically go and classify these key points to see if they are relevantly correlated to each other," he says. The easiest image to search for in pictures or video is a face. The software finds the face in a picture,plots 68 points to work outface alignment and finally checks five major regions to show the forehead, eyes, eyebrows, nose and a mouth. Then by identifying the image as, say, your mum or dad, the technology can rifle through your messy library and find matching pictures allowing you to group them together intoneat easily accessible albums.
ADVANCED MEDICAL VISUALISATION
An estimated 655,000 people die of colon cancer throughout the world per year.But early detection and diagnosis can help save lives. Intel has partnered with Phillips Healthcare in a joint project taking place in Haifa, Israel, to improve detection and diagnosis rates. At the research day, Zvi Danovich demonstrated a virtual colonoscopy application that shows aninteractive model based on information from ct scans. By optimising the image using nanometers and vectorisation, Mr Danovich was able to produce clearer and richer images faster than the old application. "Our rendering runs almost twice as fast as the Phillips application showing double the number of frames per second," explained Mr Danovich. "I am happy that this is my achievement to the world of medicine."
COMMON SENSE ENVIRONMENTAL SENSING
The power of the people is at the heart of a project aimed at influencing decision makers over environmental policy. Armed with mobile sensing devices, members of the public can collect data about the air quality in their local area and feed it back to a central base to be collated. Alison Woodruff of Common Sense says by kitting out ordinary people with these mobile devices, they are able to "empower the everyday citizen as well as provide useful information about air quality." She says typically such readings are taken by officials at a small number of locations and what Common Sense does is get a lot of readings from a lot of places. This, claims Ms Woodruff, "makes the data more powerful." At the moment the group is working with San Francisco street sweepers on a pilot project testing the device and working out how best to use the information that is gathered. Ms Woodruff says the next stage is to "get the device into the hands of concerned citizens and develop community software so people can analyse the information and work out how to use it to influence policy". For Intel, she says the value in the project is finding new and interesting applications for mobile devices.
RAY TRACING
Every day the quality of games are inching towards mirroring the real world. Ray tracing technology is one way Intel believes it can deliver a richer more rewarding experience than before. The technology is already used in Hollywood most recently in the Kung Fu Panda movie,but researcher Daniel Pohl told the BBC: "Ray tracing in games is still a research project but it represents the next big thing." Ray tracing works by using computational modelling to simulate light rays in a 3D scene. What that means, says Mr Pohl, is that "You can add a lot of nice special effects like reflections on water or in a mirror, some of the hardest things to do in a game. "We are moving towards photo realism and modelling how things work in nature.It's about making the game look more realistic and exciting." He acknowledges however that the final product is several years away.
ROBOT BARKEEP
For years we have been served up the promise that robots in the home would become our little helpers.It hasn't happened but Intel researcher Siddhartha Srinivasa believes the so called robot barkeep he has been working on is a significant step towards that goal. Using motion planning and manipulation algorithms as well as cameras, the robotic arm on display picked up black mugs and put them on a dishwasher rack. A fairly simple action, but from a robotics standpoint very complicated to achieve.Mr Srinivasa told the BBC: "This is the cutting edge of robotics research designing a robotic arm that can move at human speeds. "The arm doesn't know where the mug is so it has to search for it, then it has to work out how to pick it up and then how to place it on the rack without colliding with anyone or anything." It might not be Earth shattering but Mr Srinivasa says it hints at what is possible tomorrow. "We want to free robots from the factory floor and bring them into people's homes.Versatility is key.We envisage robots being able to do the dishes, put the toys away, make a cup of coffee and be a real help around the house."
MOOD PHONE
Everybody copes with the stresses and strains of the day in different ways.But now Intel researcher and psychologist Margaret Morrishas developed what she calls the mood phone to help deal with the highs and lows and keep us mentally healthy. Ms Morris, who is a psychologist, says: "We translated clinical dialogues into touch screen experiences on your mobile phone as prompts to make you check how you are feeling." This, Ms Morris says,is all aimed at "enablingpeople to tune into early signs of distress before they end up screaming". There are she says physiological signs of stress like a drop in heart rate variability and changes in blood pressure which can be detected by the phone. When any of these change, the phone can be programmed to ping you a message and simply ask if you are alright. It can also suggest coping strategies like doing some breathing exercises or taking a walk. The aim is to stop you in your tracks for a few seconds and force you tolisten to what is going on inside your head and your body. Ms Woodruff says the project is "about helping people become saner, healthier and happier human beings.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

'Darlings' of UK games honoured

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Two of the pioneers of the UK video games industry have been recognised in the Queen's Birthday Honours. David and Richard Darling, co-founders of game developers Codemasters, were both made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). They built up their company from a bedroom enterprise into one of the best known games developers in the world. The firm is behind well established titles including the Colin McRae Rally series and Sensible Soccer. More recently the firm has ventured into online games, releasing Lord of the Rings Online. "For over 20 years David and Richard led Codemasters as it became one of the video game industry's great British success stories," said Rod Cousens, present head of Codemasters. "Their drive and passion for creating the best in interactive entertainment will always be part of the industry's heritage and this recognition is well deserved." The brothers sold their stake in the company in 2007 after 21 years at the firm. 'Brilliant games' The two brothers started their first company - Galactic Software - in 1982, followed by a stint writing for Mastertronic, a publisher of low-cost computer software. In 1986 they set up Codemasters, along with their father Jim. Their first title was BMX simulator, released in the company's founding year. There followed a series of simulator titles including jet ski, flight and even fruit machine games. Many of these were written for the computer of the moment - the ZX spectrum - although they also produced titles for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC. The brothers were famous for putting ringing endorsements of their games on the packaging. "Dizzy's Treasure Island is brilliant - it's like a real cartoon but with amazing gameplay," read one. These were usually quotes from the creators of the game or the Darling brothers themselves.The Treasure Island quote was by David Darling, for example. Practices like this drew equal measures of mirth and criticism from the games press of the time. But the company gained even greater notoriety when it developed a series of unlicensed games for Nintendo's Entertainment System. The titles, published by controversial company Camerica, bypassed the console's so-called "lock-out chip", designed to prevent unofficial products being played. Titles included the Quattro Series, Ultimate Stuntman and the best-selling Micro Machines. The company has continued to grow and now produces games for all three major consoles, PCs, handheld devices and mobile phones. In 2005 the company was crowned the world's leading independently owned video games developer by Develop Magazine. The brothers left two years later to work on other projects. They were honoured for their "services to the computer games industry".
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

MySpace prepares for re-design

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By Jim Reed
Newsbeattechnology reporter

MySpace is preparing a major redesign next week as it tries to attract more casual users and increase the amount of time its members spend online. Most of the changes will go live on 18 June and cover the site's home page, navigation, editing, search and video functions. Managing director of MySpace UK, Antony Lukom, said designers have been working on the project for more than a year. "We wanted to make it easier and more intuitive to use," he said. "I remember when early mobile phones came out and gradually became simpler and easier to use. "Social networks are part of our lives now and we're going through the same process. Lots of users don't know how to cut and paste code so we want to make that easier." Fierce competition The move comes as MySpace is facing increased competition in the UK from direct rivals Facebook and Bebo as well as up-and-coming sites like Twitter. 4.7 million users visited MySpace in April, down more than 30% on last year, according to data from Nielsen Online. Its rivals experienced a big increase in numbers over that period with Facebook now dominating the market with 10.2 million users. Facebook is also planning a major redesign of its site over the summer. Facebook set for major facelift
Designers there are planning some widespread changes to the way core profile pages are organised, aimed at making the site "simpler, cleaner and more relevant". Cutting the clutter The MySpace redesign is the first complete overhaul of the site since it launched in January 2004. Sections from the home - or "splash" - page down will be stripped of some of its more complicated features. Those 15 navigation links at the top of the screen will be cut to five tabs. The US home page will be sponsored by one, as-yet unnamed advertiser. Anthony Lukom has no plans for the same kind of thing in the UK but does expect advertisers to support the changes. He said: "This is really about the user experience. But if the users are happy, advertisers are normally happy too." The site recently let users split their online friends into different categories for the first time. In the future users will be able to let certain groups of friends access different pieces of user generated content like videos and photos. Search is being simplified with results split into categories like people, music, video and the general web. "We're now the second biggest video site globally after YouTube"
Anthony Lukom, Myspace

Members should also find it easier to play around with the look of their profile pages. A new editor has launched this week with a point-and-click theme library offering colours, borders and images to choose from. MySpace claims users with more advanced skills will still be able to get their hands dirty with HTML code if they want to. Multimedia options The site's MySpaceTV video player is getting a facelift with support for high definition formats, an improved full-screen mode and simpler controls. Developers reckon it will be easier for members to embed video in their pages and share it with friends. "We're now the second biggest video site globally after YouTube," said Anthony Lukom. "So we've just got a responsibility to update our player with the latest technology and that's what we are doing.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Nintendo dominates May game sales

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US video game sales in May were up 37% on 2007 says market research firm NPD. Total spending on video games for May was $1.12bn (Â£574m). Total sales for the year so far are $6.6bn (Â£3.38bn). The figures were boosted by continuing strong sales of Grand Theft Auto IV (GTA IV) which was the best-selling title for a second month. The highly praised game kept the top spot despite competition from other new releases such as Mario Kart and Wii Fit for Nintendo's popular console. Seven of the top selling titles in May were for the Nintendo Wii console or its handheld DS game-playing gadget. Top-selling title GTA IV sold 1.31 million units in May taking its total since its launch in late April to 4.2 million units However, NPD said the strong sales of GTA IV was not boosting console sales. "The continued success of GTA 4 is not translating into big hardware sales for either the PS3 or the 360 but there may yet be a lift in June due to gift giving for Father's Day and graduations," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement. In May Nintendo maintained its top spot as the most popular console and managed to sell 675,000 Wiis. By comparison Sony sold 209,000 PlayStation 3 machines and Microsoft 187,000 Xbox 360 consoles, according to NPD. The figures mean that total US sales of the Nintendo Wii number 10.2 million - on a par with Microsoft's Xbox 360 which has sold 10.27 million. NPD projects that game sales could reach $23bn for 2008 - far higher than the $18bn reached in 2007, which was a 43% jump over 2006.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Spain treats child phone addicts

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Two children in Spain have been admitted to a mental health institution to be treated for addiction to their mobile phones, Spanish media report.
The children, aged 12 and 13, were sent to the clinic by their parents, who said they could not carry out normal activities without their handsets.
They were doing badly at school and lying to relatives in order to get money to spend on their phones.
They have been learning to cope without their phones for three months.
Dr Maite Utges, who runs the Child and Youth Mental Health Centre in Lleida, near Barcelona in north-eastern Spain, said it was the first time the clinic had treated children who were dependent on their mobile phones.
"They both showed disturbed behaviour and this exhibited itself in failure at school. They both had serious difficulties leading normal lives," she was quoted in Spanish papers as saying.
The children had owned their phones for 18 months, and their parents had made little effort to restrict their use before noticing how serious their dependence had become.
'Tip of iceberg'
Dr Jose Martinez-Raga, an expert in addictions, said children who developed a dependency on mobile phones, like those who over-used video games, often became irritable, withdrawn and antisocial, and their school performance deteriorated.
He warned these cases could be the "tip of the iceberg", and that mobile phone addiction "could definitely be a danger in the future".
Fears have been raised in a number of countries about the adverse effects mobile phone use may have on children.
Dr Utges recommended that parents not allow their children to have mobile phones until they reached 16 years of age.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Aeronautical advances 'looming'

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By James Gallagher
BBC News

The humble loom, once at the heart of the textile industry across Northern Ireland, could be about to make a comeback.
However it is not clothes they could be making, but aeroplanes.
Engineers at the University of Ulster's Engineering Composites Research Centre, which is based at Jordanstown near Belfast, are using a modified loom to weave carbon fibres.
The result is a "composite material", lighter and stronger than aluminium.
The centre's acting director, Dr Justin Quinn, said saving weight meant saving money.
"The lighter the aircraft the more payload and passengers it can carry, and it can reduce carbon emissions by not using as much fuel to lug around unnecessary weight in the frame and wings," he said.
Composites can be used for anything from wing components to seating.
Bombardier Aerospace, Belfast, has been developing these materials for 40 years.
Their vice-president, Michael Ryan, said they were keen to cut the environmental impact of flying: "Our next generation composite wing programme provides an important opportunity to take further steps towards more environmentally friendly aircraft."
The depth of composite knowledge in Northern Ireland has attracted the world's largest aerospace firm, Boeing.
Their director of UK Industrial Participation, Brian Moran, has discussed opportunities with businesses and academics.
"Both on the defence and commercial side, the trend is clearly going towards composites," he said.
"To find capabilities in the supply base in Northern Ireland is exciting to us, and we're really looking forward to see what they have to offer."
Half of their Boeing 787 Dreamliner, including most of the wings and fuselage, is made of composite materials.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Yahoo-Microsoft tie-up abandoned

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Shares in internet company Yahoo fell 10% after it said attempts to revive a deal with Microsoft had failed. The shares fell to $22.50, their lowest level since the software giant offered $31 a share for Yahoo in January. Recent talks between the two sides ended when Microsoft refused to renew its latest $47.5bn(Â£24bn) offer for the whole of Yahoo. Yahoo is now expected to look for an advertising deal with rival search engine Google. The world's two most popular search engines carried out a short trial in April when Yahoo shared its advertising space with Google. Alternative deal Yahoo refused a new proposal from Microsoft to buy just its online search operations. ÂIn the weeks since Microsoft withdrew its offer to acquire Yahoo, the two companies have continued to discuss an alternative transaction that Microsoft believes would have delivered in excess of $33 per share to the Yahoo shareholders," Microsoft said in a statement. "This partnership would ensure healthy competition in the marketplace, providing greater choice and innovation for advertisers, publishers and consumers," the company said. Yahoo, however, did not want to sell off only one part of the business. It said such a deal "would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces". The BBC's technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones said that according to Microsoft sources the company was no longer interested in a full takeover because Yahoo had been "underperforming" and was losing some of its key staff. Yahoo's shares closed 10% lower at $23.52, while Microsoft finished 4.1% higher at $28.24.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Experts unveil 'cloak of silence'

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Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbours blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past. Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an "acoustic cloak", which could make objects impervious to sound waves. The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships. Scientists have previously demonstrated devices that cloak objects frommicrowaves, making them "invisible". "The mathematics behind cloaking has been known for several years," said Professor John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, an expert in cloaking. "What hasn't been available for sound is the sort of materials you need to build a cloak out of." Sound shield The Spanish team who conducted the new work believe the key to a practical device are so-called "sonic crystals". These artificial composites - also known as "meta-materials" - can be engineered to produce specific acoustical effects. "Unlike ordinary materials, their acoustic properties are determined by their internal structure," explained Professor Pendry. These would be used to channel any sound around an object, like water flowing around a rock in a stream. "The idea of acoustic cloaking is to deviate the sounds waves around the object that has to be cloaked," said Jose Sanchez-Dehesa of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, one of the researchers behind the new work. He believes a material that consists of arrays of tiny cylinders would achieve this effect. Simulations showed that 200 layers of this metamaterial could effectively shield an object from noise. Thinner stacks would shield an object from certain frequencies. "The thickness depends on the wavelength you want to screen," he told BBC News. Sub systems Dr Sanchez-Dehesa now wants to make and test such a material in the lab to confirm the simulations. But researchers, such as Professor Pendry, believe the initial work is already an important first step. "It's not an unrealistic blueprint - it doesn't demand that we do extraordinary things," he said. "This is something that can easily be manufactured." If a material could be commercialised, both researchers believe it could have many applications. Walls of the material could be built to soundproof houses or it could be used in concert halls to enhance acoustics or direct noise away from certain areas. The military may also be interested, the researchers believe, to conceal submarines from detection by sonar or to create a new class of stealth ships. However, the material may need to be optimised first. "You don't want to wrap a submarine in something that is heavy and several inches thick," said Professor Pendry. "It would add quite a lot to the Navy's fuel bill, I think." Light touch The research builds on work by scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, US, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Earlier this year, independent teams from the two institutions demonstrated the mathematics necessary to create an acoustic cloak. Other scientists have shown that objects can be cloaked from electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves. For example, in 2006, scientists at Duke University showed how a small copper cylinder could be rendered invisible from microwaves. The technique used a metamaterial consisting of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements, to deflect the microwaves around the object and restore them on the other side. To an observer it looked like the microwaves had passed straight through the cylinder. Other researchers hope to build the holy grail of cloaking: an invisibility device that would channel light at wavelengths normally visible to the eye. However, this technology is in a more primitive state, according to Dr Sanchez-Dehesa. "We believe the acoustic cloak is more feasible than a similar device for light," he said

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Final Skynet satellite launched

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By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News

An advanced satellite that will improve greatly the ability of UK military forces to communicate around the globe has been launched into space.
The Skynet 5C platform rode into orbit atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport, in French Guiana.
It joins the 5A and 5B satellites lofted successfully last year and which are already handling secure traffic for UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Â£3.6bn Skynet project represents the UK's single biggest space venture.
The investment includes replacing and updating control centres, and the major antennas and terminals used by military ships, land vehicles and planes to communicate through the satellites.
The 5C spacecraft - the last in the Skynet series - left the launch pad in Kourou at 1905 local time (2205 GMT).
Skynet 5 allows the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (RAF) to pass much more data, faster between command centres. See how the Skynet 5 system is being deployed

The bandwidth capacity easily surpasses the current satellite constellation, Skynet 4, whose spacecraft are coming to the end of their design lives.
"Skynet 5 is about two-and-a-half-times more capable than the previous system, and it also gives us the ability to use not just voice communication but also data communication," explains Patrick Wood from spacecraft manufacturer EADS Astrium.
"So, computers can talk directly to computers, as well giving us pictures and real-time video images."
This extra capability can already be seen in Afghanistan, where the RAF is using a robot surveillance plane called Reaper to hunt down Taleban forces.
Although flying in the skies of the Middle East, Reaper is actually controlled by RAF personnel sitting in the US behind a computer screen.
Commands are sent over Skynet 5's high-bandwidth connections, directing the robot's every move which includes firing missiles at enemy targets.
The new Skynet platforms look much like any of the other modern commercial telecommunications spacecraft launched from Kourou, but the 5s incorporate technologies that are specially prepared for military use.
Four steerable antennas give them the ability to focus bandwidth onto particular locations where it is most needed - where British forces are engaged in operations.
The spacecraft have also been "hardened" to withstand any interference - attempts to disable or take control of the satellites - and any efforts to eavesdrop on their sensitive communications.
Classified receive-antenna technology enables the 5s to "go deaf" to signals that try to "jam" them whilst still continuing to listen to operational traffic.

Security was tight in Kourou in the lead-up to 5C's launch. Sentries had been posted outside the spaceport's giant integration complex during the final phases of the launch campaign. No unofficial photography was permitted.
The new Skynet infrastructure is not owned by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) but rather by a private company called Paradigm Secure Communications.
The firm won a contract to supply satellite services to the military and has obtained City money to help fund the new-build. Its deal with the MoD runs until 2020 and guarantees UK forces a proportion of the satellites' bandwidth.
Paradigm hopes to earn money for itself by selling spare capacity to Nato countries and other "friendly" forces.
"Skynet 5C is actually our self-insurance," said Paradigm Managing Director Malcolm Peto.
"When we committed to this programme we always promised to give the MoD a certain level of capability; and space, as we all know, is a variable environment for this type of technology. So, the importance of our third satellite is that we have an in-orbit spare should anything go wrong."
Skynet 5 is the largest Private Finance Initiative (PFI) yet delivered to the MoD. The procurement model has now been copied for an even bigger project - the Â£13bn PFI signed with an EADS-led consortium to provide mid-air refuelling services.
This will bring offer brand new tankers based on the Airbus A330-200, to replace the ageing fleet of VC-10 and Tristar aircraft.
Skynet 5C was launched along with a commercial "co-passenger" - Turksat 3A, which will beam TV and other telecommunication services to Turkey, Europe and Central Asia.

- 1. Skynet 5 overhauls satellite communications for UK forces

- 2. The largely autonomous satellites talk to two UK ground stations

- 3. Skynet 5 supports high-bandwidth applications, such as UAV video

- 4. Antennas and terminals are upgraded to make best use of Skynet

- 5. New battlefield networks, such as Cormorant, feed into the system

- 6. System gives commanders access to more information, faster

- 1. Improved technologies, including a solar 'sail', lengthen the platforms'operational lives to at least 15 years

- 2. The satellites are 'hardened' against interference. A special receive antenna can resist attempts at jamming

- 3. Each spacecraft has four steerable antennas that can concentrate bandwidth onto particular regions

- 4. The system gives near-global coverage, providing 2.5 times the capacity afforded by the previous system

- 5. Each spacecraft is a 3x4x4.5m box and weighs just under 5 tonnes; the solar wings once unfurled measure 34m tip to tip

Click here to return

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Jail sentence for botnet creator

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A hacker who hijacked hundreds of PCs to create a botnet has been sentenced to 41 months in jail by a US court.
Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida also faces $65,000 (Â£33,000) in fines and will be under supervision for three years on his release.
The hijacked PCs were used to attack other computers and install programs that plague users with pop-up adverts.
He was caught following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit (CCU).
Hack attack
The investigation began in December 2006 after marketing firm Newell Rubbermaid notified the CCU about an intrusion on its network.
The trail led the investigators to Florida where Mr Bentley was using computers to co-ordinate attacks.
He and his accomplices drove so much data through the hijacked Rubbermaid machines that it almost brought the firms network to a halt. The damage cost $150,000 (Â£77,000) to put right.
Aiding the investigation were the US Secret Service, FBI, security firm Sophos and other law enforcement agencies.
A botnet is a collection of computers under the remote control of a malicious hacker who then uses them for their own purposes. Most spam or junk e-mail is thought to be routed through hijacked PCs.
The hacking team were paid for every machine on which they successfully installed the ad-serving software and, according to US Department of Justice, made thousands of dollars out of their series of attacks.
"These computer criminals have no qualms about infecting computers around the world and causing thousands of pounds of damages," said Bob Burls, from the Metropolitan Police Computer Crime Unit in a statement.
"In their greed, they cause devastating damage to both private and company computers."

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

IT giant founds carers' network

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By Geoff Adams-Spink
Age & disability correspondent, BBC News website

IT giant, Intel, has launched an online service so that carers in the UK can support each other and get advice from professionals. The company says that the virtual network - ConnectingForCare.co.uk - is the first of its kind. It will bring together family carers, healthcare professionals, social workers and others. The aim is to "fill a void in today's healthcare system" by using technology to build a sense of community. ConnectingForCare is a collaborative effort between Intel, Counsel and Care, the Princess Royal Trust for Carers and the Queen's Nursing Institute. "We think that technology can play a major role in improving care and reducing costs," said Christine Claus of Intel's Digital Health Group. "But we've also found that technology provides a fantastic way of connecting people together and there are some communities that really need a forum to provide that exchange of information and support." Intel refuses to put a figure on its investment but says it is paying for the infrastructure, maintenance costs and publicity for the forum. It is estimated that six million people in the UK provide unpaid care for an older or disabled person and Intel is hoping that many of them will start to use the new service. The site contains information about various medical conditions - for example Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's - and hopes to attract professionals from the healthcare and social care fields. "Community nurses have always considered patients, their families and informal carers to be essential partners in their work,"said Rosemary Cook of the Queen's Nursing Institute. "Without this shared and endeavour, many patients would find it much harder and sometimes impossible to cope." The website includes an area for carers to create a personal profile and join a variety of networks according to their particular needs, forums and message boards and a "spotlight" section to draw attention to outstanding individuals. Among those who have already joined ConnectingForCare is 35 year-old Phil Hough from Cheshire who cares full-time for his mother and brother. His mother is physically disabled and his brother has mental health problems. "It's a new platform for us to share our experiences and communicate," he told the BBC. "The unique aspect for me is that we're going to share experiences with professional carers - that's not something I get the opportunity to do." Mr Hough says it is important for carers to maintain their own independence and to have the opportunity to socialise with others. He thinks an online forum will prove popular because people will be able to participate at a time that suits them best.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Low prices boost mobile data use

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Price cuts and the popularity of 3G are prompting Europeans to use mobile data like never before, says a survey. The GSM Association survey shows that European data roaming traffic grew by 75% between April 2007 and 2008. Over the same period the numbers of 3G users doubled and the average price of data roaming services fell by 25%. The rising numbers drove a 40% rise in the European mobile data market which now stands at 7bn euros (Â£5.53bn). Price cap The GSM Association (GSMA) said there were now 112 million users of third generation (3G) mobile services in Europe - about 22.5% of all mobile users. By comparison 18.4% of US and Canadian mobile users are on 3G networks. The survey questioned 38 mobile operators across Europe and found that the average price for downloading a megabyte of data within the EU was 5.06 euros (Â£3.99) at the end of March 2008. At the close of 2007 the cost was 5.62 euros (Â£4.43) The average cost of sending a text message while travelling in Europe fell by 18% during the year being surveyed. "We expect prices to continue to fall as operators further innovate around tariffs and more and more Europeans use these services as a part of their everyday lives," said Tom Phillips, chief government and regulatory affairs officer at the GSMA. In some nations, said the GSMA, mobile broadband services now cost as much as fixed line broadband services. The survey comes only weeks before EU imposed limits on roaming charges for making phone calls come into effect. Approved in May 2007 the caps on charges could cut by 75% the cost of using a mobile to make a call outside a handset owner's home nation

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Hands off

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By Darren Waters
Technology reporter, BBC News

Musicians may soon be able to play instruments using just the power of the mind.

Researchers at Goldsmiths College in London have developed technology to translate thoughts into musical notes. The Brain Computer Interface for Music requires electrodes to be attached to the head. They pick up electrical impulses from the brain which are passed through an electroencephalography (EEG) machine and analysed. The man behind the project, Dr Mick Grierson, demonstrated the system to BBC News. When musical notes flash the scientist stares at the display while thinking of a note he wants to play. When the same note appears it unconsciously triggers a change in his brain activity - a change registered by the computer he was plugged into. "After a while it will make a decision about which note I am thinking about and it tries to play it," he said. Dr Grierson has run trials in which 6 out of 8 notes played were the same as those being thought of. The project is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and aims to find a way for people who have difficulty using their hands to play music. "There are many composers who are struck down with multiple sclerosis and other physical disabilities who still want to continue making music", said Dr Grierson. Brain game A number of research projects around the world are looking into using brain controlled interaction with computers to improve the lives of people with disabilities. Tokyo's Keio University has demonstrated robotic hands being controlled through thought processes. The research is also leading to commercial products. US and Australian firm Emotiv hopes to have a headset video game costing $299 on the market by the end of the year. It enables players to vanquish villains through thoughts and emotions without ever touching a controller.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Experts question BT's fibre trial

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BT's trial of super-fast broadband is unlikely to put the UK back in the fast lane analysts have said. The telecoms firm is offering fibre to the home to 300 newly built homes in Ebbsfleet, Kent. Speeds will start at just 2.5Mbps (megabits per second) with "bursts" of 100Mbps and the service is likely to be free to consumers. "These speeds make it the lowest fibre service in Europe", said Jupiter Research analyst Ian Fogg. "I am surprised. This is a trial and I see no reason why they aren't trialling the highest speed the technology can deliver. What is the point of a trial if you don't really test things" he said. A BT spokesman said that the speeds would be "very decent". "Higher in fact that anyone currently needs," he added. It is also hoping to offer the service free for the first two years to all the 10,000 homes which will eventually be built at Ebbsfleet, in a bid to kick-start next-generation broadband. This plan has yet to be approved by Ofcom. Conservative company BT's FIBRE TRIAL OPTIONS

- 2.5Mbps download speed/ 0.5Mbps upload speed

- 10Mbps down/2Mbps up

- 10Mbps down/2Mbps up, burst to 30Mbps for downloads

- 10Mbps down/2Mbps up, burst to 100Mbps

- Source: BT Wholesale

The UK has been criticised for its slow adoption of super-fast broadband. Cable provider Virgin Media is currently the only company offering speeds of up to 50Mbps while some other ISPs are rolling out service offering speeds up to 24Mbps. In Europe a handful of operators are offering download speeds of between 20 and 100Mbps, with most also offering very fast upload speeds as well. Ebbsfleet will have 10,000 homes connected via fibre, although building will not be complete until 2020. BT has not yet announced any other new-build sites earmarked for fibre. Part of the reason for BT's decision to market fibre trial speeds lower than they are techinically capable of could be natural caution. "BT is historically a conservative company and has a tendency to suggest a lower performance than will be the case," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of ThinkBroadband, a broadband comparison and news site. "How often people at Ebbsfleet will see 100Mbps speeds depends on how much capacity is available to link the site to broadband providers, and how much capacity they have out to the internet," he said. Uploading speeds In the first instance, with just 300 homes earmarked for the trial, speeds are likely to far exceed 10Mbps. "But as more people sign up they may find that at peak times such as Friday and Sunday evenings they are only getting 10Mbps," said Mr Ferguson. He said he was more disappointed by the upload speeds, which peaks at 2Mbps. Having a fast upload speed makes it far quicker for people to put their own content online. Services which allow people to upload voice, pictures and videos needed higher speeds, said Mr Ferguson. "Uploading has been undersold but it offers the potential, for example, to bring about a sea-change in how media is produced," he said. "The BBC has been criticised for its regional coverage but with decent speeds people in those areas could upload their own video clips," he said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Google founder books space flight

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin has made a $5m (Â£2.5m) down payment to book a seat on a future orbital space flight, a US space tourism company has said.
Space Adventures says it is planning the first private space flight to the International Space Station in 2011 in a deal with the Russian space agency.
The initial payment gives members a first option on a seat on the mission.
It will go towards flight costs, which could be $35m or more, Space Adventures CEO Eric Anderson said.
"I am a big believer in the exploration and commercial development of the space frontier and am looking forward to the possibility of going into space," Mr Brin said in a statement.
In the past, Space Adventures has sent private tourists into space by buying seats on Russian missions to the International Space Station (ISS).
But the 2011 mission will be different.
"The Soyuz to be used for this mission will be a specially manufactured craft, separate from the other Soyuz vehicles designated for the transportation of the ISS crews," said Alexey Krasnov of the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation.
"This private mission, flying two Space Adventures clients at once, will not interfere with the implementation of the ISS programme or the obligations of the Russian space agency; on the contrary, it will add flexibility and redundancy to our ISS transportation capabilities."
Google has already shown an interest in space exploration by becoming one of the sponsors of a $30m prize designed to stimulate research into low-cost space missions, including landing a vehicle on the Moon.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

US space telescope set for launch

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By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

A Nasa space telescope is about to launch on a mission to explore the Universe with "gamma-ray glasses". The Glast mission will shed light on some of the most violent events in the Universe, that release massive amounts of energy in the form of gamma-rays. It will scan the sky for massive cosmic explosions, giant black holes that hurl matter across space, and dense neutron stars with powerful magnetic fields. Glast is due to lift off from Florida on Wednesday atop a Delta II rocket. The US space agency is targeting a launch window from 1545 GMT to 1740 GMT at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A "go" for launch was given on Monday following a final meeting of scientists and officials. But there is a there is a 40% chance that weather issues will delay the launch. "The clouds are the concern," Joel Tumbiolo, US Air Force weather officer for Delta II launches, noted. "We've only scratched the surface of the how and why of these gamma-ray phenomena"
Dr Dave Thompson, Nasa Goddard Space Flight Center

Glast stands for the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, but Nasa has launched a competition to find a new name for the spacecraft. The $690m (Â£350m) space observatory will take high-resolution pictures of the gamma-ray sky. These rays are the highest-energy form of light, which makes them ideal for exploring some of the most extreme environments in the cosmos. These are places where nature harnesses energies far beyond anything possible on Earth. They include supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. These black holes produce powerful jets of matter, moving at close to the speed of light, which can travel vast distances across space. But despite the staggering scale and speed of these jets, astronomers haven't been able to answer the most basic questions about them, such as how matter is accelerated to such fabulous speeds. New physics Glast will also seek to investigate the mysterious cosmic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs). These events release about the same amount of energy in one second as a star like the Sun will release in its 5-10 billion-year lifetime. THE GLAST MISSION

- Five-year mission, but spacecraft could last for 10

- Will look at the Universe in highest-energy form of light

- Spacecraft is 2.8m (9.2ft) high and 2.4m (8.2ft) in diameter

- Orbits at an altitude of 565km (350 miles)

- The mission cost about $690m (Â£350m)

- Lat instrument scans entire sky in two orbits of Earth

- Could pick up about 200 cosmic explosions each year

- Mission is a team-up between Nasa and US Department of Energy

"We've only scratched the surface of the how and why of these gamma-ray phenomena," said Dave Thompson, a deputy project scientist from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. "We have a lot to learn about how they work, and, more importantly, how these objects and phenomena affect the Universe. This is where Glast comes in." The mission will also go in search of new physics, aiming to shed light on the nature of the dark matter which makes up some 22% of the Universe. Glast represents a major step up in capability on previous gamma-ray telescopes and will cover an incredible range of light at the high energy limits of the electromagnetic spectrum. "If Glast were a piano, it would have about 23 octaves," commented Dr Steven Ritz, the chief scientist on the mission, who is also from Nasa Goddard. "With such a great leap in capabilities, the most important things for us are the surprises." The main instrument aboard the spacecraft is the the Large Area Telescope, or Lat. Gamma-rays carry far to much energy to capture in the conventional way, so this is a telescope without lenses or mirrors. Instead, the Lat uses many layers of metal foil to capture the energetic radiation from outer space. Once Glast reaches orbit, about 14 days will be spent checking out the spacecraft. In the third week after launch, the spacecraft's instruments will be turned on for tuning and calibration. The mission is a collaboration between Nasa and the US Department of Energy, with important contributions from partners elsewhere in the US, in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Sweden.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Road ahead

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By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

For millions of people worldwide Yahoo remains synonymous with the internet itself, but after Microsoft walked away from buying the firm what does the future hold
The famous exclamation mark at the end ofthe Yahoo! logo has seemingly become more of a question mark in recent months.
It has been left wounded by Microsoft's failed takeover approach, seemingly embarrassed as it trialled rival Google's advertising technology on its own search and vulnerable after losing its spot as the most visited place on the internet among US users.
Yahoo itself says the company is looking to the future with an ambitious effort to "re-wire" the whole organisation into a giant social hub.
Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo's head of communities and communications, told BBC News: "Rumours of our demise are greatly exaggerated.
"We are in a very healthy position. We generate a billion and a half dollars in cash flow a year."
Mr Garlinghousewas quick to point out that Yahoo Mail remained the world's leading mail service, used by almost a third of the world's internet users, and services like Yahoo messenger, homepage and news were market leaders in the US.

He said that Flickr, the firm's popular photo sharing site, had seen registered users rise from 300,000 to 24 million in the last few years.
"The fact people are looking at it and say it is dying or doing poorly seems strange to me," said JupiterResearch analyst Nate Elliott.
"It is a very strong player in almost everything it does. Our industry tends to be blind to anything outside of search.
"For Yahoo, unfortunately, they are dominant in everything outside search."
Mr Elliott added: "It's worth looking at the numbers: It's a massive company, with incredibly large revenues, that makes money and is still growing."
According to the firm's first quarter results, its revenues and gross profit are both up about 10% on the same time last year.
YAHOO FIGURES

- $1.8 billion in revenue in first quarter 2008

- 140,613,000 visitors to Yahoo sites in the US in April*

- 4.4% of UK search market*

- 21% of US search*

*Figures from ComScore

After a difficult few months Yahoo is beginning to focus more on returning to its roots.
Mr Garlinghouse is well-known for a leaked internal memo, in which he compared Yahoo's complex and disjointed strategy on many different fronts to spreading peanut butter thinly across many places.
Two years on from that memo and much had changed, he said,
Yahoo was now focused on making the entire organisation more open for consumers, he added.
"We really shouldn't be thinking abut communications as a group as separate from communities.
"We feel like we want all of Yahoo to be more social; how to bring people to the core of the experience."
Yahoo is hoping to combine its success in bringing audiences to content, via the home page or the news page, as well as its mail service, with the social networking features that have become so important to MySpace and Facebook, and others.
As a first step the company will be letting users pull in information to their Yahoo Mail page from other services and content companies, as well as exporting their Yahoo information to other destinations.

Mr Garlinghouse said: "Social as a silo isn't where we'll be in a couple of years as an industry. Social makes things more relevant.
"I own my social connections - not Facebook, MySpace or Yahoo. Our philosophy inside Yahoo is that this is ultimately your data; we are going to let you take it with you, let you have access to it in a very open way."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the importance of e-mail to the company, Mr Garlinghouse said that Yahoo Mail could be a really big catalyst for making all of Yahoo more social.
A smart inbox that orders e-mails from your most relevant contacts, as well as "vitality updates" from friends, and alerts based on friends' activities at other sites, will be combined inside Yahoo Mail.
Longer term, he said Yahoo was looking at making e-mail itself smarter, using a protocol called XMTP, which would allow e-mail to pull in users' social connections into messages.

"There is an opportunity for e-mail to be a richer experience by being more social," he said.
He added: "It's not just social networking for the sake of social networking - it's enabling connections to give richer experiences."
Mr Garlinghouse said the company was committed to pulling down walls users are confronted with across Yahoo sites.
"There are today over two dozen different profiles you can have on Yahoo. Where we are going you will have one profile on Yahoo, one social graph on Yahoo."
Mr Elliott lauded the ambition but said others had tried similar things and failed.
"It's a great idea - but this is just the beginning. I don't know if anyone has successfully proven that giving people their content and information to take with them is a great strategy for building revenues.

"It will be interesting to see how it works for Yahoo because it seems easier to me to build things on top of a social graph, than to build a social graph into established content and services.
"We've seen MySpace and Facebook start with a social graph and then building these content and services on top. I've not seen anyone reverse engineer the process."
He added: "If they can make it work then they are in great shape."
Mr Elliott said Yahoo's biggest challenge remained competing with Google in search.

"Search share numbers are frightening. Google is so completely dominant in so many European markets".
Yahoo has been criticised in some quarters for a limited trial of Google's advertising technology on its own search pages.
Mr Garlinghouse said the trial was about transparency.
He said: "We learned a lot from that. It helps us make better decisions. To me it demonstrates an openness and willingness to ask hard questions."
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Pole position

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By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

Sat on the start grid, foot poised over the accelerator, you wait for the row of red lights to extinguish. Alongside you are top names like Lewis Hamilton, Felipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonen. The cars' engines are screaming and everyone is poised to go. For any Formula One fan the chance to race against their heroes would be a dream come true. Sadly, the closest most of us have ever got is watching the Grand Prix on television. But that could soon change if a company from the Netherlands has its way. "It's clear that the next trend in gaming is going to be bringing real objects into the virtual world; playing not against other gamers but people doing the real thing," said Andy Lurling, founder of iOpener Media. The patented system they are developing sucks in real time GPS data from racing events and pumps it out to compatible games consoles and PCs. The idea is that you could pit yourself against the top drivers in the world, in real time, from the comfort of your living room. "You can compete against the best of the best," he told BBC News. 'Hardcore appeal' And if all of this sounds far fetched, think again. The European Space Agency (Esa) was so impressed with his proposal it gave Mr Lurling's company a grant to develop a proof of concept. A German venture capitalist has stumped up cash to develop it further. Driving the boundaries of realism

He has already tested it with an F1 car and plans to have the first games on the market as early as September this year. "At this point we have lots of interest and we are looking for the right partner to launch," he said. The firm is currently in talks with six developers about using the technology, he said. Gareth Wilson, Design Manager at Bizarre Creations, makers of the Project Gotham Racing series, says he thinks games with the real time feature would "excite a hardcore minority of gamers". "Formula 1 and similar complex simulation games are getting less mass market nowadays, compared to their more arcade-style heyday in the late 90s," he told BBC News. "This sort of feature would probably appeal to the hardcore gamer or F1 fan more than a mass market gamer. "Having said that, the hardcore would totally love it." Bizarre Creations is not currently one of the firms evaluating the system Precision position At the core of iOpener's technology is an enhanced GPS system known as differential GPS (DGPS). This uses a network of fixed base stations to correct the GPS signal, which on its own may only be accurate to within 10m. DGPS is commonly used for air navigation or shipping where precision is key.

- 1. Global Navigation Satellite Systems locate position of car

- 2. Location data and car telemetry is beamed to a track side server

- 3. Data is tagged with unique ID of the car and sent over the internet

- 4. Information stored on servers and "mediacast" to gamers.

- Whole process from car to gamer takes less than five seconds

"With that we know the location and the velocity of the car," explained Mr Lurling. As further precision is needed, iOpener can use information from the European EGNOS network, which augments GPS satellite signals to provide positional data accurate to within 2m. Other tweaks include fitting cars with an inertial measurement unit (IMU), commonly used in guided missile systems, which measure acceleration, angle and yaw of the object. "IMUs give accuracy on a short range," Mr Lurling told BBC News. "Combined with DGPS we know the location of the car to within less than 30 centimetres." In addition, the system collects telemetry data from the car, which is fitted with a small computer, transmitter and the GPS receiver. "That is already good enough data for a game," he said. Telemetry is commonly collected by track-side engineers to monitor the vehicles performance and can include information such as acceleration and what gear the car is in. It has already used by games developers to build more realistic simulations. Designers at Bizarre Creations used the telemetry to generate accurate track models for early F1 games, before detailed circuit maps existed, for example. From the track side, the data is sent over the net to a server farm, where it is saved before being pumped out - or "mediacast" - to eager gamers. The delay between collecting the data and the gamer being immersed in it is up to five seconds, similar to the lag on a TV broadcast. "We also store the data, so not only can you play the game in real time, but you can replay races at a later date," said Mr Lurling. Intelligent gaming The company does not intend to develop its own games; rather it will provide the backbone for games developers to build on to. But it will provide some software; specifically an artificial intelligence (AI) program to make sure that the virtual and real worlds blend seamlessly. "If Hamilton is driving behind you he can't see you [in the game], so he would drive right through you," explained Mr Lurling. "So the AI takes over at that point and you see a very realistic overtaking." The system also handles the results of in-game collisions between real and virtual drivers. In this case, the real car always drives away. The gamer's fate is less certain. "We go for optimal realism but the game experience has to be right," he said. Mr Wilson agrees with this approach. "There is a huge difference between what happens in the real world and what happens in video games - even the most 'realistic' simulator has to bend real world physics to make the game more fun," he said. However, even with the AI, he thinks gamers may encounter a more fundamental frustration with the system. "I know I wouldn't even get close to the lap times that Lewis Hamilton could run, unless my car in the virtual world had a load of extra grip and power - which might defeat the point," he said. At the moment, iOpener is concentrating firmly on racing games, but believes that there is a huge market for the system in other sports. "You can think of biking, rowing, skiing and snowboarding," said Mr Lurling. "In the next three to five years we believe that games will not be triple A games unless they have our feature in," he said.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Fake goods

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Internet law professor Michael Geist examines the shift from locking down content to locking down the network.

"Last week, negotiators from countries such as the United States, European Union, Japan, and Canada huddled at the US Mission in Geneva to negotiate the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).
The ACTA, which was shrouded in secrecy until a leaked summary of the agreement appeared on the internet last month, has sparked widespread opposition as many worry about the prospect of a trade deal that could lead to invasive searches of personal computers and increased surveillance of online activities.
While internal ACTA discussions began in as early as 2006, the trade negotiations only came to the public's attention last autumn when several governments simultaneously revealed their intention to participate in the negotiations.
Since the announcement, most governments have tried hard to keep the negotiations below the public's radar screen.Both the US and Canadian governments launched public consultations earlier this year that revealed little about the form or substance of the proposed treaty.
European negotiators provided a brief report on last week's negotiations, yet most of the details remain hidden from public view.
Diminished privacy
" It could focus attention on other key concerns including greater internet service provider filtering of content, heightened liability for websites that link to allegedly infringing content, and diminished privacy for internet users. "
Michael Geist

In recent weeks, fears about the ACTA have spilled into the political arena.In Canada, opposition Members of Parliament have raised concerns in the House of Commons and Toronto-area Liberal MP Bob Rae blogged that it "augurs a ridiculously intrusive national and international apparatus to police practices that are as common as eating and breathing."
With another round of talks set for next month in Japan, participating governments should use the opportunity to lift the veil of ACTA secrecy.Trade negotiators may prefer to remain outside of the spotlight, yet greater transparency is desperately needed.
Public disclosure of the draft documents might put an end to fears about iPod searching border guards by clarifying the full scope of the treaty.
Moreover, it could focus attention on other key concerns including greater internet service provider filtering of content, heightened liability for websites that link to allegedly infringing content, and diminished privacy for internet users.
Greater transparency would also lead to a more inclusive process.To date, the ACTA negotiations have excluded both civil society groups as well as developing countries.
Pharmaceutical fraud
In fact, reports suggest that trade negotiators have been required to sign non-disclosure agreements for fear of word of the treaty's provisions leaking to the public.
Given the need for cooperation from all stakeholders to battle counterfeiting concerns, an effective strategy requires broader participation and regular mechanisms for feedback.
An open ACTA also promises to increase the effectiveness of anti-counterfeiting activities.
For example, there is general consensus that law enforcement and regulators should prioritize health and safety concerns that arise from counterfeit pharmaceutical activities.
Protecting the public from pharmaceutical fraud requires a comprehensive approach, including confiscation of counterfeit and expired drugs, regulatory action against unsafe marketing claims, and assurances that consumer health will not be placed at risk due to the withholding of relevant research data.
If the leaked ACTA information is accurate, the current draft adopts a much more limited approach by focusing on confiscating drugs, thereby leaving the public vulnerable to pharmaceutical fraud.
With the ACTA speculation at a fever pitch, there is a sense that both the US and European Union are anxious to conclude negotiations by the end of the year.
The public should express reservations about this aggressive timeline and insist that all parties open the ACTA now. "

Michael Geist holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law. He can be reached at mgeist@uottawa.ca or online at www.michaelgeist.ca.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Spying eyes?

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Bill Thompson believes Virgin Media has decided it likes record companies more than its customers.

"The chances are that I'll be getting a letter from my internet service provider (ISP) in the next few weeks telling me that they've been watching my network activity closely and think I've been breaking the law.
Virgin Media, who used to be called NTL before they acquired Virgin Mobile and turned themselves into a "four-play" media company, has announced that it is working with record industry lobby group, the British Phonographic Industry, to write to customers whose network connection seems to have been used to download unlicensed content.
Like almost every technically-competent internet user of my acquaintance I've used BitTorrent to get my hands on a copy of a TV show that I missed,taking advantage of the kindness of strangers who bothered to record and upload the shows for fans because the companies that make and broadcast them choose not to.
However I also go out and buy the DVD box sets as soon as I can.
And I don't feel like a criminal, because I don't see why downloading a copy of a show that someone else has recorded should be seen as a breach of copyright while recording it myself onto a DVD is not.
According to the BPI's press release the letters are part of a "new education campaign to help Virgin Media's broadband customers safely download music from the internet and avoid the risk of legal action".
"At the moment it's hard to use BitTorrent anonymously, although since the service itself is entirely legal and legitimate there should be no need to do so"
Bill Thompson

But from the outside it seems more like a softening up move to get Virgin customers used to the fact that they are being observed by their ISP. And I predict Virgin will be happy to help the BPI identify individual account holders so that they can be threatened with prosecution over their downloading activities later on.
The move follows a campaign by the BPI to persuade UK ISPs to adopt a "three strikes and you're out" approach to downloaders, where they would have their network connection terminated if they were found to be downloading unlicensed material after two warnings.
This hasn't happened, not least because the two sides can't agree who would pay the costs of monitoring or sending letters, or who would be liable for the inevitable lawsuits when innocent users decided that arbitrary disconnection without due process was likely to prove unpopular in the courts.
They should be careful who they sue. Researchers at the University of Washington recently announced that they had managed to fool US film industry body the MPAA into sending formal legal notices to three laser printers, claiming that they had been downloading copies of Iron Man and Indiana Jones.
Fake IP addresses
They had set up their network to fake the relevant internet addresses and the software used by the MPAA was unable to spot this.
Virgin will be on slightly firmer ground because it's their network, and although some users may claim that they have open wireless networks that could have been used by anyone the buck will stop with the account holder.
There continues to be concerted pressure from established content providers in film, television and music, hoping that aggressive enforcement of copyright law will ensure that their 20th Century business models survive against the onslaught of the network society.
I believe it's a doomed enterprise, as the growth of a fast internet coupled with the ability to make perfect copies of digital content means that all of the assumptions that underpin film studios, TV broadcasters and record companies have been stripped away, leaving them flailing around, threatening and suing the people who should be their best customers and hoping to persuade politicians to pass new laws to give them special privileges online.
As more licensed download services become available, many offering songs without usage restrictions enforced by digital rights management technologies, the wholesale copying of unlicensed copies becomes a lot less defensible.
But the habits that grew up when the music industry was simply unwilling to accept that downloading was the way forward - and the technologies that support those habits - will be hard to break.
Heavy downloaders
Evidence that heavy downloaders are also heavy music purchasers doesn't seem to have made any difference to the BPI's approach either, and instead of finding new business models they hold on to the old ways of working.
It gets more complicated because the larger ISPs in the UK, Virgin, Sky and BT, are also content providers with their own interests in shoring up the current copyright regime.
Virgin don't want programmes they have paid to distribute ending up on the internet for people like me to download, but by acting in concert with trade bodies they can appear socially responsible rather than simply serving their own broader interests.
The spaces within which we can live unobserved are constantly diminishing, as both public and private sector agencies link their databases together or co-operate to ensure that nothing we do goes unremarked.
We need a space for experimentation, where we can test the limits of old laws and explore how they might be altered in future, but once ISPs decide that they are no longer neutral carriers of bits and choose to ally themselves with the content industry then we lose another sliver of freedom.
At the moment it's hard to use BitTorrent anonymously, although since the service itself is entirely legal and legitimate there should be no need to do so.
The moves by Virgin and other ISPs will simply spur the development of new ways of sharing files, just as the clampdown on Napster lead directly to the development of the current generation of peer to peer networks.
Virgin has just given its thousands of users an incentive to explore these new tools in order to confuse their administrators. After all, we pay them to move my bits around, not to go running to the record company if they suspect us of downloading unlicensed music. " Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Testing times

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By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

In a first, Google is opening up its testing process by calling on tens of millions of Gmail users to put new features of the service through their paces.
Gmail Labs has launched 13 settings for users to play around with and tell engineers directly what they think of them. The new developments, which are only available in the UK and the US, show up as a red tab at the top of the page. Gmail product manager Keith Coleman says: "This marks a big change in the way the company does product development." Generally speaking products are tested internally on Google staff for weeks if not for months and then refined before being released to the public. Never before has the firm opened up the testing process and brought in outsiders on such a large scale.Smaller scaled usability tests have been done with invited visitors. Mr Coleman says: "We want to take the next step and let Gmail users help us do that refinement." Old Snakey The new settings include things like 'Pictures in Chat' which puts portraits in chat sessions, 'Superstars' which lets you put different icons on mail, 'Old Snakey' lets you play the classic game in Gmail,and 'Email Addict'forces you to take a screen break by locking you out of the Gmail for 15 minutes. Mr Coleman says the features are "Really rough and have gone through no filtering in terms of productanalysis or design analysis. They have just gone through a general code review process to make sure they are safe to run." "They have also gone through less testing than a typical feature would. But what this is is a way to take our ideas and get them out to the public." After testing, users will get the chance to directly tell the developers what they think of them.The most popular are likely to become a regular part of theGmail product. 20% time The service was unveiled to a smallgroup of journalists, including the BBC, who had been invited in to Building 47 at the Googolplex for a rare view of the team at work. Normally such spaces are off-limits to people outside of the company. As well as being shown the new service ahead of release, we were also walked through the offices where engineers take 20% of their time to come up with ideas and work on them.The 20% time is part of Google's core ethos. "The idea behind Labs is that any engineer can go to lunch, come up with a cool idea, code it up, and ship it as a Labs feature to tens of millions of users," explains Mr Coleman. Staff write suggestions on a white board to keep track of everything being played around with and who is working on what. Another display shows how many bugs an upcoming application needs to get fixed and which engineer is working on it. Spam Tsar The whole workspace is divided into areas covering various aspects of Gmail from the calendar to documents and from the reader to spam. The guys fighting to keep spam out of the Gmail inbox are tucked away in a dark corner of the office.Brad Taylor is known as the 'Spam Tsar', a title he quite enjoys. He has been working on Gmail since its public launch back in 2004 and says he has seen a real growth in the amount of unsolicited email flooding into the system. "Originally when we launched 25% of email was spam.We caught a lot of that.Over time its grown and grown andcurrently around 75% of all email is spam and so our job has got a lotharder." Top secret In the heart of this open space is the so called 'war room'. Here around a half a dozen engineers are huddled into a cramped office to work on top secret projects.Everyone there was tight lipped about what the next big thing coming out of the room would be but helpfully quipped that it was a new colour. Todd Jackson, another Gmail product manager, was more serious when he said that what goes on here is kept under wraps and that the engineers don't come out until they have either solved a particular problem or fully developed a new feature. Situated next to the office cafe is the Usability Lab where Gmail invites small groups of six to eight people to test new applications to see how they will fare with the general public. Nika Smith, who helps run the Lab, says instead of having a two-way mirror to watch participants and how they interact with a product, they are a little more high tech. "We have this little hidden camera next to some flowers and one in the corner of the room.We just want to know how they use Gmail and see from the users perspective what their experience is like." "Then we just watch how theyinteract with the product and work out what improvements are needed." A-Team Perhaps one of the coolest areas in the Gmail Lab is the site reliability room, which is just past a sign that says "Hippies Use Backdoor".
Decked out with a slew of monitors and computers, there is also a selection of intoxicating drinks, a drum kit and a couple of guitars.On the wall hangs a whiteboard with a wish-list of things like 'surround sound, a WII Fit machine and a bigger TV'. Mr Coleman says even though the place was empty during our tour, everyone is on a pager and gets an alert when something goes amiss with the site. The overall Lab space is like any other nondescript office, albeit with a few fun quirks here and there such as naming every printer and copier after TV shows of the 80's like The A-Team and All in the Family. And one of the ways the Gmail Labs fosters a family atmosphere is by simply relaxing in the sunshine every so often with a barbeque, aregular occurrence here at Building 47 and the rest of the Google empire

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

iPhone fever

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By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter, BBC News

Apple fans are waiting with bated breath - and a seemingly unending supply of rumours - for the iPhone Version 2.
The iPhone Version 1 was launched in July 2007 to widespread tech hysteria. Version 2 is widely expected to be unleashed at Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference that starts on 9 June. The blogosphere is already red hot with speculation. Most think the new version will run on 3G, with the more pedantic design watchers predicting it will be slightly fatter as a result due to the need for a bigger battery. Others predict a bigger camera, video-calling capacities and a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip built in. Huge influence Ben Wood, director of analyst firm CCS Insight, goes further, predicting that a blue button on the phone will link directly through to Apple's application store, with access to games, calculators, currency converters, screen-savers and ringtones. "We predict this will become the most popular mobile applications store ever launched," he said. Apple has a tendency to offer something no-one expected and such a "sting in the tail" is also possible thinks Mr Wood. "If it didn't have an Apple logo, it would have been long forgotten."
John Starkweather, Microsoft

Possible other "stings" include a hybrid iPhone Nano, a new partnership with a big internet brand or capacity for mobile TV. Of course the biggest surprise would be no announcement at all, but even if the rumours turn out to be premature, there is no doubting the influence of the first iPhone. Data usage has grown exponentially since the iPhone launched with all operators seeing a huge ramp up in the amount of non-voice traffic. "In the last six months we have seen continuing demand for these services and have improved our own mobile browsing and music download services to meet this demand," said Richard Warmsley, head of Beyond Voice at T-Mobile. CCS Insight predicts that 218 million Europeans will be browsing on mobile devices by 2010. "Apple has done an amazing job. It was its first ever mobile phone and it has managed to reshape the market and how people interact with their mobiles," said Mr Wood. Younger generation So-called smartphones have been slow to take off and, for a long time, remained a must-have only for corporate workers. Tony Cripps, senior analyst with research firm Ovum, thinks that expectations of mobile connectivity have changed over the last year to the extent that the term "smartphone" is largely "redundant". "A lot more devices can access the web and there is a huge range of services which people want from e-mail, search, maps and social networking. "The younger generation now expect all of these on their mobiles as standard," he said. Currently, the price of the iPhone puts it out of the range of many younger consumers, but some think the new version, whenever it is announced, will come with new pricing models. The mobile market in Europe, where operators routinely subsidise the price of handsets, has meant that the high-priced iPhones have sold in much smaller quantities than in the US. Five million iPhones have been sold but less than 350,000 of these were shifted in Europe, says research firm Jupiter. Change in tactics "The question has to be asked to what extent Apple can succeed without embracing the traditional mobile eco-system," said Jupiter analyst Thomas Husson. Mr Woods believes the iPhone Version 2 could change the way Apple does business with the mobile operators. "Some level of subsidy is likely to be available and operators are going to be allowed to set the price to some extent, although there are bound to be guidelines from Apple which will not want to endanger its lucrative iPod business," he said. The era of exclusivity, where just one operator per country rolled out the iPhone, is already changing. Vodafone and TIM are both due to launch the iPhone in Italy later this year. Vodafone has also signed up to deliver the iPhone in Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, South Africa and Turkey. In markets such as Italy, where 90% of the market is pre-paid, it is likely non-contract handsets will be available, thinks Mr Wood. The change in tactics is down in part to the unexpected number of people unlocking their iPhones to work on any network. For the hard-core Apple fans the price of the next generation device comes second to its new specs, but not everyone is so excited by the whole iPhone phenomenon. Catching up Microsoft's anticipation is, as one would expect, lukewarm. About Version 1, director of Windows Mobile, John Starkweather said: "If it didn't have an Apple logo, it would have been long forgotten." He maintains that Apple is still playing catch-up with the rest of the smartphone market. "This year sees their first 3G phone to market. We have had 3G-enabled phones since the first networks were built and we will sell 20m new Windows Mobile phones in 2008," he said. The numbers put the market share of the iPhone into perspective, but as more and more copycat iPhone handsets come on the market, the influence of its look is undisputed, even by Microsoft. "Apple is good at design," conceded Mr Starkweather.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Celebrity gamers

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Margaret Robertson
Video game consultant and writer

Margaret Robertson on how games and gamers are attracting more and more recognition

Like many commuters, one of my milder vices is leafing through a free copy of Metro on the morning train. It rarely disappoints - cute animals rescued from improbable peril, TV stars revealed to be dieting hoaxers, lovelorn fugitives betrayed by sausage addiction - but it's rarely worth slowing down from a rapid flick.
Today, though, I was brought to a standstill, not by the enduringly inexplicable photo of Mike Tyson cab-sharing with Aisleyne from Big Brother, but by a mean and moody quarter-page shot of a middle aged Japanese man.
Suddenly, alongside Amy and Blake and Peaches and Lily, here was Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid, and one of the best known game developers in the world.
But while Kojima had made it into the paper he hadn't made it into the fashion column or the interview slot.
He was smouldering out from an HMV promo advertising a signing session for the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.
What else would you expect Game designers just aren't great gossip fodder.
Rich rewards
It's hard to imagine David Braben on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, for all sorts of reasons.
Gillette, to my certain knowledge, has never approached Charles Cecil to be its new face, despite his formidable stubble, and I'm pretty sure Mike Tyson has never shared a cab with Matthew Smith.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that most Metro readers will never have heard of Braben, Cecil or Smith, nor be able to name off-hand the games for which they're revered (Elite, Broken Sword and Manic Miner, respectively).

But Kojima's presence in the paper - albeit in a paid-for slot - is evidence of a trend that's been building for some time.
Game makers are gaining more and more recognition. In Britain they get OBEs, in France admittance to the Ordre des Artes et de Lettres. Game fans queue along Oxford Street to bag an autograph, and it's not unheard of for game studios to receive requests for candid developer calendars.
Nor are these emerging stars rubbing shoulders with an army of geeky nobodies.
Gaming is drawing celebrity to it like never before.
Throwing knickers
The arrival of Rock Band and Guitar Hero have changed the relationship of gaming and music forever.
At the moment the repertoire - Motley Crue and Def Leppard - may leave you cold, but the news stories show that games can be a better place to sell a single than iTunes, and a better place to launch an album than a TV show or a festival stage.
And if The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has left you wanting more Spielberg, then you'll need to head to your Wii, not the cinema, for his latest release, Boom Blox. And speaking of cinemas, the rash of game-inspired movies in the works is going to produce an epidemic of heart-throbs racing each other to come out as life-long gamers.
Expect hours of interviews with Prince of Persia Jake Gyllenhaal earnestly explaining how much he loved the original game on the Apple II, and whatever hunk bags the Gears of War lead to lay claim to 16-hour co-op marathons to get him into character.

Of course, the great thing about games is that there's scope for their consumers as well as their creators to become stars.
It's hard to imagine anyone throwing their knickers at a really prolific reader, or eBaying the kidney stones of someone who's seen a lot of films, but around the world top-class gamers are already celebrities.
Virtua Fighter experts get mobbed by girls in Japanese arcades. Korean Starcraft champs are on TV every night.
In Brazil the top Gunbound player was famous enough to get himself briefly kidnapped. Think it can't happen here Sky already screens the Championship Gaming Series, and live e-sports events in the west attract audiences of tens of thousands.
Major events - such as the Electronic Sports World Cup and the World Cyber Games - have prize purses of hundreds of thousands of pounds.
New models
And money is a key issue. There's long been a theory that we don't get gaming celebrities because developers just don't have the charisma, or the looks, to be superstars.
The truth is colder: overwhelmingly they just don't have the money.
Being famous is an expensive business, and game makers were for many years most likely to be salaried employees, paid the same regardless of how much money their games made.
But that's changing: thanks to new distribution methods and new financial models, there are more and more ways for developers to work independently if they choose to, which lets them reach their market direct, speak their minds instead of towing publisher PR guidelines and retain more of the credit - and more of the profit.
All of a sudden, the indie kid who made Desktop Tower Defence is making more each year out of his ad revenue than lead designers on games that gross hundreds of millions. And wherever youth and money meet, fame follows.
So a year, or two, or three from now, there could be enough celebrity game developers that Mike Tyson would need to share a bus with them, not a cab.
Make no mistake, gaming is going to get celebrities, and celebrities are going to get gaming. But I'm still not betting you'll see them in the gossip section of the Metro. Not because they're too boring, or too ugly, or too poor. But because they're too smart.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Broadband speed test

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HOW TO USE THIS MAP

- Click the white arrows to show more comments

- To read individual comments, click on the coloured pins

- To read BBC reports click on the grey pins

The majority of British homes now have access to broadband but the speed at which they are connected varies widely.
Distance from the local telephone exchange is one factor governing connection speed, and people living in the countryside may find their service is considerably slower than those in urban areas.
The map below shows results from a broadband speed test on the BBC News Website.
Thank you to everyone who took part in this test. This debate is now closed.
To see the full list of comments on this issue, click here .
The map is part of a trial to find new ways of showing comments sent in by our readers.

Did you like this map Tell us what you think here.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Storm warning

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The physical location of our online services still matter a great deal, argues Bill Thompson

"My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company.He's currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.
One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at.He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had "outsourced his memory" to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.
Recently I've noticed that Simon's head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing tocloud computing, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.
For a small but growing business it means that new storage and processing capacity can be added incrementally instead of having to buy a whole new server at a time.
And for a distributed company like WorkCircle, where the team all work from their own homes or offices, it makes coordination, document sharing and collaboration a lot easier.
The approach is growing in popularity, and Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among the many large companies working on ways to attract users to their offerings, with Google Apps, Microsoft's Live Mesh and Amazon S3 all signing up customers as they try to figure out what works and what can turn a profit.
The technical obstacles to making distributed systems work are formidable, and while books like Nick Carr's The Big Switch talk optimistically about the potential for utility computing to be offered to homes and businesses just like electric power, building robust, reliable and scalable systems around these new models will tax our ingenuity.
Constant outages
As we become more reliant on the cloud any problems will become more severe, as we can see in the irritation that many users feel with Twitter at the moment because of constant outages, dropped messages and general flakiness as the company tries to cope with what was clearly an unanticipated growth in usage.
It would be a lot worse if your spreadsheets or presentations were inaccessible because of problems in the cloud, or rather because of problems with the physical computers or network connections that make cloud computing possible.
" Those of us who use the cloud just need to be clear about the realities of the situation - and not send or store anything on GoogleMail or HotMail that the US government might want to use against us"
Bill Thompson

Because behind all the rhetoric and promotional guff the 'cloud' is no such thing: every piece of data is stored on a physical hard drive or in solid state memory, every instruction is processed by a physical computer and the every network interaction connects two locations in the real world.
It is often useful to conceptualise online activities as cyberspace, the place behind the screen, but the internet is firmly of the real world, and that is one of the greatest problems facing cloud computing today.
In the real world national borders, commercial rivalries and political imperatives all come into play, turning the cloud into a miasma as heavy with menace as the fog over the Grimpen Mire that concealed the Hound of the Baskervilles in Arthur Conan Doyle's story.
The issue was recently highlighted by reports that the Canadian government has a policy of not allowing public sector IT projects to use US-based hosting services because of concerns over data protection.
Under the US Patriot Act the FBI and other agencies can demand to see content stored on any computer, even if it being hosted on behalf of another sovereign state.
If your data hosting company gets a National Security Letter then not only do they have to hand over the information, they are forbidden from telling you or anyone else - apart from their lawyer - about it.
The Canadians are rather concerned about this, and rightly so. According to the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that helped the Internet Archive successfully challenge an NSL, more than 200,000 were issued between 2003 and 2006, and the chances are that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were on the recipient list.
Encrypting data
Even encrypting the data stored in data centres won't always work, as one of the benefits of Amazon's S3 and other services is that they do remote processing too, and the data needs to be decrypted before that can happen.
This is not just a US issue, of course, although attention has focused on the US because that it where most of the cloud data centres can be found. It applies just as much to the UK, where the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act will allow the police or secret services to demand access to databases and servers.And other countries may lack even the thin veneer of democratic oversight that the USA and UK offer to the surveillance activities of their intelligence agencies.
Companies have no real choice but to comply with the law in countries where they operate, and I don't expect a campaign of civil disobedience from the big hosting providers. Those of us who use the cloud just need to be clear about the realities of the situation - and not send or store anything on GoogleMail or HotMail that the US government might want to use against us.
Part of the attraction of the internet was always that it transcended geographic boundaries of all forms, whether political or physical. Communities grew because people shared interests or values, not because they lived in the same place or were under the same government. It was far from perfect, but it gave us a glimpse of a better world.
The push towards cloud computing may force us to be more realistic about the boundaries that have always existed. Perhaps it is time for the UN to consider a cyberspace rights treaty that will outline what it's acceptable to do when other people's data comes into your jurisdiction. " Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Who me?

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Hard cases make bad law, especially online, argues Bill Thompson

"It has always been difficult to stay completely on the right side of the law, however law-abiding one tries to be.
I try to check the copyright status of every picture I use in my presentations, but may sometimes slip up.
Copying CDs I own to my iPod may - or may not be - illegal, and copying DVDs I own certainly is.
And like all drivers I sometimes see the speedometer creep up above the speed limit when I'm not paying attention to it on a quiet motorway.
But now it seems I could face prosecution for the wide range of user accounts I've created on MySpace, Facebook, Googlemail, Flickr and Bebo to support the various projects I'm involved with.
The Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Tyneside 100 and Wysing Arts Centre identities I have lovingly crafted may well fall foul of a US decision that breaking the terms and conditions of a social network site can count as unauthorised access, turning what would seem to be at most a civil offence into a criminal act under computer misuse laws.
The concern arises because prosecutors in California have just charged 47-year-old Lori Drew under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for creating a fictitious MySpace account, something which many of us have done in the past and which I do all the time when projects I'm working on require a MySpace profile.
" The prosecution raises wider issues that should concern any computer user"
Bill Thompson

Drew allegedly used the account to pretend to be a 16-year-old boy, befriending and then rejecting 13- year-old Megan Meier, a friend of her daughter's, and - it is claimed - provoking Meier to commit suicide.
However state officials could find no basis on which to prosecute her in the 18 months since Meier's death, until the imaginative use of the computer crime law lead to charges last week.
Now she has been charged with "accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress", because she broke MySpace's terms of use, which forbid "impersonating or attempting to impersonate another Member, person or entity" and"using any information obtained from the MySpace Services in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person or entity, or attempting to do the same".
If the case against Drew is proved then she deserves our complete condemnation for bullying a young and vulnerable girl, and I can't imagine anyone would defend this behaviour or argue that a right to anonymity or pseudonymity extends to adults who abuse young people in this way.
Wider issues
But the prosecution raises wider issues that should concern any computer user, especially those who neither read nor take much notice of the terms and conditions of the sites and services they visit, since it opens up the possibility that acts which we thought were insignificant could be used against us in unexpected ways.
As always, we need to be careful about jumping to the conclusion that this is the death of the web as we know it, that every social network site will start prosecuting its users or that we are all under risk of investigation.
All we have is an indictment, which may be thrown out by the court, claiming that an offence has been committed.
The Computer Fraud and Misuse Act is being used because the false identity was used to do something much more serious, and the legal argument is that it can form the basis of a prosecution because it constitutes a "tortious act", but this has yet to be accepted by a judge.
Even if it went all the way through to successful prosecution it doesn't mean that MySpace could throw recalcitrant users in gaol for signing up with false names.And in most cases, like that of Lori Drew, there would be another law under which to prosecute anyone who used their online identity for something dodgy.
And yet it is a worrying development, because it creates a degree of uncertainty and may, because of that, have a chilling effect on what we do online.
Wild abandon
I've created new profiles and identities with wild abandon, secure in the knowledge that if Facebook or Bebo or whoever didn't like what I was doing the most they could do was close my account and perhaps try to stop me opening a new one.
But just as new laws on anti-social behaviour in the UK have created uncertainty about what is acceptable, with tales of people being fined for dropping two crisps that would be eaten by a bird within minutes promoting an atmosphere of careful restraint, any sense that online activity could get someone into serious trouble may limit playfulness and creativity.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston Smith is afraid of the telescreen not because he is being watched constantly but because he might be being watched at any particular moment.
As a result he controls himself far more carefully than the Party could ever manage.
We need to be careful that the US legal system, desperate to prosecute someone over the tragic death of a young girl, does not end up establishing a precedent that leads us all to censor ourselves online, just in case. " Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Two internets

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Should we have two internets asks Bill Thompson

"Jonathan Zittrain's recent book, The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It, has spurred a lot of discussion both online and offline, with blog posts lauding his insights or criticising his over-apocalyptic imagination.
The book itself makes fascinating reading for those who have watched the network grow from its roots in the research community into today's global channel for communications, commerce and cultural expression.
And the distinction that Zittrain makes between computers and devices that are open for hacking, exploration and creative use and those which are locked down and limited is one that we can clearly see.
An iPhone and an Asus Eee PC are very different objects, and I can't imagine anyone scrawling 'this machine kills fascists' on their iPhone in homage to Woody Guthrie, while my son has just done this to his Asus.

Red and green
"Perhaps we should ...offer two separate logical networks, operating over the same physical connection"
Bill Thompson

One of the reasons that Zittrain puts forward for the growing popularity of closed or, as he prefers 'tethered', devices, is that they are less vulnerable to hacking, security flaws, malware and all the other perils that face any internet-enabled system.
But he sees great dangers in allowing the creative potential of our computers to be limited by the need to register programs with companies like Apple, or have Microsoft's approval before your software will run on Windows.
And because he's from the United States, he doesn't believe that the government or a regulatory framework can solve the problem.
Instead he calls on the internet-using community to come together to solve the serious problems that face us, and offers his own suggestions as to where some of that effort might go.
One of his more interesting suggestions is that our PCs and laptops should have two operating modes: red and green. In the green zone the system is locked down, only approved programs can run, only demonstrably safe traffic is sent and received, and safety is as assured as itcan be.
The red zone is more like today's network, where you can download and run pretty much any software you like, but you run the risk that the movie file you found on BitTorrent is actually carrying a nasty little virus.
Users could then decide whether they want to work in the safe zone or go out onto the wider network. And, crucially, the red zone would have a 'restore' button that would wipe anything bad and return you to its initial state so you could recover from any infection.
It's a nice idea, and I think a lot of home users would choose a safer, if more limited, online experience.
Space for subversion

But unlike Zittrain I think that regulation can help, and that putting control in the hands of democratically elected governments is far better than putting it in the hands of corporations.
He wants the network's users to solve the problems, but a community on its own is far less effective than one backed by the rule of law, as eBay clearly demonstrates.
It can only operate as it does because contract law and financial regulation provide a way for the community to enforce its decisions against members, and this is true for other online services.
However not all governments are good; not all governments are wise and sensible; and not all governments listen to reason.
It is therefore necessary to ensure that, whatever the architectures of control on tomorrow's network, there is space for subversion, for activism, for stuff that is not approved, not countenanced by the state, not strictly legal.
And even if we accept that trusted systems will define the online experience for most people, most of the time - and that they will accept and even benefit from that - there needs to be more.
Perhaps we should extend Zittrain's idea beyond the computer and onto the network itself, and offer two separate logical networks, operating over the same physical connections.
One would be the safe world of electronic toll roads, the other a collection of dark and dangerous back alleys.
It would not be hard to build such a system.
Many of us already use what is called 'virtualisation' technology to run different operating systems at the same time, like the Mac users who also have Windows on their computer.
We could have a special virtual operating system for the uncontrolled internet, and anyone who wanted to use it would simply have to run it.
Of course things are not yet as bad as Zittrain seems to claim, and though I don't often agree with noted free market advocate and libertarian Adam Thierer, hiscritical review on the Progress and Freedom Foundation blog is well-argued and often insightful.
Safe place

As he notes, he can 'see no reason why we can't have the best of both worlds - a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness.'
But the desire to have a safe space online is growing stronger, and the pressure to lock down large swathes of the online world in order to make the network safe for the vulnerable will not go away.
We've seen it just this week with Facebook announcing that it will attempt to block access to its service to people convicted of 'sex offences' in the US, even though many of them will be guilty of nothing more than consensual sexual activity with other adults in public places.
But because the effort of checking whether someone was convicted - and not merely cautioned - for an offence which involved children is too great tens of thousands of people will be blocked from accessing the service.
Perhaps having a place where no such unreasonable and arbitrary distinctions exist is a good reason to start working on an alternative network. " Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Power healing

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Smart thinking about green computing could make a big impact, says Bill Thompson.

"Like every other product of the advanced manufacturing capabilities of a long-industrialised society the computers that surround us - and, for the pacemaker wearers among us, that we have taken into our bodies - carry an environmental cost. Silicon may be cheap, but turning it into processors requires vast amounts of energy, clean water and many potentially toxic chemicals. Some of the raw materials used elsewhere, like the coltan in our mobile phones, are extracted at great human and environmental cost. Displays and casings may contain heavy metals and damaging chemicals, while the disposal of old computers is becoming a significant issue. And the billions of processors, hard drives, screens and network devices that we increasingly rely upon consume more and more electrical energy, much of it wastefully generated from non-renewable sources that release carbon into the atmosphere. Faced with overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity is behind the current shift in the world's climate and that both temperature and sea level will rise significantly in the next century it is clear that we must take action. Taking small steps in our daily lives is clearly important, both because the cumulative impact of millions of people turning off their big screen TVs matters and also because awareness of the issue will drive real political and technical progress. But turning off the computers and dismantling the modern world is neither feasible nor desirable, although if we don't start telling our politicians that we expect them to believe the science and offer new policies then we may not have the choice. "But the imaginative thinking we're seeing from Prof Hopper and his team, coupled with individual changes to the wasteful way we live here in the West, seem to offer hope for the future of the species."
Bill Thompson

Andy Hopper, professor of computer technology at Cambridge University, is heading up a team of researchers exploring how we can use the technology to solve the problems to which it contributes. Under the banner "Computing for the Future of the Planet" the Computer Lab has outlined an adventurous programme of research into the ways in which computing technology could help us maintain our current way of life, and even give more people access to the comfort, safety and pleasures that characterise modern life in the West. And while it may not please those who believe that we must somehow suffer for the sin of making the most of what the planet has to offer, what they have done is to take the same sort of engineering approach to the problem of building a sustainable and supportable economy that the great Victorian engineers took to the issues of their time. Only this time questions of environmental impact, energy efficiency and social justice are part of the calculation. Prof Hopper and his team, lead by Andrew Rice, Alastair Beresford and Robert Harle, are asking some interesting questions, and they may come up with some interesting answers. After all, the Cambridge Computer Lab has something of a reputation for innovation, having been home to EDSAC, one of the world's earliest computers. They are looking at whether digital alternatives to physical activities really make a difference, and whether the environmental cost of creating the iTunes economy is actually larger than the CD-based one that preceded it. They are asking what forms of online entertainment and personal services will work for people whose primary access to the network is over their mobile phone, whether in sub-Saharan Africa or on the move in Sussex. And since they aren't short of ambition they are exploring ways to model the resource consumption of the entire world as a means of understanding the impact of our individual activities and optimising our use of energy and materials. When Prof Hopper gave a speech about the issues to the Royal Society in March most of the coverage focused on his suggestion that we should be siting server farms near to wind farms or other renewable sources of energy. As he points out, it's a lot cheaper to transmit data than to transmit energy, and the data networks are often already in place, while wind and wave farms in remote sites require extensions to the electricity grid. It's an eminently sensible idea, but implementing it is a lot more complicated than sending shipping containers full of processors and disks off to remote Scottish islands and congratulating ourselves on the results. For one thing, we need to make cloud computing work effectively so that processing tasks can be distributed over the network from our desktop computers, laptops and even mobile phones. At the moment web-based processing is farmed out to Amazon and Google's online services, but when I do a spell check in Word it's stuck on my local processor. We also need to build data centres that can cope with varying power supplies, so that the server farm uses only the electricity that can be locally generated. The Cambridge research could be seen as blithe optimism, a desire to avoid facing up to the real implications of a finite world and a growing population, but if there's arrogance here it's the arrogance of the engineer who knows that certain classes of problem are amenable to solution. I still think of myself as a computer scientist, and I have to point out that I did the Diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge so I'm disposed to look at what they do favourably. But the imaginative thinking we're seeing from Prof Hopper and his team, coupled with individual changes to the wasteful way we live here in the West, seem to offer hope for the future of the species. Of course the Earth will do just fine without us, and we must not confuse working to keep the place habitable for humans with "saving the planet".
As futurist Jamais Cascio pointed out recently on his blog: "the Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves". He's right. If we mess up then it will be hard to tell we were ever here in a few hundred million years or so, apart from the odd radiation hotspot and a layer of soot, plastic and remarkably pure silicon that will be noticed by geologists of whatever species emerges to take our place. If computing can help defer the day the planet becomes inhospitable to us, I'm all in favour. " Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Walking web

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Maggie Shiels Technology Reporter
Web 2.0 San Francisco

Developers are being asked to devise applications for mobile devices so users can "access it, mix it up, save it, and store it". The plea to harness the creativity of the internet and apply it on mobile phones was made by Mitchell Baker the chair of Firefox developer Mozilla. All of this functionality "should be the same if I am on a laptop or phone, at home or on a train," says Ms Baker. "The breadth of the new ideas floating around and the different ways that people are thinking about information and using the web further away from browsing into more personalised information is exciting," said Ms Baker, speaking to the BBC News website at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. She is convinced that mobile phones will be one of the forces that will help people make better use of information pertinent to them "Information that matters to me is what the future is about," she said. Transforming experience For Marc Davis, Yahoo's social media guru, there's no doubt that the future is about mobility - with the numbers of handsets about to hit 4 billion there's plenty of evidence of their popularity. "We are about 18 months from an incredible boom in mobile applications and mobile adoption"
Mike Butcher, TechCrunch

"The mobile web is not just about accessing the web from your phone," he said "Mobile phones that are location aware, temporarily situated and socially connected will transform our experience of the web, the world and ourselves." "The next web," he says "will be about place and time." He suspects that we are near the point at which more people will be able to access the web via their phone than their desk top computer. Open strategy Echoing Mozilla's call to developers, Mr Davis is urging them to get involved in being part of Yahoo's mobile future. As a way to convince his audience he highlighted the company's earlier announcement at the Expo called Yahoo Open Strategy (Y!OS). "Openness is deeply in our DNA and we are coming out as an 'open company' now in a big way.So we are making it possible for developers to write an application, to write a widget and open this up." Yahoo is no the only one championing widgets. Mobile giant Nokia has announced the next stage of its Widget platform for Symbian Series 60 smartphones . The new stage will give developers access to GPS, contacts book, communications stacks, e-mail and SMS functions on the phone. "These are the kinds of things that really make a phone unique," says David Rivas, vice president for Nokia's Series 60 technology management devices group. "We are at a real crossroads in terms of mobile phone technology and it is this availability of web technology on the mobile device that signals that crossroads." But when can consumers expect results Not for a while said Mike Butcher from technology blog TechCrunch. "We are not there yet," he said. "We are about 18 months from an incredible boom in mobile applications and mobile adoption." "I think there are two things that are going to happen," he said. "Firstly the mobile platform is being opened up for other people to create interesting applications. And the second is the handsets are constantly improving which means the overall experience promises to be good.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Robot dreams

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By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website, in San Francisco

Google has made no secret of its ambitions in the mobile space. There are mobile versions of all its key services, such as search, e-mail and calendar.
But the company is going much further. At the end of 2007 it lifted the lid on Android, an open mobile operating system that is being used to power a new generation of devices under the Open Handset Alliance, a group which involves firms like HTC and chip designer ARM.
Android is the creation of Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms.
He believes that a lack of openness in the mobile phone space has stifled innovation to date.
"What Android enables for third party developers is the kind of programming we see on the internet," he says.
"What it enables is agility and rapid innovation and the same kind of innovation that happens on the internet."

Mr Rubin says that by opening up the phones - from the operating system, released under open source, to the drivers and the application framework - developers will have more freedom to innovate, and more scope also.
But if you talk to Symbian and Microsoft, two companies that also build mobile operating systems, both claim to be open also. Mr Rubin says: "There's a distinction we have to make - and it's an important one - between open source and open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
"APIs are essentially documentation, they're the way that somebody like Symbian or Microsoft will allow third party developers to develop for their platform.
"Open source is a mechanism by which the source code of the operating system is actually for free and that way the carriers and OEMs are not really locked into a single vendor, nobody really owns this. "It means they are free to take it into the direction that's important to them; they can fix bugs, add enhancements so in the end the consumer has a better experience."
Mr Rubin believes this will lead to greater variety of mobile experiences - driven not by the rules and regulations of an operating system but by the ideas of developers.
In essence, it could lead to greater variety of phones and of what those phones are capable.
Google has formed the Open Handset Alliance, with manufacturing partners like HTC and chip designers like ARM.
At the Mobile World Congress earlier this month the first reference handsets running Android were on show.
Mr Rubin gave BBC News a demo of his handset and while the software was in pre-beta form, it was a good representation of what the phones will be able to do.
The browser was responsive and driven by both touch and a mini-track ball.
Google Maps supported Street View, the ability to see stills of real world locations, which has not been seen on a mobile device before.
Mr Rubin says Android is running on a phone powered by a 300Mhz chip, which puts the device in the mid-range of smartphones.
"A lot of applications we are seeing on phones today, in some of the newest and most powerful phones, are doing internet style web browsing.
"There should be nothing that users can access on their desktop that they can't access on their cell phone"
Andy Rubin

"But that is just one of the components of the internet we need to bring to cellphones. There should be nothing that users can access on their desktop that they can't access on their cellphone.
Mr Rubin points out that not all net experiences are available through the browser.
"Applications like Google Earth and YouTube have specific functionality that hasn't yet effectively been brought to mobile.
"Up until Android that wasn't possible on the phone - you could only access functionality given to you by the operating system."
Mr Rubin says the open nature of Android will let developers take advantage of the web, of other applications, of the phone's hardware capabilities, from 3D graphics to multimedia capabilities.
This is not Mr Rubin's first foray into overturning the "natural order" of things.
A former roboticist and Apple engineer, he created Web TV, and the device which led to the pioneering Sidekick handset.
"One of my passions throughout my whole career is consumer products; making things my mom would use.
"That need wasn't satisfied doing robotics. that was behind the scenes factory stuff."
So what does he make of Apple's first phone to the market?
"It's a great 1.0 product; I use one.
"Apple has that great balance of being both a hardware and software firms so they have a lot of flexibility.
"One of the things that is a challenge for them is having an incredible footprint worldwide - there are different types of communications standards, regulatory issues, and different language issues.
"I'm hoping that doesn't limit them."
With about three billion people using mobile phones worldwide and the number of devices that can access the net climbing rapidly, the future of the web is definitely mobile. And with no one company dominating the mobile arena as yet, the race is very much on.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Nokia morphs itself from within

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By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website, in San Francisco

Nokia is the world's largest mobile phone maker and with more than one billion handsets shipped is by extension the world's largest computing platform.
Every day Nokia sources 329 million parts and builds a million phones in 100 plus handset models and distributes these phones in 70 different languages to 150 countries.
But as phones become less about making calls and more an extension of our connected lives, Nokia is transforming itself from a hardware company into something more converged. It's not the parts that matter but what use those parts are put to.
"We're not a cell phone company we're a software and services company as well," Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president at Nokia, told BBC News.
He said: "We are already living in the converged world; the spearhead consumers, about 200m people, are using their devices to be present in the internet 24/7, using their handsets as multimedia computers."

For Mr Vanjoki Nokia's transformation is just another change in direction for the firm.
"The company was established in 1865 and since then we have changed the course of the company several times from the original wood chip factory, to what is our main business, monetising our software know-how by selling devices."
He added: "It's very obvious in a converging internet world that when software, media and hardware come together it allows us to monetise our know-how in multiple ways."
To aid this latest genesis Nokia has invested in research centres around the world, building relationships with universities and academic institutions.
In the UK Nokia has partnered with Cambridge University and is focusing on the application of nanosciences to the mobile phone market, and has partnered with Professor Mark Welland, one of the world's leading nano experts.
Earlier this week the firm unveiled Morph, a concept phone that revealed the company's long-term ambitions; a mixture of high technology and services.
Morph is the product of nanosciences - a handset that can be folded, stretched, used to sense the world around it, and deliver the high end functions of a future communications device.
"Morph is a beguiling vision"
Technology editor Darren Waters
Read more on the Dot.Life blog

In the US Nokia has built a research centre in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley. This centre is focused on developing internet and web applications, leveraging the local talent and expertise found at Stanford and Berkeley universities.
Professor Henry Tirri, head of System Research Centers, is tasked with fostering the collaborative research between Nokia and partner universities worldwide.
"Our research scope is very wide - but we're not focusing on display, radio technology or battery life - it goes from nanosciences in the UK to services and software in Palo Alto."
The research centres work outside the roadmap Nokia has for handsets, looking at future technologies and applications from one to three years ahead, three to eight years and beyond.
"An enormous amount of the patents found in today's handsets originated in Nokia's Research Centres - from the interface design to improvements in audio quality on the phones to applications."
"These devices can connect the physical world with the digital world"
Professor Henry Tirri

He added: "A lot of things that you will see in the future, as Nokia moves to be an internet company, willcome from the research labs."
Mr Tirri said: "Nokia sells 18 phones every second of every day; that is a humungous computing platform.
"Voice is one function of these devices, but we are moving to a data centric world. These devices can connect the physical world with the digital world.
"But what are the services which will marry the two?"
One such project trying to do just that is under development at Palo Alto. Nokia's researchers are using the GPS technology in some of their phones to help create a real-time picture of traffic flow.
The lab is working with Berkeley University and state authorities to trial software on mobile phones which will hopefully lead to a better understanding of how traffic moves through a system, and ultimately lead to better information for motorists as they drive.

Dr John Shen, head of the Palo Alto Research lab, said his team was helping Nokia's development as a services company.
"We see the intersecting of the internet and mobility.Nokia has been a device company and that will remain a lucrative business for years to come, but instead of waiting until we have to change, Nokia is looking ahead and making changes now."
He said the focus for the firm was a "total solution", encompassing hardware and software, but focusing on a "compelling user experience".
"The company that understands the end user experience is going to have an edge," he added.
In Palo Alto 50 researchers are working on future mobile services.
Professor Tirri said the challenge for Nokia as it alters its focus was dealing with the issue of scale, and how best to use the information in the digital world that phones were able to gather in the physical world.
"If one billion devices each produced one message every minute, it would swamp the network capacity.
"And what do we choose to measure in the physical world? We could measure everything, using the camera and sensors like GPS, which is perfectly possible.

"But the challenge then is indexing that data. How do we sort and deliver that data back to people?"
"And then there is a humungous user interface problem - how do keep the experience simple enough for consumers?"
Dr Shen added: "When technology is below the user requirement, technology drives the industry.
"But once you cross over to the mainstream then you have to look at services and the user experience.
"The real focus now is compelling user experiences. It has to be user experience driven rather than technology driven."

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Why the future is in your hands

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By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

Sales of smartphones are expected to overtake those of laptops in the next 12 to 18 months as the mobile phone completes its transition from voice communications device to multimedia computer. Convergence has been the Holy Grail for mobile phone makers, software and hardware partners, as well as consumers, for more than a decade. And for the first time the rhetoric of companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola, who have boasted of putting a multimedia computer in your pocket, no longer seems far fetched. "Converged devices are always with you and always connected," said Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia chief executive at last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Last year Nokia sold almost 200m camera phones and about 146m music phones, making it the world's biggest seller of digital cameras and MP3 players. In the coming year the firm predicts it will sell 35 million GPS-enabled phones as personal navigation becomes the latest feature to be assimilated into the mobile phone. Form and function
Nigel Clifford, chief executive of Symbian, said: "All of those single use devices - MP3 players, digital camera, GPS - are collapsing onto the phone." "We are going past the point where this was a phone with a few other things," he said. Symbian's operating system shipped on 188 million phones last year and a third of those came with GPS. "We see mobile phones evolving into multi-functional devices that now support consumer electronics, multimedia entertainment and mobile professional enterprise applications; all converging," said Luis Pineda, from mobile phone chip firm Qualcomm. Convergence is being driven by a combination of software, services and hardware. The first phones powered by a chip running at 1Ghz will hit the market later this year, seven years after the first desktop chip broke the gigahertz barrier. Qualcomm's 1Ghz Snapdragon chipset will debut inside a number of handsets, including some from Samsung and HTC "It's a first in the industry for a wireless chipset," said Mr Pineda. As well as raw horsepower Snapdragon also features a dedicated application processor, as well as the ability to handle 12 megapixel digital photos and up to 720p high definition video imaging. Mr Clifford from Symbian said the mobile industry had to deliver multi-function devices which did not compromise. He said: "When we look at what is collapsing on to these devices and people's expectations with their experiences on single-use specialized devices there is going to be rising expectations." Chip shop
More than 90% of the world's mobile phones are powered by technology created by British firm Arm. It designs chip architectures that it licenses to semiconductors makers such as Qualcomm and Broadcom. Ian Drew from Arm said future mobile phones demanded ever more processing power. But building chips with greater processing was not a straightforward, he said. "The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it's going to be mobile"
Nigel Clifford, Symbian

"If you look at a typical phone the first thing you have got to do is get within the half a watt envelope. "It needs to get into your pocket. And there's no fan. It needs to work for days rather than hours." He added: "When you start adding multi media experiences- such as 3D graphics, video, and games - there are two ways to do that: you can get bigger and bigger processors or you have multi core where you can switch off a processor when you don't need it." Arm is demonstrating a chip architecture, called Coretex A9, that will offer four cores, or processors, on a single chip. Symbian has been working with Arm on future uses for multi-core mobile phones. "You can use massive amounts of processing if you need it. But if you don't you can power down the cores that aren't required," said Mr Clifford. Symmetrical Multi Processing will drive the next generation of applications on a phone, he added. "Silicon vendors are looking very seriously at how they integrate SMP." Mr Clifford added: "The future of the internet and computing applications is not going to be in the home or at the office; it's going to be mobile." He said gaming would be the next feature to collapse into phones. "That is one of the next single usage devices that will start feeling the pressure from the mobile device," he said. 3D graphics acceleration is becoming standard on many of today's mobile phones and specialists like Nvidia have joined the market. Mr Clifford said today's most powerful mobile phones, such as Nokia's N96 and NTTDoCoMo's 905 series have the same power as a laptop from 2000. Nvidia's APX 2500 chip has enough 3D graphics acceleration to handle Quake 3, a PC game from 1999, on a mobile phone. Handset owners were also beginning to expect the same online experience they have on their desktop PCs on their mobile phones. "Web 2.0, social networking and video sharing; that's a real driver of horsepower," said Mr Drew from Arm. He added: "But you need to be able to get data in. The next generation of mobile phones need high performance radios - they will have high data rates that will enable this content to be streamed to you." Symbian is working on technology called Freeway to give phones the ability to move seamlessly between wireless networks, like wi-fi and cell networks like 3G and 4G. "We don't want people to feel the mobile web is a second class experience."

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

A journey into 'fab world'

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By Peter Wilson

The process of making silicon chips is as complex as the chips themselves.
Each manufacturing plant, or "fab", may cost billions of dollars and is a triumph of engineering.
But working inside these hi-tech plants can be a surreal experience, says Dr Peter Wilson of the University of Southampton.

""Fab world" is like no other place on earth.
Its pristine white walls, secure air locks, sterile air and ethereal yellow lighting makes it seem like you have arrived in the belly of an orbiting space station.
I can still remember the first time I went there.
It was set in classic "tumbleweed" territory - a small town in Arizona with just one road and the factory.
The temperature was over 100 degrees outside, with dust everywhere, but when you crossed the threshold into the plant, the air-conditioning kicked in and you felt like you were in a different world.
This is a common experience to anyone who works in the silicon manufacturing sector. The world outside and the fab world inside are on two different planes.
The boundary can transcend geographic and political boundaries - it can become impossible to tell which country you are in, when everyone is wearing a mask, and is dressed head to foot in shapeless, white hooded-suits.
'Bunny men'
Outside, we worry about dirt on our shoes and wipe our feet, or perhaps wipe some dust off our laptop screen. In fab world, we worry about a few atoms contaminating the environment.
If dust falls on the delicate silicon wafers on which chips are printed it can render them useless.

Modern transistors - the tiny switches at the heart of these devices - are described in terms of the smallest feature sizes that can be made, such as a 45 nanometres, or 45 billionths of a meter.
To put this in perspective, the average human hair will be between 20 and 100 micrometers across - over a thousand times larger - and a typical dust particle will be anything from 1 to 100 micrometres.
Dust and contaminants must be kept out.
The fab is a place for chips, not for people. As a result, only the pure and the clean are given permission to penetrate its' inner chambers.
Anyone that enters must go through a strict set of procedures.
All of the trappings of the outside world must be left behind, whether clothes, jewellery or even make-up.
A series of ante-chambers serve as prep rooms where workers change into a series of gowns and gloves, collectively known as a "bunny suit".
Sticky floors make sure that no one treads in any contaminants and an air shower before entry makes certain that any loose particles are stripped away.
Skin flakes, lint, hair and anything else gets sucked into the grate in the floor.
Pure products
And then it's onwards into the hum of the clean rooms. Stark white walls reflect the yellow sodium lights from above and a constant breeze blows down from the ceiling taking any particles through the gridded floor.
"Fab world is an expensive place and, hence, it never stops"
Peter Wilson

In modern fabs, ultra high tech chips are manufactured in what are known as class 1 rooms that contain just one tiny particle per metre cubed. In contrast, a room where open heart surgery takes place may have as many as 20,000.
Everything taken in either needs to be cleaned with alcohol or specially designed. Even the paper we use to take notes is designed from a special lint-free material.
Inside, humans very rarely come into contact with the rainbow-streaked discs of reflective silicon on which the chips are cut.
Instead, they are there to trouble shoot and monitor that everything goes correctly.
The silicon wafers are handled on monorails that move above the fab floor and the processing is done by complex vacuum sealed robots.
The wafers enter one end of the line costing a couple of hundred dollars and appear at the other - weeks later -patterned with billions of transistors and worth tens of thousands of pounds.
The silicon itself is not made at the fab - the ultra pure ingots (up to 99.99999999% pure) are produced and cut by specialist companies and sold to the chip makers.
The fab world's magic is creating the incredibly complex patterns of wires and circuitry on chips the size of a postage stamp time and time again
That alchemy can cost billions of dollars.
Non-Stop
Each layer of a processor is constructed using a mask which is like a stencil, to highlight the areas to be deposited, etched or doped.
Each plant can cost billions of dollars

Doping involves adding impurities to the silicon to change its electrical characteristics - something which has to be done with astonishing precision.
Each mask used to cost several thousand pounds but as the complexity of chips has increased, and the smallest possible feature size has reduced, the number and intricacy of these masks has increased.
In addition, the size of individual features is now smaller than the wavelength of light that used to be used to pattern them, which means the use of some clever optics is required.
The yellowish lights used inside the fab are to make sure that they do not interfere with this process.
The result of all of this is that an individual silicon integrated circuit may require masks that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, or perhaps even millions of pounds, to produce and machines that cost a similar amount.
Fab world is an expensive place and, hence, it never stops.
The plants churn out chips every single day of every year. So called giga-fabs may process more than 100,000 wafers every month, each containing hundreds of chips.
Each one of the 10mm by 10mm silicon squares is a triumph of design.
As a chip designer, the impact of the incredible complexity of fab world has led to an amazing transformation in what we can do on a single chip.
The products of this strange and surreal place have burst out of its confines and have pervaded every facet of the outside world from computers and mobile phones to aircraft and microwave ovens.
Yet, incredible as it is to visit, fab world is also a place that is blissful to leave.
At the end of the day there's no better feeling than being able to rip off the itchy bunny suit, step outside into the searing heat and once again get dirty. "

Dr Peter Wilson is Senior Lecturer in Electronics at the University of Southampton, School of Electronics and Computer Science.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Future computing technologies

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Silicon electronics are a staple of the computing industry, but researchers are now exploring other techniques to deliver powerful computers.
A quantum computer is a theoretical device that would make use of the properties of quantum mechanics, the realm of physics that deals with energy and matter at atomic scales.
In a quantum computer data is not processed by electrons passing through transistors, as is the case in today's computers, but by caged atoms known as quantum bits or Qubits.
"It is a new paradigm for computation," said Professor Artur Ekert of the University of Oxford. "It's doing computation differently."
A bit is a simple unit of information that is represented by a "1" or a "0" in a conventional electronic computer.
A qubit can also represent a "1" or a "0" but crucially can be both at the same time - known as a superposition.
This allows a quantum computer to work through many problems and arrive at their solutions simultaneously.
"It is like massively parallel processing but in one piece of hardware," said Professor Ekert.
'Complex systems'
This has significant advantages, particularly for solving problems with a large amount of data or variables.
"With quantum computing you are able to attack some problems on the time scales of seconds, which might take an almost infinite amount of time with classical computers," Professor David Awschalom of the University of California, Santa Barbara told the BBC News website recently.
In February 2007, the Canadian company D-Wave systems claimed to have demonstrated a working quantum computer.
At the time, Herb Martin, chief executive officer of the company said that the display represented a "substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable."
But many in the quantum computing world have remained sceptical, primarily because the company released very little information about the machine.
The display also failed to impress.
"It was not quite what we understand as quantum computing," said Professor Ekert."The demonstrations they showed could have been solved by conventional computers."
However, Professor Ekert believes that quantum computing will eventually come of age.
Then, he said, they will not be used in run-of-the-mill desktop applications but specialist uses such as searching vast databases, creating uncrackable ciphers or simulating the atomic structures ofsubstances.
"The really killer application will probably be in designing new materials or complex systems," he said.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Getting more from Moore's Law

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By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

For more than 40 years the silicon industry has delivered ever faster, cheaper chips.
The advances have underpinned everything from the rise of mobile phones to digital photography and portable music players.
Chip-makers have been able to deliver many of these advances by shrinking the components on a chip.
By making these building blocks, such as transistors, smaller they have become faster and firms have been able to pack more of them into the same area.
But according to many industry insiders this miniaturisation cannot continue forever.
MOORE'S LAW

- The number of transistors it is possible to squeeze in to a chip for a fixed cost doubles every two years

- First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel

- Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965

"The consensus in the industry is that we can do that shrink for about another ten years and then after that we have to figure out new ways to bring higher capability to our chips," said Professor Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard.
Even Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel and the man that gave his name to the law that dictates the industry's progression, admits that it can only go on for a few more years.
"Moore's Law should continue for at least another decade," he recently told the BBC News website. "That's about as far as I can see."
Tiny tubes
As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in efforts to allow the industry to continue delivering the advances that computer users have come to expect.
Key areas include advanced fabrication techniques, building new components and finding new materials to augment silicon.
Already new materials are creeping into modern chips.

As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip.
To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium.
The material's development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s.
But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger advances.
"Carbon nanotubes are a step beyond [hafnium]," explained Dr Phaedon Avouris of the company.
'Superior' design
CARBON NANOTUBES

- Sheets of carbon atoms folded into a cylinder

- Unusual strength and electrical properties

- Promise to revolutionise electronics, computers, chemistry and materials science

Carbon nanotubes are tiny straw-like molecules less than 2 nanometres (billionths of a metre) in diameter, 50,000 times thinner than a strand of a human hair.
"They are a more drastic change but still preserve the basic architecture of field effect transistors."

These transistors are the basic building blocks of most silicon chips.
Dr Avouris believes they can be used to replace a critical element of the chip, known as the channel.
Today this is commonly made of silicon and is the area of the transistor through which electrons flow.
Chip makers are constantly battling to make the channel length in transistors smaller and smaller, to increase the performance of the devices.
Carbon nanotube's small size and "superior" electrical properties should be able to deliver this, said Dr Avouris.
Crucially, he also believes the molecules can be integrated with traditional silicon manufacturing processes, meaning the technology would more likely be accepted by an industry that has spent billions perfecting manufacturing techniques.
The team have already shown off working transistors and are currently working on optimising their production and integration into working devices.
Tiny improvement
Professor Williams, at Hewlett Packard is also working on technology that could be incorporated into the future generations of chips.

As well as exploring optical computing - using particles of light instead of electrons to significantly increase the speed of today's computers -he is building new electronic components for chips called memristors.

He says it would be the "fourth" basic element to build circuits with, after capacitors, resistors and inductors.
"Now we have this type of device we have a broader palette with which to paint our circuits," said Professor Williams.
Professor Williams and his team have shown that by putting two of these devices together - a configuration called a crossbar latch - it could do the job of a transistor.
"A cross bar latch has the type of functionality you want from a transistor but it's working with very different physics," he explained.
Crucially, these devices can also be made much smaller than a transistor.
"And as they get smaller they get better," he said.
Professor Williams and his team are currently making prototype hybrid circuits - built of memristors and transistors - in a fabrication plant in North America.
"We want to keep the functional equivalent of Moore's Law going for many decades into the future," said Professor Williams.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Meeting computing's prophet

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By Jonathan Fildes
Science and technology reporter, BBC News

In April 1965 a 36-year old electronics buff jotted down his thoughts on the future of the juvenile silicon chip industry.
Writing in a "throw-away" journal, Gordon Moore accurately imagined a future filled with mobile phones, home computers, and even intelligent cars.
But it was a much more prosaic prediction that has come to dominate his life and the industry that he helped found.
"I could see a change coming that the electronics were going to get significantly cheaper," says the co-founder of Intel, the largest maker of computer chips.
In the article in Electronics Magazine, he predicted that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double every year for ten years.
He later revised the forecast to doubling every two years or so, as the initial breakneck speed of development and shrinkage waned. It was a prediction that became known as Moore's Law and it has helped drive the computer revolution over the last four decades.
Modest growth
At first glance it is not the kind of observation that would catapult a person to fame.
But the day I meet him, a now silver haired Dr Moore has just given a talk to a packed auditorium of people and he is surrounded by crowds of autograph hunters who were not even born when he made his off the cuff observations.
Moore's Law has become shorthand for the pace of technological change. It set a standard for the chip industry's phenomenal growth and has in turn underpinned the world's digital awakening.
TRANSISTORS

- Transistors are basic electronic switches found in silicon chips

- Each transistor can be switched on or off, representing a "1" or "0", known as binary code

- All computation is done using different combinations of these two outputs to do calculations

- The number of transistors on a chip determine its speed

- Modern chips contain millions of transistors allowing them to execute millions of calculations per second

- The tiny devices consist of a source, drain and gate

- A voltage applied to the gate and drain turns the device on

- Removing the gate voltage switches it off again

"It was an exciting technology in the beginning. It had so much potential, we just had no idea how much potential," he says.
"When Intel was formed [in 1968] the total semiconductor industry was only a couple of billion dollars worldwide - today it is 300 billion."
And as the industry has delivered each successive generation of faster, smaller, cheaper chips, it has opened up rafts of new possibilities for silicon that have ultimately delivered the technologies he predicted more than 40 years ago.
Reflecting on his prophesies today, a retired and quietly-spoken Dr Moore is characteristically modest.
"When I went back and read that I was amazed that I predicted all of those things," he says.
But, as a young engineer, he was at least uniquely placed to make his key observation, having co-founded Fairchild Semiconductors, maker of the first commercial integrated circuit, or chip.
"I was directing a lab where we were trying to advance the technology and from my perspective I could see some of these things coming that weren't generally visible to the rest of the population," he says.
Force for change
At the time, computers were mainly used by the military and PCs were unheard of, he says.
"Computers were in glass rooms tended to by a core of monks that knew how to do the proper incantations."

But as the silicon chip industry took hold and computer makers learnt how to exploit the technology everything changed.
"Shortly after that the commercial market just completely dwarfed anything in the military," he says.
And what had originally been just a prediction by Dr Moore became a self-fulfilling prophesy.
"It has become a driving force for the industry," he says. "Competitors have realised that if they don't move at least that rate they are going to fall behind."
So far silicon producers have managed to keep on or ahead of the curve for more than four decades by continually shrinking the technology and packing more and more components inside a chip.
MOORE'S LAW

- The number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years

- First outlined by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel

- Published in Electronics Magazine on 19 April, 1965

Moore's Law in action

"It's a peculiar feature of this technology that by making things smaller everything gets better," says Dr Moore. "The transistors get faster, you can put more of a system on a chip."
But more importantly, and perhaps more curiously, the chips also become cheaper.
And this is the key point of his 1965 paper, he says. Moore's Law is an economic law and would probably have driven the industry regardless of whether or not he had made his prediction.
"I am not sure that having Moore's Law held up there as a yardstick increases the pressure [on chip manufacturers] because the need to remain competitive is so strong."
Chip future
As a result, the industry has grown "far beyond" what he could have imagined in 1965, he says.

"It is surprising that any of the things we predicted are still valid."
He is most impressed with the industry's inventiveness, he says, allowing it to overcome a series of seemingly insurmountable technical hurdles as it grew.
"The industry has succeeded in getting around all of the ones that have been thrown in front of it," he says. "It has been much more successful than I probably would have predicted."
But, Dr Moore says, the industry can only go on shrinking transistors for so long.
Eventually, the features will become so small that the atomic structure of the materials will be a limitation, possibly spelling the end of Moore's Law
So what does he think will happen in the next 40 years?
"I'm through with making predictions," he chuckles. "Get it right once and quit."

Return to text

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation

Techdirt

Video Gamers Sue EA Over Exclusive Sports Games

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Sports video games are a huge business -- and for many years, it was an extremely competitive space. I remember a few years back trying to wade through half a dozen different baseball video game titles to figure out which one was worth buying. However, a few years back, video game giant EA started signing "exclusive" deals with a variety of sporting leagues, including the NFL. These "exclusive" deals supposedly meant that only EA could produce games with the names and stats of real players -- a huge selling point among most fans. And, of course, in gaining exclusivity, EA has completely cashed in. However, a bunch of angry video gamers are now suing the company for anticompetitive conduct, noting that these exclusive deals killed off all the competition, allowing EA to drastically raise its prices.

Of course, there's a separate issue that might make these gamers (and other video game companies) happy: with the recent rulings concerning fantasy baseball, it appears that the court system recognizes that player names and stats are public domain data. Thus, even with the "exclusivity," other video game companies should be able to include real player names and data. They probably still cannot use real league logos, and even player likenesses may be out (which, again, is often a big selling point) -- but hopefully it at least brings some competition back to the market.

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Forget Journalist Plagiarism, How About Journalists Hiring Others To Ghost Write For Them?

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These days, journalistic plagiarism scandals are old hat. Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass... been there, done that. So, now, thanks to Romenesko we get news of a new type of journalism scandal. A columnist who's been accused of hiring a ghost writer to write his columns. Apparently that ghost writer came forward, asking for bylines to be changed to include his name (oops). Still, is this really that bad?

It reminds me of stories from a few years back during the dot com boom when there was some concern about offshoring work to India. Some people jokingly claimed that they hired some folks in India to do their own jobs for them, and were able to make a good living without having to do much work, other than reviewing the work of others. It's not clear if this ever really happened, but would it really be that ridiculous if it did? Yes, there's the moral question of whether or not it was right for this guy to present the work of someone else as his own, but that happens every day. Almost every political speech is written by someone else -- yet no one worries about the ethics there. Books are ghost written all the time. Hell, I've been both asked to ghost write a book for someone else and had someone offer to ghost write a book for me (in the same week, no less!). So, is this really such a big scandal?

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Virtual Video Store Clerks Take On The Geeks For Netflix Prize

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We've been fascinated with the Netflix Challenge for a while now. That's Netflix's offer of $1 million to whomever can improve on their system for recommending movies by 10%. While there were a lot of early success stories in making improvements, all of the attempts seemed to bog down, making much more gradual improvements, but not getting close enough to hit that 10% mark. Earlier this year, we wrote about the surprising run up the leaderboard by a (previously) anonymous individual who approached the problem from a very different perspective, that of a psychologist, rather than a coder, which apparently was quite helpful in getting good results through a very different method.

Now some other folks are trying something completely different, relying on more of a "crowdsourcing" system, combined with a gaming element. They've set up a virtual video store, called Video Store Clerk, and set it up as a game for movie buffs. The game players act as a video store clerk, and can see how particular users rated three movies, and are then asked to predict how they would rate a fourth movie, with points given to correct answers. The idea is that they'll be able to use these crowdsourced predictions to create an even better model than the purely algorithmic model being worked on by various teams.

This reminds me of the research work by Luis von Ahn to do things like tag images via the "ESP Game." von Ahn has had numerous successes in creating fun casual online games, where the output data is actually very useful for taking on some sort of problem that is quite difficult to do algorithmically (such as identifying what's really in an image). The real question, though, is if movie recommendations really work that way as well. Perhaps I need to be a bigger movie buff, but so far, I'm not particularly good at figuring out how others would rank a movie. And, unlike the ESP game, frankly, the Video Store Clerk game isn't all that fun as currently designed. After playing it once, I had no desire to try again. Still, I'm intrigued by the different approach, and wonder if a more advanced (and more fun) version might be much more effective.

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'Free Software' Scammers Fined $2.2 Million

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We've seen various incarnations of the scam (often found in infomercials) where a company offers you something for "free," but in the fine print, you're really signing up for an ongoing paid service. For years, some of the biggest "ringtone" companies made much of their money this way, offering "free" or cheap ringtones that actually involved the user signing up for a monthly service without realizing it. The infamous "Video Professor" has been accused of running a similar system, though the company vehemently denies this.

Either way, it appears that the FTC is starting to crack down on some of these practices, fining a competitor to "Video Professor," called ThinkAll, $2.2 million. Apparently ThinkAll took this scam to a new level. It offered "free" software, where you simply had to pay for the shipping and handling -- though, it sounds like that was really just so the company could get your credit card on file. After receiving that first free CD, customers were offered 3 more titles totally free (not even any shipping). If you decided to accept that software (and why wouldn't you?) it made you check a box saying you had read the terms of service. Of course no one reads the full terms of service, which include (hidden down in the 7th paragraph) the fact that in accepting this "free" software, you're actually agreeing to sign up for a monthly fee-based service. Quite sneaky... until the FTC stepped in. Hopefully other businesses take notice and start avoiding these types of scams.

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EFF Asks Appeals Court To Rehear Case On Laptop Searches At The Border

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Back in April, we noted that an appeals court reversed the one lower court ruling that found that customs agents at the border were overstepping their bounds by searching and confiscating travelers' laptops without probable cause. This brought the 9th circuit into alignment with our circuits, so that, generally speaking, it appeared our judicial system had decided that your 4th Amendment rights do not apply at the border. This is particularly problematic for laptops, because unlike tangible goods that you pack, you don't choose to "pack" all the data on your laptop. In other words, with most tangible goods you bring across the border, it's done as a proactive choice. With the data on your laptop, it's the opposite. Unless you proactively delete it from your computer, it's there.

The EFF already has demanded Congress look into this issue, and now it's urged the full appeals court to review this latest decision. Given that all the other circuit courts have also ruled this way, it may be difficult to get the court to agree to rehear the case (or, if they do, to change the decision). At some point, it's likely this issue will get appealed to the Supreme Court as well -- though it will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court takes the case without a seeing a split in the lower courts.

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European Court Notes That Using A Competitor's Trademark In An Ad Is Not Trademark Infringement

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We've said it probably 100 times, but trademark was never designed to be about "ownership." Rather, it's always been about consumer protection from fraud: making sure that you didn't buy one product, believing it was made by someone else. Yet, unfortunately, trademark is often lumped into the category of "intellectual property" with patents and copyright, and that falsely leads people to believe that trademarks are about ownership and, with it, full control over the mark. That leads to some really questionable situations, where companies overreach in trying to block others from using their mark. Luckily, some courts are pushing back on this. Steven Hoy writes in to let us know that a European court has ruled that there's absolutely nothing wrong with a company using a competitor's trademark in an advertisement for comparative purposes, just so long as there's no confusion on the part of the customer. This is exactly the way it should be. Hopefully, we'll start seeing European courts use the good old "moron in a hurry" test more frequently. After all, that "moron in a hurry" trademark test was a European invention in the first place.

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Forget The Cone Of Silence... Get Ready For The Cloak Of Silence

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Just in time for the remake of Get Smart to hit the theaters, it appears that some researchers may be making one of the TV show's most famous tools a reality. It's not quite the Cone of Silence, but rather a (one would imagine, more useful) cloak of silence. Basically, it's fabric designed to channel sound around the fabric, potentially soundproofing all sorts of things. The article suggests anything from soundproofing a room in your house, to military applications, such as soundproofing equipment. Of course, it's all mainly theoretical at this point, so don't expect to wrap yourself in silence any time soon. At the very least, you'll probably have to wait until the sequel of Get Smart comes out for the inevitable marketing tie-in.

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Viacom-Owned TV Station Using P2P To Offer Up DRM-Free Downloads Of New Show

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Viacom seems to have a bit of a multiple personality when it comes to online video. It's famously suing YouTube for $1 billion because some clips of TV shows have shown up on the site, but at the same time, it's been aggressively putting its own shows on a variety of sites. Yet, for the most part, it's focused on having full control -- that is, making them streaming versions only, on specific sites, often complete with advertising. However, it looks like the company is finally realizing that a little uncontrolled distribution isn't such a bad thing. Viacom-owned Spike TV is trying to promote a new TV show by distributing a commercial-free, DRM-free download of the show through a variety of sources including P2P system Limewire. The company admits that it's just trying to entice viewers to watch the series on TV when it debuts later this summer, but it makes you wonder how the company can stand up in court complaining about YouTube, when its out there telling people to do whatever they want to help promote this other show. In fact, the folks behind this offering admit that DRM would have defeated the purpose, which is to get the show seen by as many people as possible: "We're trying for a bit of a ubiquity here, to go where the people are." Wonder if this story will make its way into the Viacom-YouTube lawsuit.

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AP Goes After Bloggers For Posting Article Headlines And Snippets

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Last fall, the Associated Press claimed that it was ready to change to face the new internet world -- and that meant not just being a gatekeeper, but joining in the conversation. As we noted at the time, though, AP execs said all that, only to immediately follow that up with plans that looked like it was trying to become a new type of gatekeeper. It didn't help that the company had also just sued VeriSign's Moreover division for linking to AP stories along with a title and a tiny excerpt. That sort of thing is clearly fair use -- but the AP doesn't seem to think so.

And, now, it's expanding its target list. Rather than just going after the big aggregators (surprisingly, Google settled), it appears that the Associated Press is going after bloggers for merely posting a linked headline and a tiny snippet of text from the article. In this case, Rogers Cadenhead informs us that the AP sent 7 DMCA takedown notices last week to his site, the Drudge Retort (a site that mocks the Drudge Report). In six cases, a blog post on the site quoted just a small snippet of text from an AP article (between 33 and 79 words -- nowhere near the full length of the article). In every case, they also contained links back to the original AP article. Five of the six used a different headline than the original AP article. The other complaint was about a comment to a blog post, which also included a very short snippet and a link.

On the face of it, it's nearly impossible to see how this isn't fair use, even though an AP representative insists it's not:
The use is not fair use simply because the work copied happened to be a news article and that the use is of the headline and the first few sentences only. This is a misunderstanding of the doctrine of "fair use." AP considers taking the headline and lede of a story without a proper license to be an infringement of its copyrights, and additionally constitutes "hot news" misappropriation.
Hopefully, they won't send a takedown notice for quoting that. This is pure bullying on the part of the Associated Press, and a clear overstepping of its legal rights. It's most certainly not a sign that the organization has adapted to the internet age. In fact, the most amazing thing is that these types of uses (a snippet and a link) clearly help drive more traffic to those AP articles. This is a pure "shoot-self-in-the-foot" move by the Associated Press -- and if they have any sense of decency they should issue a very public apology.

In the meantime, since the Associated Press apparently no longer wants traffic, we'll start looking for other sources when linking to stories. I can't promise we won't link to any AP stories (they're everywhere), but given the opportunity we'd prefer to link to a news organization that's happy to accept our traffic, rather than one that might sue us for pointing people their way. This is quite unfortunate, as there are many AP reporters who read this site, and with whom I have come to build a strong relationship. I think they're quite good reporters, and it's too bad they work for such a short-sighted organization.

Update: Someone from the AP has posted a response in the comments. It makes some claims that simply do not seem to represent reality, including trying to define what is and is not "the link-based culture of the Internet." It claims that it won't go after snippets -- but doesn't explain why that's exactly what it did. And then it responds to a blog post from Jeff Jarvis that I have not seen and did not reference. If the AP seriously wants to respond, why not respond to what is actually happening or what we actually said, rather than someone else. Update 2: I should also note that the comment from the AP includes what appears to be a bit of a sales pitch suggesting that bloggers license AP articles.

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Microsoft Seeks Patent On Virtual Graffiti Years After The Idea Is In Use

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theodp points us to a new patent application from Microsoft for the concept of "virtual graffiti" that someone could leave for mobile devices connected to a real geographic area. As theodp notes: "Here's what passes for inventive these days in Redmond: 'Mary, while at Tom's house, may create graffiti on her cell FVG-enabled phone that says, 'Party Here Friday Night!' and make the graffiti available to all her friends. Then any of Mary's friends (with their FVG-enabled devices) passing by Tom's house would become aware of the graffiti associated with the house and be able to view it, thus becoming aware of the planned party.' Microsoft proudly boasts that the technology can also be used to shout 'Subscriber!' to newspaper boys as they pass customers' houses and exclaim 'Great lunch joint!' to those passing by a restaurant."

If that doesn't sound particularly new or non-obvious that's because it's not. We wrote about nearly an identical system that was already in use at Cornell University in August of 2003, more than three years before this Microsoft patent application was filed. Even in writing about that story, we noted that there were a few similar systems already out there and that "people have been talking about such things for ages"). How this could possibly be considered new or non-obvious seems like a reasonable question. Hopefully the patent examiner agrees and rejects this application.

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Are High School Newspapers Obsolete?

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When I was in high school years ago, I was both an editor for the school newspaper and a co-founder/editor of an "underground" newspaper that a group of friends put together to compete with the official school newspaper (it probably won't surprise folks to find out my first article for the underground paper was an examination of why an underground newspaper is perfectly legal and can't be prevented by a school administration). Both experiences were quite useful (and fun), but with so much talk these days of the challenges facing the normal newspaper industry, is it worth it for high schools to still publish newspapers? After all, these days, students who want to report on what's going on in a school no longer need the "sanctioned" press, thanks to the internet.

What got me thinking about this was reading an article about a high school principal who decided to shut down the high school's newspaper (via Romenesko) after he got offended by an editorial on flag burning that included a photo of a student burning a flag. The whole thing seemed ridiculous -- because there's nothing to stop the students from taking the content, and putting it all online and not needing any stamp of approval from the school administration.

Obviously, there's something to be said for the learning experience that can be provided by working together on a project, and the potential mentoring of a school newspaper advisor (though if I remember correctly, our advisor didn't actually do much), but that could just as easily be done through other means, including classes/extra-curricular activities focusing on helping students create their own content for online purposes, rather than under the umbrella of any official school newspaper.

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Will The RIAA Sue Judge Kozinski For Sharing MP3s?

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While judge Alex Kozinski is getting a ton of press for accidentally sharing pornographic images from his webserver, Justin Levine notes that the report concerning what was on the server also found music MP3s from musicians like Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic. Levine wonders if the RIAA will now sue this federal judge as well. In fact, things could get tricky in that some research suggests not only was Kozinski storing MP3s, he may have actively been sharing some of those MP3s as well. That same link mentions that in one of many copyright infringement lawsuits concerning the company Perfect 10, Kozinski wrote a dissenting opinion suggesting that facilitating copyright infringement should be seen as infringement as well:
"When it comes to traffic in material that violates the Copyright Act, the policy of the United States is embedded in the FBI warning we see at the start of every lawfully purchased or rented video: Infringers are to be stopped and prosecuted."
There's a lot more involved in his opinion, which really focuses on credit card companies profiting from infringement -- but considering how he much he writes against those who help others infringe, it's probably not a wise idea that he was out there sharing music files himself.

However, to be fair, as the details come out, this whole thing is quite clearly a witch hunt by someone who seriously dislikes the judge. As we noted when the story broke, it's perfectly ridiculous to try to suggest this makes him any less qualified to judge cases. And, indeed, as the details come out about the content on his server, it's becoming clear that it is, as he noted "funny" stuff. It's all basically the sort of silly viral content that gets passed around all the time, much more for the amusement factor than any sort of titillation.

This post certainly isn't to slam Kozinski, who seems like a genuinely thoughtful judge -- with a sense of humor to boot (he famously nominated himself for a mocking "Judicial Hottie" contest run by a blog, noting: "While I think the list of female candidates is excellent, the list of male candidates is, frankly, lacking. And what it's lacking is me.... I have it on very good authority that discerning females and gay men find graying, pudgy, middle-aged men with an accent close to Gov. Schwarzenegger's almost totally irresistible." The fact that he was also sharing MP3s, again, is just yet another reminder that, contrary to the entertainment's claim that "education" will solve music sharing, many people just think it's perfectly natural and reasonable to share a song with some friends.

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Yes, DMCA Safe Harbors Apply To Websites

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Every once in a while, when discussing the DMCA's "safe harbors" someone shows up in the comments to insist that the safe harbors were never intended to apply to websites, but merely to ISPs. Tim Lee does a nice bit of work absolutely destroying that assertion, by pointing out how it doesn't make sense given the language of the law which clearly is designed to apply to websites as well as network providers (otherwise, as he notes, why would they ever suggest content would have to be "removed" rather than just "blocked").

But, more importantly, the focus should be on the overall intent of the law beyond just the specific scenarios on the mind of those who wrote it. Even if it's true that those who crafted the language weren't "thinking" about websites when they wrote it, the intent of the safe harbor is clear, and it should apply to websites as well as network providers. Why? Because the whole point of safe harbors was to make sure liability was properly applied to those who actually infringed, rather than an easy-to-target company. That it was the network providers who raised this concern in the first place doesn't mean that the same thinking wouldn't apply to websites as well. And, on top of that, while the safe harbors of the CDA (for things like defamation) haven't been harmonized with the DMCA's safe harbors -- the purposes are nearly identical, and the courts have granted extremely wide coverage of the CDA safe harbors, so there's no reason to think that they wouldn't apply the same broad interpretation to the DMCA as well.

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Do You Need To Schedule Your Technology Down Time?

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One of the best decisions I made when I first start blogging on Techdirt oh-so-many-years ago, was that I wouldn't blog on weekends. While it wasn't on purpose, it's worked out nicely as it gives me plenty of time on weekends to disconnect and do other stuff. I've found (surprising to some, I'm sure) that it's not at all difficult for me to pretty much ignore my computer for the weekend if I need to. And, then, there are some weekends where I do end up using the computer, either for fun or to catch up on some work-related things. However, I never considered setting up an official "schedule" of tech down time. Yet, Mark Glaser, over at MediaShift notes that a growing number of people are setting aside "tech sabbaths" to force themselves to disconnect. Interestingly, he even notes that it's often quite common for religious people, who observe a religious sabbath, to embrace this idea as well. I can see the point for folks who really have trouble disconnecting, but if it's not that big a deal, I would think that the situation should dictate how people act. If they have no pressing reason to be on the computer -- then don't use it. But that doesn't mean necessarily requiring it be out of your life for a specific time period.

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Even Lawyers Are Confused About What's Legal Or Not In The Prince/Radiohead Spat

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We were just discussing how copyright has been stretched and twisted so many times that it really just isn't designed properly to handle internet communications -- and a good case in point may be the funny little spat we covered a few weeks back between Prince and Radiohead. If you don't recall, Prince performed a cover of a Radiohead song at a concert. Someone in the audience videotaped it and put the video on YouTube. Prince's representatives demanded that the content be taken down under a DMCA request -- raising all sorts of questions. After all, Prince didn't own the copyright on the song. That's owned by Radiohead, whose lead singer wanted the video back online. Prince didn't own the copyright to the video either, since he didn't take it. So how could he use the DMCA to take down the video?

But, it's not that simple, apparently. As Ethan Ackerman details, as lawyers began to think about the situation, the more confused they got, noting that maybe there was a right under anti-bootlegging laws. Only, then things got more confusing, because it turns out that anti-bootlegging laws aren't actually a part of the copyright act (though it does fall under the same "title" just to add to the confusion), and the DMCA (under which the takedown occurred) only applies to copyright law.

However, again, we're left in a situation where the "law" is hardly clear at all, and even those who follow the space were somewhat confused over whether or not Prince had any sort of legal standing here. A law is not useful if the boundaries of that law are not clear, and if someone has no clue if their actions go against the law. In the internet era, copyright certainly falls under that category of laws in which it is no longer clear what is and is not legal -- and that should be seen as a problem.

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Adapting To A Market Change Is Not The Same As Killing People

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What is it with people trying to equate changing markets to terrorism these days? First we had Andrew Keen trying to equate file sharing to the September 11th hijackers, and now Adam Thierer points us to Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post comparing Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell to a domestic terrorist from 1910 who set a bomb at the LA Times building, killing 21 employees. On what basis does Meyerson make this comparison? Because Zell recognizes that the traditional way the newspaper business worked isn't cutting it any more, and he's out to make changes. Some of those changes do involve cuts -- but if that's what it takes to survive (and thrive), then that's hardly the same as killing people. If Zell simply stays the course, and pretends that the old newspaper business model isn't going away, then he runs a much bigger risk: having the entire Tribune Co. fail. I would think that having him make some cuts here and there to adjust would be better than shutting down the whole damn thing -- and both of those scenarios are light-years better/different than killing people.

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Yahoo-Google Deal Official; Now Can We Talk About Something Important?

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Sorry corn farmers, it looks like Yahoo's potential deal with Microsoft has gone away, and Yahoo and Google have finally agreed to a plan that hands off a bunch of Yahoo's search ad inventory to Google, basically admitting that Google is just better at serving the long tail of the advertiser market.

Basically, this means that the search ad market battle is settled, Google has won. Yahoo's mistake all along was trying to play catch up and to build its own Google, rather than focusing on doing something different. Hopefully, Yahoo can now reinvent itself to focus on providing something that's not just a Google competitor, but which actually provides a different value proposition to users. Of course, at the rate Yahoo seems to be bleeding talent these days, that might not be so easy. Plus, of course, the feds are almost certainly going to take up the cry of those corn farmers, and investigate whether or not the deal violates any sort of antitrust rules. That's going to be a major distraction as well. So, rather than focusing on Yahoo's struggles, perhaps it's time to go focus on the next interesting startup. After all, that seems to be what a bunch of Yahoo's employees are doing.

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Metallica Says It's Sorry About Review Takedowns; Blames Management

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Mathew Ingram alerts us to the news that the band Metallica has responded on its own website to the controversy over representatives from the band demanding reviews of the band's latest album get taken offline. The band's response is basically to blame its management company:
We were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites. Our response was "WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record. . . that makes no sense to us!" So after a few rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20 push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and just post the links here on our site.
And, with that, they linked to the reviews. While plausible, the whole thing sounds sketchy at this point. It seems like a weak cop-out to say "oh, it was our managers' fault" when the band has had so much controversy concerning how it has interacted with the internet community. Besides, even this response rings hollow. The band only seemed concerned that the management team took down "mostly positive reviews," not the fact that it took down reviews. It's nice that they have now linked to the reviews, but the fact that this happened in the first place still seems like a problem.

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Australia Tells eBay It Can't Require Auction Users Only Use PayPal

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Slashdot points us to the news that Australian regulators have slapped down eBay's attempt to require users to use PayPal as a payment system, noting:
"Given eBay's position as Australia's leading online marketplace, the notified conduct will substantially reduce competition to supply online payment services to users of online marketplaces more generally. The ACCC acknowledges that having PayPal as the only payment provider has the potential to deliver some benefits to users, such as increased buyer protection insurance in certain circumstances. However, the ACCC believes that consumers are in the best position to decide which payment method is most suitable for them."
eBay's plan to ban all other payment system received a ton of negative publicity when first announced, so perhaps Australia's response isn't all that surprising. However, is it really necessary for the Australian government to step in? The anger from eBay users was quite strong, and you would think that the end result would be eBay users leaving for other online e-commerce options -- and that, alone, should be enough to get eBay to reconsider this decision. eBay shouldn't need to have the Australian government tell it that restricting payment options is a dumb idea. Consumers were already doing so. And, if we go by the ACCC's own words, it supposedly "believes that consumers are in the best position to decide" which e-commerce platform is most suitable as well.

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UK Police Accused Of Violating Copyright By Listening To Music In Police Stations

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While we've seen performing rights groups like ASCAP be overly aggressive in trying to collect money from anyone holding a "performance" of music, it seems that the UK's "Performing Right Society" (PRS) is pushing the boundaries even more. This is the same group that we noted last year had sued a bunch of auto mechanics for listening to radios in their garages loud enough that customers in the waiting room could hear them. Yes, the PRS insisted that this required a performance license.

It appears that PRS representatives just go around the UK these days trying to see if they can hear music anywhere. One den of piracy that they discovered? Police stations! Yes, they're now accusing 34 police stations with failing to pay for a license because officers were listening to music loud enough that others could hear it. These would be the same police that are out arresting people recently for "Conspiracy To Defraud The Music Industry." Perhaps they should be checking themselves out as well.

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TechCrunch

Israel’s LabPixies Offers Highly Awesome Widgets

NYTimes Article Reverberates Through Yahoo; Who’s Their Next CEO?

Arrington Talks Yahoo/Google/Microsoft

Why Kyte.tv will kill Qik and Flixwagon in cell phone video space

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Hey Microsoft, How ’bout We Do That First Deal You Offered?

Orgoo To Offer True Webmail To Existing Social Networks

Technorati Confirms New Financing; New Business Focus Coming

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Microsoft’s Letter to The Troops: Our Yahoo Offer Was Better

Next New Networks Looking For Next New CEO

Get Ready For A New Platform War. Google Gears Drives Straight At Microsoft’s Profits.

Quillpill: A Twitter For Cell-Phone Novelists (500 Invites)

Shopzilla Founder Farhad Mohit Behind Stealth Startup DotSpots

Google’s $83 Million Escape Clause: SEC Filing Spells Out Details Of Yahoo-Google Deal

Massive Destruction Of Shareholder Value, Employee Morale and Internet Balance Of Power

Google Speeds Up Mobile Search

Facebook’s Second F8 Developer Conference Announced. How Will They Top Last Year’s Facebook Platform Launch?

Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network

Redesign A First Step In Bringing Order To The MySpace Chaos

Yahoo Runs Into Google’s Arms

Liveblogging Yahoo-Google Conference Call

Yahoo Announces Non-Exclusive Search Agreement With Google

Qik Strikes Back: Supporting The iPhone Next Week

Slashdot

Clash of the Titans Over USB 3.0 Specification Process

Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced

User Not Found, Email Drops Silently

A 30-Picowatt Processor For Sensors

Tin Whiskers — Fact Or Fiction?

Net Neutrality vs. Technical Reality

Geohashing Meets an Angry Rancher With Firearms

Early Look At ASUS Eee PC 901 With Intel Atom CPU

BPI Defends Anti-File-Sharing Partnership With Virgin Media

Verizon Cutting Access To Entire Alt.* Usenet Hierarchy

Anti-Technology Technologies?

MPAA Wants To Prevent Recording Movies On DVRs

Darling Brothers, UK Indie Game Devs, Upgraded to CBE

RIAA Says "Wanna Fight? It'll Cost You!"

Westinghouse Commits to Green Plug's Universal A.C. Adapter

BBC News | Technology | UK Edition

More than chips

'Darlings' of UK games honoured

MySpace prepares for re-design

Nintendo dominates May game sales

Spain treats child phone addicts

Aeronautical advances 'looming'

Yahoo-Microsoft tie-up abandoned

Experts unveil 'cloak of silence'

Final Skynet satellite launched

Jail sentence for botnet creator

IT giant founds carers' network

Low prices boost mobile data use

Hands off

Experts question BT's fibre trial

Google founder books space flight

US space telescope set for launch

Road ahead

Pole position

Fake goods

Spying eyes?

Testing times

iPhone fever

Celebrity gamers

Broadband speed test

Storm warning

Who me?

Two internets

Power healing

Walking web

Robot dreams

Nokia morphs itself from within

Why the future is in your hands

A journey into 'fab world'

Future computing technologies

Getting more from Moore's Law

Meeting computing's prophet

Techdirt

Video Gamers Sue EA Over Exclusive Sports Games

Forget Journalist Plagiarism, How About Journalists Hiring Others To Ghost Write For Them?

Virtual Video Store Clerks Take On The Geeks For Netflix Prize

'Free Software' Scammers Fined $2.2 Million

EFF Asks Appeals Court To Rehear Case On Laptop Searches At The Border

European Court Notes That Using A Competitor's Trademark In An Ad Is Not Trademark Infringement

Forget The Cone Of Silence... Get Ready For The Cloak Of Silence

Viacom-Owned TV Station Using P2P To Offer Up DRM-Free Downloads Of New Show

AP Goes After Bloggers For Posting Article Headlines And Snippets

Microsoft Seeks Patent On Virtual Graffiti Years After The Idea Is In Use

Are High School Newspapers Obsolete?

Will The RIAA Sue Judge Kozinski For Sharing MP3s?

Yes, DMCA Safe Harbors Apply To Websites

Do You Need To Schedule Your Technology Down Time?

Even Lawyers Are Confused About What's Legal Or Not In The Prince/Radiohead Spat

Adapting To A Market Change Is Not The Same As Killing People

Yahoo-Google Deal Official; Now Can We Talk About Something Important?

Metallica Says It's Sorry About Review Takedowns; Blames Management

Australia Tells eBay It Can't Require Auction Users Only Use PayPal

UK Police Accused Of Violating Copyright By Listening To Music In Police Stations