News : Zero-gravity is wonderful. Outer space here I come, says Hawking

Jacqui Goddard at Cape Canaveral
From The Times

For more than 40 years, Stephen Hawking has studied the mysteries of the universe from his wheelchair. Last night, he broke free of his disability and indulged his passion for gravitational phenomena in a finely stage-managed operation 32,000 feet above the Atlantic.

“It was amazing,” he said after he returned from his experience of weightlessnes. “The zero-g bit was wonderful . . . I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come.”

Peter Diamandis, head of Zero-G, a company that gives the public the chance to experience space-like conditions for about £2,000, said that the professor told his carers after the first of eight zero-gravity plunges that he would like to perform a 180-degree “flip” with his body.

He had spelt out his request using an alphabetical board as his electronic voice synthesizer was removed to allow him to drift free of electrical wires. “He was doing gold-medal gymnastics in zero-g, it was incredible,” Mr Diamandis said.

When asked if he was enjoying himself, Professor Hawking’s “eyebrows went up and there was a big grin . . . he was grinning the entire time”, Mr Diamandis said.

He added: “Professor Hawking reached for the sky and he touched the heavens today.”

The astrophysicist, who in 1963 was given less than three years to live after doctors diagnosed motor neuron disease, floated in zero gravity onboard a nose-diving Boeing 727 known as “G-Force One”.

The aircraft managed to simulate zero-gravity through a series of rollercoaster-style manoeuvres, known as parabolas. These moves help passengers to achieve the weightlessness they would experience in space for up to 25 seconds at a time.

Professor Hawking, 65, who teaches mathematics at Cambridge University and whose books include the bestselling A Brief History of Time, was assisted by a team of three doctors throughout the 90-minute adventure. He was able to breathe unaided while the doctors monitored his vital signs using an oxygen sensor clipped to his earlobe, a blood pressure cuff around his arm and a heart monitor hooked up to his chest.

Professor Hawking, whose theories on the Universe have singled him out as one of the world’s brilliant thinkers, viewed the flight as the first step to completing his dream of space travel.

“I have been wheelchair-bound for almost four decades and the chance to float free in zero gravity will be wonderful,” he said, speaking through his computer-operated voice synthesizer, before boarding the flight from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

“Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space,” he said.

The flight mimics the methods used to train Nasa astronauts — who refer to their own zero-gravity aircraft as the Vomit Comet, because of the regularity with which they lose their lunch to its stomach-churning manoeuvres.

News : Microsoft Proves it's a Software Company as Devices Take a Hit

If it were an independent company that produced the Xbox 360 game console and little or nothing else, the news for the quarter that just ended could be devastating: Fewer than one-third the number of consoles sold, by the company's estimates, than three quarters ago. You might be hearing the usual platitudes from a consumer electronics company: the market is saturating, the product's already a year-and-a-half old, the first calendar quarter is always a downer after the holidays...maybe the economy's not all that good...

But this is Microsoft, a corporation which has so many other projects going on that it has back burners behind its back burners. The company that three quarters ago was praising Xbox 360 for stellar sales numbers that more than compensated for R&D expenses, easily dispensed with the bad news - truthfully, though quickly.

"Entertainment & Devices revenue decreased 21% [year-over-year]," announced senior director of investor relations Colleen Healy, "as a result of lower Xbox 360 sales. We sold over 500,000 Xbox 360 consoles during the quarter, bringing our life-to-date sell-in to approximately 11 million. Software and accessory attach rates remain at record levels in the US...and we have passed the 6 million member mark for Xbox Live."

That Microsoft is losing money on its next-generation gaming console is not unexpected. At the time of its launch, we knew from iSuppli's teardown analysis that the company would be losing substantially on every unit it sold. The point of selling 11 million or so consoles was to invest in a platform that could become a bountiful farm of software consumers, who could be harvested for high-margin sales throughout the estimated five-year term of the console's shelf life.

That harvesting period is marked on Microsoft's calendar with a little flag that reads, "Halo 3." As chief financial officer Chris Liddell explained, "Halo 3 [is] clearly going to have a positive impact in two senses: One, it gives us more confidence in the number of consoles that we're going to be able to sell next year. In terms of the direct impact, obviously, it's a first-party product so it's reasonably profitable from our point of view, and it will be several hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue next year."

But after six quarters of shelf life, Xbox 360 hasn't yet reached its own turnaround point, where the cost of production decreases and the revenue from software and accessories increases to where the division can begin breaking even. Instead, it's the focus of the division's declining revenue - down 21.5% annually to $929 million. With Zune being out for such a short time, it could perhaps be blamed for rising expenditures but not for declining revenues.

However, the truth of yesterday was that only one analyst inquired about Entertainment & Devices. One of the big positive bullet points to emerge from yesterday's conference was that the computer enthusiast is alive and well, as evidenced by an increasing shift toward OEM sales and media-oriented versions of Windows.

"Consistent with the results we saw last quarter and the relative strength in the consumer segment following the launch [of Windows Vista]," Healy read from her prepared remarks, "we continue to see a change within the mix of sales of our premium edition operating systems. OEM premium mix is 71%, an increase of 18 percentage points from the prior year, driven by sales of Windows Vista Home Premium, while our other business editions of Windows declined a few points in the overall mix."

Now, that's not to say sales of Windows to businesses declined; rather, when you divide the pie between high-end consumers and business customers, the former got a bigger share this time around. Microsoft is indeed selling to high-class consumers...just not console games.

As Healy explained, however, an 18% shift toward OEMs doesn't translate into that much more revenue for Microsoft, since it costs the company more to sell to that end of the market than to businesses. The relative potency of sales to a segment - what Healy calls the "pricing uplift" - is five times more for Windows Vista Business than for Vista Home Basic, which is five times more potent again over Vista Home Premium. As a result, that 18% shift only translates into net revenue growth of 1%.

News : Google Tops in Most Powerful Global Brands

For the second year in a row, a technology brand ranked as number one among the most powerful global brand, a survey released Monday says.

The study by market research and consulting firm Millward Brown shows that Google ranks as the top brand with a value of $66.4 billion. It beat out competitor Microsoft, who was third with a market value of $55 billion, and non-tech companies GE and Coca-Cola, in second and fourth.

Brands from the Far East are also beginning to make their mark, with China Mobile moving into the fifth spot with a brand value of $41.2 billion. The increasing wealth of consumers in this region are also helping brands outside of the region to grow revenues, the group said.

However, Google's rise to the top is the most notable. It catapulted from seventh to first, and nearly doubled its market value. Microsoft went the other way, with its value dropping about $7 billion USD, the report showed.

"A lot can change in world business over 12 months, and this year's brand rankings are testimony to that with Google taking pole position as the world's most powerful brand," Financial Times editor Simon Targett said In a statement.

Other technoiogy companies making an appearance in the rankings were IBM, in ninth; Nokia in 12th, Hewlett Packard in 15th; and Apple in 16th.

News : Apple Challenged Over Old Xerox UI Patent

AppleInsider's Aidan Malley broke the story over the weekend that portfolio licensing company IP Innovation, LLC has filed suit against Apple, Inc. in (where else?) Marshall, Texas, claiming to defend a graphical technique where multiple workspaces are divided into frames, between which the user can switch devices like tabs.

[Editor's Note: IP Innovation, LLC is not to be confused with IP Innovations, LLC (plural), a patent search services firm for prospective patent filers, based in Washington, DC.]

The single patent in question, #5,072,412, for "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects," was filed in 1987 by various Xerox researchers, and granted in 1991.

The graphical era was already well under way by this time, although this patent was apparently intended to give the manufacturer of STAR workstations an on-screen tool for collecting multiple complete workspaces together under a single row of tabs. The description of such a system in the patent is so replete and generic that it could apply to a wide array of visual tools, so it isn't specifically stuck on the notion of tabs.

As AppleInsider reported, IP Innovation seeks a judgment of over $20 million, which would appear to fall under the category of treble damages - relating to a clause in federal patent infringement law that awards plaintiffs three times the amount of the basic infringement amount. Firms such as IP Innovation may be filing such claims now, in advance of landmark federal legislation some say is likely to pass this year, whose draft language would eliminate the treble damages provision.

IP Innovation is no newcomer to the patent litigation or settlement field. In August 2005, it reached a major settlement with Sony over a series of patents related to noise filtering for both audio and video.

That same year, it settled with five providers of online courseware, including market leader Thomson Learning, over patents related to the display of graphical course material in a window with hyperlinks. But there were eight parties to that suit, three of whom -- eCollege, DigitalThink, and Docent -- chose to fight it out and let a judge decide.

That November, a district court ruled the three firms did not infringe upon the defended patent after all, after having taken apart the patent's definition of a hyperlink and concluded it actually didn't meet the three companies' implementations.

The patent language made it appear that the hyperlink code itself was translated to the screen in a "human-readable font," as if the A tags in HTML hyperlinks were visible. Since the three defendants used HTML, and since their A tags were invisible to the user, the court determined the description by the patent didn't apply. Had Thomson recognized this flaw, it might have avoided paying that unspecified amount.

Apple is, of course, no stranger to IP disputes over visual content of operating systems. In 1989, the company fought Microsoft and Digital Research valiantly over what Apple claimed to be their misappropriation of Apple's graphical constructs, such as the trash can icon for deleting files.

I and several other reporters at the time noted that Xerox PARC was actually the first to use such icons in that fashion, though at a time before the US patent database was searchable online, it appeared that Xerox had never filed claims to that effect. As it turned out, it had, and ironically this is one of them, although the filing was not actually granted until 1991.

Exactly how this 1991 Xerox PARC patent changed hands to eventually wind up in the IP Innovation portfolio, remains unknown.

News : Napster, Circuit City Launch Co-Branded Store

Napster has partnered with Circuit City to offer its music service to the retailer's customers in a co-branded environment starting next week. The service would essentially be the same as the Napster service, save the 'Circuit City+Napster' branding. New customers receive the first month free, and will be billed $14.95 per month thereafter, which includes five free song downloads.

"Increasingly, consumers are turning to the digital environment for entertainment and this new service will give our customers easy access to the content they want, when and how they choose to enjoy it," Circuit City's entertainment chief Irynne MacKay said.

News : Google adding copyright protection tool to YouTube

CBC News

Google Inc. announced details this week of a tool they say will allow television and film studios to quickly remove copyrighted video clips from its popular YouTube website.

CEO Eric Schmidt said a "Claim Your Content" option would soon appear on the site to make it easier for copyright holders to report infringements on YouTube.

The new software will not restrict uploading or downloading of copyrighted material, but will allow owners to more easily search for and flag material they wish to be removed.

Schmidt first revealed information about the tool at an annual meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters on Monday and addressed it again Tuesday at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

"We're testing this with a couple partners, and we're very close to turning this on," said Schmidt.

Google has come under fire for failing to police the content on YouTube since it bought the online video-sharing site in the fall for $1.65 billion US.

Last month U.S. entertainment conglomerate Viacom Inc., sued YouTube and Google for over $1 billion US in damages on claims of widespread copyright infringement.

On Thursday Google reported first quarter profits of $1 billion US, or $3.18 US a share, up 69 per cent from a year ago. The market value of Google now stands at $150 billion US.

News : Verizon Wireless Adds Unlimited Messaging

With "texting" becoming ever more popular, wireless carriers are beginning to offer unlimited messaging, some with the feature built into the voice plans themselves. Verizon Wireless is the latest to do so, saying Monday it would offer the feature in America's Choice Select and Family Share Select plans, which would allow customers to send unlimited text, photo, video, and instant messaging to any carrier within the US.

As opposed to the traditional America's Choice plan, the new options would be $20 more expensive per month. All other features, including minutes, would stay the same, said the company. Verizon Wireless customers are among the most prolific messagers in the industry, sending a record 17.7 billion text and 353 million picture and video messages during the fourth quarter of 2006.

News : Google's Ad Moves Ruffle Feathers

Google said Monday it would sell ads across all Clear Channel radio stations in the United States. This comes amid news that Google's competitors, including Microsoft, may challenge the DoubleClick deal over antitrust concerns.

Since the inception of its radio advertising program brought about by the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting, Google has struggled to convince station owners to allow the company to sell their advertising time. The ClearChannel deal is certainly a step in the right direction.

All 675 Clear Channel stations across the country would make available time to advertisers, amounting to five percent of the total advertising space. Slots would be available at all times of the day.

Clear Channel has even made some important concessions that are good news for Google's initiative. Rather than only gaining access to leftover content, advertisers would also be able to bid for premium inventory, says the company.

Undoubtedly, Google execs are breathing a sigh of relief over the latest agreement. Up until now, radio advertisers only had access to 900 stations in 200 markets, but mostly low-budget and low-power operations outside of the major metropolitan areas.

However, Google's competitors are becoming increasingly wary over Google's power in advertising. The Wall Street Journalreported Monday that several companies including Microsoft, AT&T and Time Warner are all lobbying antitrust regulators to look closely at its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick.

Google beat out Microsoft, who early on was said to be in the running for the Web advertising provider. However, as the price tag passed $2 billion, the company was said to have lost interest, as did other early players, Yahoo and Time Warner.

Opponents of the deal argue that it would consolidate too much of the online advertising industry under a single company. Microsoft told the WSJ that as much as 80 percent of ads served over the Internet would be through Google after the close of the deal.

"This proposed acquisition raises serious competition and privacy concerns in that it gives the Google DoubleClick combination unprecedented control in the delivery of online advertising, and access to a huge amount of consumer information by tracking what customers do online," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a statement. "We think this merger deserves close scrutiny from regulatory authorities to ensure a competitive online advertising market."

To its defense, Google said it was confident that the deal would pass regulatory review, although it declined to comment on its competitors' complaints.

News : Google Beats Microsoft in Race for DoubleClick

Just when analysts and journalists were believing that interest in acquiring Internet advertising firm DoubleClick had perhaps dwindled, it’s Google that made the big play late this afternoon, beating Microsoft to the line in a deal Google says late this afternoon is worth $3.1 billion in cash.

This afternoon’s joint Google/DoubleClick briefing with analysts did not have the characteristic Google attitude. Many queries were posted, as it were, but few search results turned up. The reason, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was made clear right away: Although today’s deal, consummated just hours earlier, was “something we’ve thought about for a very, very long time,” neither side had actually worked out the major details.

So the degree of what isn’t known this evening is substantial – in fact, it’s perplexing, especially with regard to a $3.1 billion cash investment. The role current DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt will play, if any, in a company that’s already stacked to the rafters with executives, may yet be determined.

Just how Google came up with the $3.1 billion bid is just as unknown, except for the fact that it has that much cash on hand. Executives on both sides refused to answer questions about how DoubleClick was evaluated, exhausting the usual side-step responses (“We typically don’t give guidance...”) until they started just winging it: Schmidt, at one point, perhaps in an effort to fill time in search of a more appropriate answer, explained the two companies happened to lease office space in the same New York building (the Caledonia on 17th Street and 10th Avenue), implying that since they were neighbors already, they concluded they may as well be family...and that was where the two companies saw the value.

“One of the things that we hear most from our customers, both in the online world and the offline world, is specifically around making the process easier,” responded Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president of advertising sales, to the $3.1 billion question, “and in general, we feel that a key outcome in the industry right now is operationally improving the underlying connections between advertisers and publishers and agencies. Certainly we see a clear path online. I think the same is true in the offline world as well.”

Another question: Has the deal been run by the Federal Trade Commission for guidance yet? Google vice president and general counsel David Drummond audibly stalled for time, uttering random phonemes before answering that this is the sort of thing merging companies generally do, so they indeed plan to do that.

The merger process, we did learn, could consume most, if not all, of this year. As Drummond explained, “We expect the transaction to close sometime later in this year, subject to the regulatory requirements. Until that time, DoubleClick will operate as an independent company.” The question to which he was responding was, why will the process be completed late in the year; essentially, he confirmed the premise without repeating it.

Why do the deal now? Why didn’t, for instance, Google acquire DoubleClick back when the asking price was closer to $1.1 billion – the price investors Hellman & Friedman paid for it in 2005? “The reasoning from a Google perspective,” stated Eric Schmidt, “is that DoubleClick has been a partner of Google’s for many, many years; and as I mentioned, people knew each other and they talked to each other, and...they were doing a very good job in the display ads business, and we were actually focused on some of the other ads businesses. When we did a strategic review for this year, we realized that the scale of the display ads business was much larger than we had thought, and that the DoubleClick management team, frankly, had done a very impressive job of entering that business and growing it. And that was a change of view, an understanding now of how much larger an opportunity it was, and how it could be targeted...We’d had informal chats before, but the alignment wasn’t there, and we got to the alignment now.”

This was one of the more informative responses analysts heard all afternoon. Based on that, one could come to the conclusion that DoubleClick’s management team was what appealed most to Google’s.

But contrast that explanation with the prepared statement read by Schmidt just minutes earlier, as he opened the conference from on location in Argentina: “From our perspective, DoubleClick is in a unique position to strengthen advertising and the advertising business of Google. More importantly, we think this benefits advertisers, partners, and end users. The first, and in many ways, most compelling argument for this from a Google perspective is that it’s accelerating our display advertising business. By virtue of both acquisition and the subsequent integration of tools and technologies between the two companies operating as one, we’ll be able to offer integrated tools to solve interesting problems. And more importantly, perhaps, people will be able to use unified metrics. As you know, Google is all about performance and measurability. It turns out DoubleClick has some of the very best tools in the world. We can now use those across the many different services that Google and DoubleClick offer.”

News : Serious RPC Flaw Could Expose Microsoft DNS Servers to Remote Exploits

This morning, the US-CERT team of the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged Microsoft's advisory this morning, stating that it's investigating instances where Windows servers running the DNS service can be tricked into running any code remotely in a local system context, with the same privileges as the DNS service itself.

As an indication of how seriously Microsoft takes this threat, in a special advisory issued this morning, it instructs customers to use their Registry Editors to set a bit in their DNS parameters for servers running the DNS service, effectively disabling DNS bindings to remote procedure calls (RPC) in favor of local procedure calls only (LPC). From there, the company further suggests that admins use their firewalls to block all RPC traffic, which could extend from ports 1024 to 5000.

Essentially, Microsoft is telling admins to shut off the pipes completely for all traffic that would otherwise enable them to manage DNS servers from remote locations. As the company acknowledges, remote management tools will not function while LPC protocol is favored and RPC ports are blocked by a firewall, though remote management through Terminal Services is still possible.

An engineer with SANS Internet Storm Center who has examined the exploit believes it may not actually be related to DNS at all, since some of its code matches the signature of the infamous Blaster worm of 2004, which had the effect of slowing down many corporate networks to a crawl.

But security engineer David Maynor of Errata Security disagrees. In a blog post this morning, Maynor suggests that comparing the code signature of one exploit to that of another isn't a proper way to judge its identity. The matching code signature in question, Maynor pointed out, is an RPC binding request - the type of request that any DNS host would place to another DNS host, asking it for the rights to make RPC calls. Essentially, it's part of the handshaking procedure that would eventually enable a remote management tool to have access to a DNS server from a more convenient location. Both the Blaster worm and this new exploit would place the same call, which would look the same on a binary scan - that doesn't mean they're the same exploit, he contends.

"If you look at a lot of traffic you will notice that this is pretty standard for the beginning of a DCERPC request," Maynor writes, "and there are tons of reasons you would see this legitimately."

Maynor also suggested that Microsoft should perhaps be a little more forthcoming about the nature of the problem, withhold less information from the public for the sake of ferreting out the perpetrator like a police investigator would, and perhaps instead direct the warning more specifically at the institutions where the perceived threats may have been targeted.

An initial read suggests this threat may not be related to a proof-of-concept circulated among the self-proclaimed Internet underground, entitled "Exploiting Microsoft DNS Dynamic Updates for Fun and Profit." That POC, produced last month, appears to exploit vulnerabilities in Active Directory that can make DNS records point to non-genuine addresses. In such a fashion, comments in the POC's code suggest, Windows systems could be directed to download and even install remote binaries using the same triggers employed for automatic updates and patches.

Today’s threat, Microsoft said, impacts Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 (just released), and Windows 2000 Service Pack 4. However, servers which use IPsec to encrypt traffic may not be impacted. Microsoft’s security advisory made a point of saying Vista is unaffected by this problem, although presently, Vista isn’t deployed in many business environments as a server anyway, especially where admins await the release of Longhorn.

News : Apple Can't Face The Truth

Instead of admitting that Leopard is taking far longer to finish than it anticipated, Apple has chosen an attempt to hide behind the iPhone to mask the hypocrisy of delaying the next version of Mac OS X.

PERSPECTIVE I can no doubt hear the snickers from Redmond this very minute after reading Apple's statement regarding its delay of Mac OS X "Leopard." This comes from a company that never passed up an attempt to bash Microsoft's incessant delays of Vista at every turn.

Now, Apple's a great company, don't get me wrong, but this attempt at getting around the truth smells of hypocrisy all around. As somebody in the office said today, "You can't bash Microsoft for being late to the party and then be tardy yourself." How true.

Apple claims that in order to finish the iPhone on time, it had to pull developers from the Mac OS X team. It goes on to say that the OS would be feature complete, but it would not be able to "deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us."

Okay, so we basically take a risk by delaying an already established product in favor of finishing a product on time that hasn't even been proven yet? Let us all remember that music phones in general have so far been flops.

We don't know for sure that Apple will succeed either -- even the world's biggest purveyor of music devices may not be immune to that as-of-yet insurmountable problem.

We do know from Microsoft OS launches that they also in turn boost PC sales. The profit margins on PCs are far higher than phones, so why would Apple take such a risk? It's beyond me, and probably a lot of other folks too.

Already, financial analysts are questioning the move. Barron's Eric Savitz said Thursday that he expected analysts to begin downgrading their estimates for the third quarter.

"There has been speculation that Leopard's release would generate both software upgrade revenue and an immediate charge to Mac sales," he wrote.

Apple's hypocrisy has been further exposed by sites like AppleInsider as well, which noted that many of the critical issues with Leopard still remain two months before the "end of the quarter," which was the Cupertino company's previous release target.

The company should have taken the chance to confirm the reports at that time, rather than lie about it and look like a hypocrite now.

What's wrong with admitting the truth, Steve? That's what I don't understand. If you think you were going to be able to sneak under the radar, I'd hate to tell you that the Microsoft fans would revel in your woes. They've been waiting for you to slip up for years.

The real gem from the statement came at the end: "Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones."

Well, it should be you hope this was the right one, because I'm not so sure it was.

News : Google Asks Students About Campus E-Mail

Google is asking college students to voice their opinions on campus e-mail services, likely aimed at giving the company a better understanding of how to improve its suite of communications services aimed at colleges and universities.

The Mountain View, Calif. search giant has been offering a version of its Google Apps product for educational institutions for about a year now. The offering includes e-mail, instant messaging, document collaboration and calendaring tools.

Several schools already use the product, including Arizona State and Northwestern University. Google provides the service for free to schools that are accredited as non-profits.

Thus far, however, reception to the offering has been somewhat cool, and it is likely Google is looking for ways to attract more institutions by offering services and features that students want.

"University students lead hectic lives and are ready for email that helps them better organize themselves and communicate with others," Google's education division head Jeff Keitner said. "We're asking students to share their thoughts on campus email so we can help to make that experience even better."

An online survey has been posted on Google's Web site. In it, participants are asked to respond to five questions related to their habits and preferences when it comes to both e-mail and online applications.

Google also asks how satisfied the student is with his or her school's current system, likely giving the company a better idea of which schools may benefit from Google's services.

The search company is not the only Web e-mail provider attempting to lure colleges and universities: Microsoft offers a similar package called Live@edu, now used at about 100 colleges worldwide.

Microsoft hopes using the services in college would turn the student into a life-long user of the company's online applications.

News : Yahoo, SanDisk Team Up Against iPod

Yahoo is joining the ranks of Microsoft and others in attempting to unseat Apple's venerable iPod by teaming with SanDisk on a new Wi-Fi enabled Sansa MP3 player. The device will retail for $250, and includes a 2.2-inch color LCD screen and a capacity of 4GB.

Although it's not the first portable music player to boast Wi-Fi connectivity, Yahoo and SanDisk are making the feature more useful. Unlike the Microsoft Zune, the Sansa Connect would be able to directly download songs from the Internet and stream Internet radio.

The connectivity software that powers the Sansa Connect's key features was developed by Zing, a Mountain View, Calif. start-up co-founded by Tim Bucher, a former Apple executive who played a key part in the iPod's development.

"My sixteen year-old daughter has a Zune, goes to a high school with 3700 kids, and has never once encountered another person with a Zune, shared music, or even used the Wifi functionality on the device," Yahoo! Music's Ian Rogers wrote Monday.

"Welcome to the social? It's 2007," he mused. "How about welcome to the Internet. Duh."

In addition to the downloading of songs, a Sansa Connect user would be able to view their photos online from Flickr, and share music with users of Yahoo! Messenger even if they don't own the device.

While sources insist that the Zune will eventually sport similar features, they have not yet appeared. However, in an increasingly competitive market, new entrants must define themselves quickly or risk being lost in the crowd.

Of any of the MP3 player manufacturers, SanDisk has shown the most promise in competing with the iPod. Its players are #2 to Apple with about a nine percent market share. Apple currently holds a 73.7 percent market share, according to February data from NPD Group.

Yahoo will offer a subscription service for the Sansa Connect player for $11.99 USD per month, would allow users to download unlimited songs from the Yahoo! Music Unlimited catalog.

Analyst reaction to the player seems mixed. Internet pundit Om Mailk called the player a "marriage of convenience."

"Zing, despite the buzz hasn't exactly proved to be David Wright of Consumer Electronics," he wrote for GigaOm. "And Yahoo, well their music efforts have come in fits-and-starts. The only winner in this deal is SanDisk - it manages to sell flash memory at premium prices instead of being stuck with commodity pricing."

News : Google Admits Help in Chinese Character Editor

Google has admitted to using a third-party in developing the dictionary for its recently-released Pinyin Input Method Editor (IME), aimed at assisting Chinese users in entering characters on a Roman-style keyboard, IDG News Service reported Monday. The search engine has come under criticism for possibly infringing on a similar service offered by Chinese competitor Sohu.com.

Sohu sent a letter to Google Friday demanding that they halt downloads of the IME, as they claim portions of the application copies its own IME. It is unknown whether Sohu used the same third-party, although names of Sohu employees and similar mistakes are found in each product. Google China apologized in a blog post Monday, making changes to the IME database.

News : Google Trials Search by Phone

Google may have an answer for those tired of paying for expensive 411 calls from their cell phone: Google Voice Local Search, which goes by the nickname Goog-411. The service, currently in testing on the search company's Labs site, makes local business searches accessible via the phone.

In theory, Goog-411 is simple: users call a toll-free 800 number and speak their search query, which is then processed through speech recognition software. If there is an exact match, Google can connect the user directly to the business free of charge.

Results from the search are read back to the user, who can request them be sent via text message to a cell phone. Initial reviews of the service have been mostly positive, although Google reminds callers that Goog-411 is still in its experimental stages.

According to Google, the data used is the same as would be found using Google Maps, although no computer is required in this case. For now, the test offering is only available in English and in the United States.

Goog-411 is not the company's first foray into cell phone based searching: the company currently offers searching by SMS and a special version of its homepage and Gmail service designed for mobile browsers. However, it is the first to encroach on territory currently owned by the phone networks themselves.

News : Apple Sells 100 Millionth iPod

Outpacing even Sony's once-ubiquitous Walkman, Apple announced Monday it had sold 100 million iPods, making the device the fastest selling music player in history. The milestone was hit in just five and a half years, with the original 5GB iPod introduced in November 2001.

Apple has released 10 new iPod models since that time, including the iPod mini, iPod nano and iPod shuffle. Over 4,000 accessories are available for the player, and over 70 percent of car manufacturers offer iPod support. "iPod has helped millions of people around the world rekindle their passion for music, and we’re thrilled to be a part of that," remarked Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

News : Apple Debuts Eight-Core Mac Pro

Apple on Wednesday refreshed its Mac Pro line, adding a new 8-core behemoth using Intel's new "Clovertown" quad-core Xeon processors. Also, a new quad-core model was introduced. The base configuration for the 8-core Mac Pro includes two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors, with 1GB DDR2 RAM expandable to 16GB. A 250GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics card, and a 16x SuperDrive are also included.


The base price for that model will be $3,997 USD, although better configurations could push that figure several thousand higher. The new 3.0GHz quad-core model, using two Intel Xeon "Woodcrest" processors, will retail for $3,298 USD. The new models are the first refresh to the Mac Pro since Apple introduced the Intel-based lineup in August of last year.

News : Vista to Become More Virtualization-Friendly

Microsoft has tweaked the licensing for Windows Vista slightly to allow users of the Enterprise version of its software to use the operating system in non-traditional environments, such as diskless PCs.

The changes were announced at Microsoft's Management Summit 2007, an annual event held for IT management professionals in Redmond. The company says its customers had been requesting the licensing changes so that IT administrators could experiment with new management architectures.

Changing the licensing to better support virtualization shows a slow capitulation on Microsoft's part to answer calls for better support of the increasingly popular technology. The company briefly flirted with banning Vista virtualization altogether last year, although settled later on taking it out of home versions only.

Still, in order to use these new virtualization features, a company would need to purchase a license for Vista Enterprise, only available to those who participate in Microsoft's Software Assurance program.

Diskless PCs are considered workstations where the PC runs windows, but has no hard drive. Instead, the data is stored in a centralized location on a network. Microsoft says it would work with customers to provide solutions for both individualized and shared disk images.

Along with the right to use Vista on so called "diskless" PCs, customers would also gain access to a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD), which permits use of Vista on virtual machines centralized on a server.

"These are still nascent technologies and new architectures, and we think that only a select few customers are planning to broadly implement these centralized desktop models today," Microsoft Windows Business Group director Scott Woodgate said.

Woodgate and Microsoft had expressed a similar stance on virtualization last month when the news about Vista's near-nixing of virtualization first appeared.

Woodgate said the company would continue to invest in virtualization over the next few years. "These investments will span multiple disciplines, ranging from the desktop to the datacenter, and will fuel our overall virtualization strategy," he added.

Virtualization features for images residing on a PC rather than a server remain unchanged - only customers of Ultimate or Enterprise can use the Vista in that configuration.

News : Google Warming Up to DoubleClick

Although earlier reports have indicated Microsoft was close to a deal with online advertising firm DoubleClick, sources now say Google is emerging as a top contender as the price of the company continues to grow.

The Wall Street Journal said Monday that as the likely acquisition price surpassed the $2 billion mark, Microsoft has been slow in responding with a counter offer. Negotiations were described as "fluid," although a deal could be announced in days.

Several companies, including AOL and Yahoo, as well as private investment firms, have been rumored to have negotiated a deal with DoubleClick. It is unclear whether those companies are still in the running.

Google and Microsoft are locked in an increasingly bitter battle for Internet advertising dollars. While Google is no doubt the behemoth in Web ads, Microsoft has made motions to make up lost ground, such as its adCenter offerings.

Much of the interest around DoubleClick likely has to do with concerns over Google's dominance in the industry. DoubleClick has large customers, including the AOL network and MySpace, and a Google buy would strengthen the company's hold on Web advertising.

Neither Google, Microsoft, nor DoubleClick were returning requests for comment on Monday.

News : iTunes to Offer EMI's DRM-free Music

11:00 am CT April 2, 2006 - In what could be a watershed moment for the digital entertainment industry, leading music publisher EMI Group announced today it would provide most of its music catalog to listeners without any digital rights management restrictions.

And making Apple CEO Steve Jobs live up to his promises from earlier this year, the two companies have reached a breakthrough agreement where DRM-free EMI music will be available on iTunes next month.

As EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli announced in a press conference in London this morning, his company will be making available DRM-free music tracks across all platforms, with iTunes having signed up as the publisher’s first distributing partner. DRM-free tracks on iTunes will carry a premium, selling for $1.29 per track versus the $0.99 that has been iTunes’ standard since its inception.

Just yesterday, EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli issued invitations to his employees to attend his company’s headquarters in London, specifically in the center atrium, for what appeared to be a little concert and a little announcement. Given what day it was, employees weren’t at all certain the invitation was serious.

“We were acutely aware that the invitations were issued on April Fool’s Day,” opened Nicoli during his speech to employees, which was open to the press and which was indeed preceded by a concert. “That was, I’m afraid, unavoidable, and we’re aware that the invitations have provoked considerable speculation over the last 24 hours.”

Given that the press attendance was indeed real, the nature of Nicoli’s announcement ended up not much of a surprise among the company’s ranks, judging from the audience response during the conference’s audio feed.

Nicoli proceeded to explain how EMI came to the conclusion that providing DRM-free tracks to customers was an evolutionary necessity. “In all of our research,” he said, “consumers tell us overwhelmingly that they would be prepared to pay a higher price for digital music files that they could use on any player. It’s clear to us that interoperability is important to music buyers, and is a key to unlocking and energizing the digital business.

“In January, we ran a number of tests with DRM-free downloads of music from selected leading artists, and in these tests, we made available standard quality downloads and higher-quality downloads at a premium price,” Nicoli continued. “The results were resoundingly clear, with the higher-quality tracks outselling standard by 10 to 1, reaffirming our belief that sound fidelity is for many an important factor.”

Along with the lifting of DRM provisions comes what audiophiles will consider a significant bonus: EMI’s DRM-free tracks will be encoded using 256 kbps non-variable AAC encoding, which Apple says is the same quality level as the original in-studio recording.

“While the current 128 kilobit per second AAC encoding is the best audio quality offered by any mainstream digital music store, audiophiles can still tell a difference between it and the original source material,” Jobs stated this morning. “As portable music players have increased their storage while at the same time coming down in price, it is time to reconsider delivering even higher audio quality than is currently available.”

As he later stated, while FairPlay-endowed, 128 kbps EMI tracks will continue to be available at $0.99 each. “In addition, iTunes customers will be able to easily upgrade their entire library of previously purchased EMI songs and albums to higher-quality DRM-free versions for just 30 cents a song,” Jobs added. “We think customers are going to really appreciate this.”

“Our sampling of users indicates that the vast majority of them will pay the additional 30 cents for the superior audio quality and the safety net of interoperability,” Jobs remarked. “iTunes will let users choose to automatically buy these new DRM-free versions whenever they are available, so that users won’t need to think about it on a song-by-song basis.”

The deal between EMI and Apple brings to an end a two-year-old dispute between them, and may literally have taken place just over the weekend, with Apple’s move just last week to promote albums through iTunes perhaps having served as the crack in the dam. Throughout his statements this morning, EMI’s Nicoli referred to the importance of the album, not just the song, as his company’s principal product.

“Since the digital download business started, many people have talked about the demise of the album,” stated Nicoli. “They said that consumers will cherry-pick their favorite tracks, and will no longer want to buy full albums. At EMI, we believe that the body of work an artist produces is still very important for many fans, and our experience to date tells us there remains a high interest in full albums. At the same time, many do indeed prefer to buy individual tracks.”

To help EMI promote its albums, not just its artists and its songs, Jobs announced that iTunes will be making entire EMI-labeled albums available in the new 256 kbps AAC, DRM-free format at the standard price per track, “so customers can elect to purchase the DRM-free albums with even higher audio quality for the same price.

“EMI has taken the first bold step in the music industry,” Jobs continued. “And starting today, Apple will reach out to all the other major and independent labels to give them the same opportunity. We think our customers are going to love this, and we estimate that well over half of the five million tracks offered on iTunes today will be also offered in DRM-free versions by the end of this calendar year.”

The agreement may not have been without some compromise: Although both executives made references to EMI’s entire music catalog, according to AP reports, tracks from The Beatles have been excluded from this deal. Also, Jobs has obviously given in on his earlier insistence upon a flat fee for music, which was a tremendous sticking point in his previous negotiations with the recording industry as a whole. Now, the other major industry players – Universal Music, Warner Music, and Sony BMG – may be able to exploit Jobs’ willingness to establish a premium tier.

But by making a deal with EMI and not the recording industry, Jobs may have made a very smart play, after recognizing that the industry’s collective representatives may be unwilling to take evolutionary steps as a single entity, though its members may be willing to do so in the spirit of competition.

Still, Jobs showed a few signs of reluctance, even while appearing to embrace the concept of interoperability. While Nicoli stated interoperability was among his customers’ prime concerns, Jobs seemed to think that at least some iTunes customers might not think it’s such a big deal, since in his view, they kinda had interoperability already.

Referring to his customers’ history with iTunes, Jobs remarked, “Although most users have never bumped up against the DRM, the music they have bought from iTunes will not play on portable music players other than iPods unless they burn it onto a CD, and then read that CD back into the computer. So it is interoperable, but it’s a little bit of a hassle. Even though users may not want to play their music on devices other than iPods today, they want to know that they have that choice in the future.”

That last sentence appeared to point to a glimmer of an inkling of a hope that Apple’s loyal customers wouldn’t dream of shifting brands, with iPod as well as Macintosh.

Referring to the tremendous buzz Jobs’ open letter to customers received a few months ago, he closed his comments with this: “Some doubted Apple’s sincerity when we proposed this solution to the interoperability problem earlier this year, saying that as the #1 digital music store and the #1 maker of digital music players, we had too much to lose by breaking the proprietary bond between the iTunes Music Store and iPod music players. Hopefully, by our actions here today and over the coming months, they will conclude that we are continuing to do exactly what has earned us these #1 positions: doing the right thing for the customer, and the right thing for the customer going forward is to tear down the walls that preclude interoperability by going DRM-free. And that starts here today.”