technology

Major Phone Maker’s Profits Affected By Natural Disaster

January 19, 2012

STOCKHOLM (AP) — Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, which is soon to be wholly-owned by Sony Corp., on Thursday reported a fourth-quarter loss due to costs related to restructuring as well as lower sales amid the financial crisis. The London-headquartered group posted a loss of euro207 million ($265 million) in the quarter, compared with a profit of euro8 million in the same three months a year ago. Aside from weaker sales, which dropped 16 percent to euro1.29 billion, the LM Ericsson and Sony joint venture said margins were also squeezed severely by intense pricing competition on the smartphone market. The gross margin shrank to 24 percent from 30 percent, while operating costs soared to euro538 million from euro427 million. “Our fourth quarter results reflected intense competition, unfavorable macroeconomic conditions and the effects of a natural disaster in Thailand,” CEO Bert Nordberg said. The group, which shipped 9 million units in the quarter — 20 percent less than a year earlier — said it expects the global smartphone market for 2011 to have increased by 60 percent and estimates “strong growth” in that market in 2012. In 2001, Sony and Ericsson combined their unprofitable handset ventures in the Sony Ericsson joint venture. Although enjoying some early success with its Walkman and Cyber-shot phones, the company later suffered from the competitive climate in the smartphone market. In October, the two companies announced that Ericsson would sell its 50 percent stake to Sony for euro1.05 billion. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter. Despite the weaker earnings results for Sony Ericsson, shares in wireless network maker Ericsson rose 1.7 percent to 68.10 kronor ($9.88) in early Stockholm trading.

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Man Please Guilty In Huge Online Poker Scam

January 17, 2012

NEW YORK (AP) — A U.S. citizen credited with helping online poker companies move billions of dollars in illegal gambling proceeds overseas from U.S. customers pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy charges. Ira Rubin, 53, entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Prosecutors say he made it appear that money processed by poker companies through U.S. banks was actually the proceeds of transactions on websites for golf stores, electronic companies or other businesses. Rubin admitted he created dozens of websites so that gambling proceeds could “be disguised as payments from nonexistent online merchants.” He said he carried out the fraud from 2006 until last March. Rubin was swept up last year in a federal prosecution that shut down the three largest Internet poker companies operating in the United States and resulted in charges against 11 individuals. He has been held without bail after he was arrested in Guatemala last April as he prepared to travel to Thailand. Authorities said he had lived in Costa Rica since 2008. He was facing charges that carried a potential sentence of more than 80 years in prison, but his guilty plea came with an agreement with prosecutors that the recommended sentence would be between 18 months and two years in prison. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges related to illegal gambling, bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. He admitted that he helped Pokerstars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker hide the true nature of their transactions. Sentencing was set for May 17. The plea came from a defendant who prosecutors had portrayed as a frequent offender, facing or having faced criminal charges in New York, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Florida and Virginia since the 1970s. They say he has yet to pay an $8 million Federal Trade Commission judgment against him because of a payment-processing business he operated from 2003 to 2006 that was tied to telemarketing fraud.

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A Look At New HDTV Products And Connected Devices From CES 2012

January 17, 2012

The Consumer Electronics Show is always a big deal for HDTVs and the devices that plug into them, and the 2012 edition was no different. With the majority of households already owning an HDTV, manufacturers are pressed to convince you to upgrade, and are pulling out all the stops. We’ve got new display technologies like OLED, 4K and Super Hi-Vision, plus more 3D and internet connected features than ever. DVRs and media streamers haven’t slowed down either, so while some services focused on eliminating the set-top box, those that remained either shrunk (Roku) or added features (Boxee, TiVo, Ceton — pictured above). The pace of the announcements made it nearly impossible to keep up with everything going on last week, so we’ve wrapped everything up in one neat summary available after the break.

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SOPA, PIPA Headed For Major Makeover

January 16, 2012

By Sarah McBride (Reuters) – U.S. legislation aimed at curbing online piracy, which had appeared to be on a fast track for approval by Congress, appears likely to be scaled back or jettisoned entirely in the wake of critical comments over the weekend from the White House, people familiar with the matter said. The legislation, known as SOPA in the House of Representatives and PIPA in the Senate, has been a major priority for entertainment companies, publishers, pharmaceutical firms and many industry groups, who say it is critical to curbing online piracy that costs them billions of dollars a year. The legislation is designed to shut down access to overseas websites that traffic in stolen content or counterfeit goods. Internet companies have furiously opposed the legislation and have ramped up their lobbying efforts in recent months, arguing the legislation would undermine innovation and free speech rights and compromise the functioning of the Internet. Some Internet advocates have called for a boycott of any companies that support the legislation, and several popular websites, including community-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia and the social media site Reddit, have vowed to black out their sites this Wednesday in protest. With public sentiment on the bill shifting in recent weeks and an implicit veto threat now emerging from the White House, Congressional staffers are resigning themselves to writing replacement language or possibly entirely new bills. The White House said in a blog post over the weekend that it wouldn’t support “legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.” Three key section of the existing legislation seem likely to remain, a person familiar with the matter says. They comprise provisions aimed at getting search engines to disable links to foreign infringing sites; provisions that cut off advertising services to those sites; and provisions that cut off payment processing. But critical provisions that would require Internet service providers such as Verizon Communications and Comcast Corp. to cut off infringing sites through a technology known as DNS blocking are now likely to be eliminated. Critics have said that such measures would only encourage people to navigate the web in riskier ways, with modified browsers or other tweaks that could lead to their Internet sessions getting hijacked by scammers. Lawmakers had already been coming around to the realization they would have to hold back on the DNS-blocking provisions. Before the holidays, an amended version of the House bill had added a “kill switch,” or provision that service providers wouldn’t have to block a site if it did “impair the security or integrity of the system.” On Thursday, Senator Patrick Leahy, who is sponsoring the Senate bill, said he planned to propose amending it so that the ramifications of blocking access to a site be studied before implementation. On Friday, Representative Lamar Smith, who is sponsoring the House bill, said he planned to remove altogether the provision that would require service providers to block access to infringing foreign websites. A Google official said in Congressional testimony in November that the company did not necessarily oppose disabling search engine links and cutting off advertising. But it is not clear if eliminating the DNS-blocking provisions alone will be enough to mollify critics. “Like many other tech companies, we believe that there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking U.S. companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday. In addition to concerns about the technical ramifications of DNS blocking and the practical issues associated with disabling services to individual websites, many in the Internet business fear the bills create far too much leeway to shut down websites without sufficient due process. But supporters of the legislation are just as adamant that something needs to be done. Over the weekend, News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, whose holdings include Fox, complained that the White House had caved. “So Obama has thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery,” News Corp’s chairman and chief executive officer posted on his personal Twitter account on Saturday.” The debate seems likely to intensify in the coming weeks. The White House said it would soon host a conference call among opponents of the existing bill. (Reporting by Sarah McBride in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Ilaina Jones; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Sandra Maler)

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Google Calls Murdoch’s Allegations ‘Nonsense’

January 16, 2012

“This is just nonsense,” wrote a Google spokeswoman. “Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.”

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Judge Sides Against Apple In Smartphone Dispute

January 13, 2012

(Reuters) – Motorola Mobility Inc did not violate Apple’s patented technology in making its Droid, Cliq, BackFlip and other smartphones, a judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission said in a preliminary decision issued on Friday. The full ITC will issue a final decision in March. Apple had filed a complaint with the ITC in October of 2010, accusing Motorola Mobility of infringing three Apple patents to make its smartphones. Two of the patents have to do with how the devices accept manual input when users type or handwrite on them while the third relates to ways for consumers to add applications without jumping through hoops like rebooting the smartphone. The complaint, like many patent battles focusing on smartphones, is part of a larger fight between Apple and Google Inc’s fast-growing Android operating system, which Motorola uses. The ITC is a popular venue for patent disputes because it can order devices made with infringing technology barred from importation. Google has reached an agreement to buy Motorola Mobility, and is seeking the antitrust approval needed to close the sale. (Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

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Tech Leader Joins Google Board

January 12, 2012

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc appointed Diane Greene, a co-founder of technology company VMware Inc, to its board of directors on Thursday. Greene, 56, will also serve on Google board’s audit committee, the company said. Greene will become the 10th member of Google’s board, filling a spot left vacant when former Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson resigned in 2009. Levinson, who is also a director at Apple Inc, resigned after federal regulators began looking into the “interlocking directorates” between the two companies. Greene, who co-founded VMware in 1998, served as the company’s CEO from 1998 to 2008. She also is a member of Intuit’s board of directors. Shares of Google, the world’s No.1 Internet search engine, were off 52 cents at $629.12 in after hours trading on Thursday after closing the regular session up $3.68. (Reporting By Alexei Oreskovic; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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Mini Apple Stores Coming To Target

January 12, 2012

NEW YORK — Target says it will team up with owners of specialty shops to create affordable, limited edition merchandise for sale online and at its stores in a bid to attract more customers and distinguish itself from rivals. Target Corp. said Thursday it will start featuring products from five shops starting May 6. The shops will be open for six weeks and then be replaced with another slew of shops in the fall. The initial group includes The Candy Store in San Francisco, The Privet House home accessories shop in Connecticut; The Webster House, a clothing store in Miami; Polka Dog Bakery in Boston; and The Cos Bar, a cosmetic shop in Aspen. The items will be sold both at Target stores and online. With prices ranging from $1 for a nail file to a $159.99 online only ottoman for the home, the five collections total nearly 400 products. “This puts Target at the frontier of what’s next in retail,” said Brian Robinson, director of fashion and design partnership at Target. Separately, Target says will testing creating mini-Apple shops in 25 Target stores. It provided no details. Target pioneered the concept of offering designer merchandise at affordable prices starting with its Michael Graves launch of home accessories in 1999. It says rivals have copied its cheap chic mantra. Target shares rose 17 cents to $49.20 in morning trading Thursday. Its shares have traded in a 52-week range between $45.28 and $56.44.

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Where Gadgets Go To Die: E-Waste Recycler Opens New Plant In Las Vegas

January 11, 2012

LAS VEGAS — Inside the mad hum of the convention center, an overwhelming array of gadgetry confronts attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show, a showcase for much that is new in the technology world. The products seem impervious to the workings of time, as if the latest smartphones and tablet computers — so shiny and sleek — are permanently tethered to the future. Yet 10 miles to the west, on a patch of reddish desert beyond the high-rise casinos of the Las Vegas Strip, a building the size of an airplane hangar serves as the final resting place for old electronics. This is where gadgets go when they are wanted no more. Typically, they are refurbished and sold anew. Sometimes, they are stripped down to their basic elements and recycled into plastic, steel and precious metals. The new $20 million plant, which officially cut the ribbon here Wednesday afternoon, is the second such facility opened by U.S. Micro Corp., a business whose very existence illustrates the extent to which the world is increasingly contending with a surplus of unwanted electronics. Even products that seem intrinsically part of the modern age eventually become waste, presenting a growing threat to the environment and the sanctity of the data stored on electronics of every type. Back in 1995, when the company’s chief executive and founder, Jim Kegley, opened the first plant in Atlanta, recycling old electronics was at best a niche business. Cell phones were still in their infancy, and a long way from the current fashion of trading up for a slicker model every two years. Popular computers remained on sale for three years and longer, eons by contemporary standards. But last year, U.S. Micro — a privately held company — estimated that it processed about 1 million technology products, relying solely on the Atlanta plant. With the new facility here, the company foresees processing 1.5 million products this year. The company harvests old devices owned by major American companies across the industrial landscape and disposes of them, refurbishing and reselling about 90 percent of them, while recycling the rest. “Typically, we find that our customers don’t have a good outlet for their old equipment, and they are worried about their data, so they stockpile,” Kegley told The Huffington Post during a visit this week. “We like to say, ‘Storage is not a solution.’” The growth of the electronics recycling industry sits at the confluence of two intensifying concerns — the vulnerability of companies whose data is stored on myriad electronic devices, and awareness that huge volumes of old gadgets are landing in troubling places. Many take up space in landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that 70 percent of heavy metals landing in municipal waste disposal sites are the result of electronics being discarded . And many are shipped to China and other developing countries , where poor people laboriously harvest their innards using crude and dangerous methods, often polluting waterways and sickening communities. The marketing pitch from U.S. Micro is predominantly focused on the threat posed by unwanted data lying around in discarded machines — credit card and Social Security numbers left in the hard drives on computers of major banks; legal documents cached in the memories of copy and fax machines operated by publicly traded corporations; stray thumb drives and memory cards forgotten in old computer bags. “Today, we see data everywhere,” said Kegley. “People just don’t know what to do with this stuff.” But the plant here is also aimed at preventing so-called e-waste from sullying landfills in suburban American landfills or rivers in southern China, where whole towns are now engaged in the gritty work of melting down old circuit boards to extract copper and other precious metals. The 10 percent of the electronic equipment that technicians deem unfit for refurbishing is fed into a series of conveyor belts and then into the guts of machines that break them into pieces. A large magnetized chamber separates the metals from the plastic, depositing each into industrial-size cardboard boxes to be trucked off to plants that can absorb them.The precious metals are sent to a plant in Europe that separates them into their base elements, Kegley said, while the plastics and steel are sold to domestic users, including the auto industry. The company touts its ability to fully process all of the equipment it removes from its customers’ premises as insurance against having any of it landing in the wrong hands. Many e-waste recyclers promise to responsibly dispose of old gadgets, only to sell them off to middlemen merchants who export to low-grade operations in China, India and other developing nations, according to environmental watchdogs. Advocates assert that e-waste recyclers must gain accreditation from bodies that audit their operations to verify their compliance with proper practices — a step that U.S. Micro says it is now pursuing. “There really aren’t any legal standards for e-waste recycling,” said Sheila Davis, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a San Francisco area non-profit watchdog group. “If you don’t have any certification, and you’re not audited, then we really don’t know what you’re doing with the material.” A Seattle-based non-profit, the Basel Action Network, oversees one such certification regimen, the so-called e-Stewards program, publishing a list of approved e-waste recyclers located in many communities . Here in Las Vegas, U.S. Micro said it is pursuing accreditation from a competing regimen, the R2 standard , which includes participation from the EPA. The company said none of the equipment it handles winds up in a landfill or overseas, something it can guarantee by maintaining full control over the process. On a walk through the concrete hangar earlier this week, the the volume of goods pouring in was unmistakable. Several dozen boxloads of gear sat stacked on wooden pallets in the loading dock, a trove trucked in from Phoenix and the Seattle area. Here were boxes of Dell computer monitors, Cisco routers, a Hewlett-Packard laser jet printer, and a Canon copy machine. A Fujitsu scanner was tagged with a yellow sticky note bearing black magic marker: DO NOT MOVE JESSICA’S SCANNER. Not that many years ago, Jessica’s scanner had presumably sat inside a shrink-wrapped box, waiting to unleash new possibilities. Now, it was something else — a modern form of detritus.

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Groupon Forges Giant New Partnership

January 10, 2012

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Germany’s Deutsche Telekom and Groupon, the world’s largest daily deals company, will cooperate in mobile internet businesses, German business daily Financial Times Deutschland reported, citing company executives at both groups. “We will start some services and activities with Groupon in the coming months,” Heikki Makijarvi, responsible for developing new businesses at Deutsche Telekom, was quoted as saying on Tuesday. Deutsche Telekom aims to generate revenues of 2-3 billion euros ($2.6-3.8 billion) in the field of online services with private customers in 2015, the newspaper reported. “For us, it’s an important step. It is the first time we are entering a cooperation with a wireless service provider,” said Michael Shim, responsible for mobile marketing and partnerships at Groupon. ($1 = 0.7851 euros) (Reporting by Christoph Steitz; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

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Intel Readies Biggest Ad Blitz In Nearly A Decade

January 10, 2012

LAS VEGAS — Intel Corp. says it is betting big on its “ultrabook” concept with its largest advertising campaign since 2003. The campaign to push the new thinner and lighter notebook computers will start in April, says Kevin Sellers, Intel’s head of advertising. Sellers didn’t say how much Intel Corp. would spend on the ads and other initiatives. He spoke to the press on Monday, ahead of the opening of the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Intel hasn’t planned a launch this big since the company introduced Centrino chips for Wi-fi-capable laptops eight years ago. Though it chiefly makes processors, Intel often prods PC makers to build their products in certain ways. The “ultrabooks” are similar to Apple’s MacBook Air, which launched three years ago. PC makers have responded well to the ultrabook idea, and Intel says there are 75 models on the way. The Consumer Electronics Association expects 30 to 50 ultrabook models to be on display at CES. More news is expected out of Intel on Tuesday, when CEO Paul Otellini speaks at the show. Intel watchers expect that the news will have something to do with the company’s long-standing ambition to get its chips into smartphones.

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Larry Magid: 5 Hot Trends at CES 2012

January 8, 2012

I’ve just arrived in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show to hang out with 140,000 of my closest friends. This show — the mother of all tech trade shows — is where people find out what many companies plan to release at some point during 2012. Not all products shown at CES will make it to market and many of the ones that do will be flops. But there have also been some successful products and product categories launched at CES including the VCR in 1970, the Commodore 64 personal computer in 1982, the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, HDTV in 1998, Tivo in 1999, Blu-Ray in 2003 and that wildly successful (not) Palm Pre in 2009. CES is also where many people first saw 3D TVs in 2009 and a parade of tablets in 2011. Check out this chart at Sortable. So here are a few things we can we expect at CES 2012. 3D TVs without glasses . We saw that in 2011 but we’ll see more of them and larger ones in 2012. We’ll also see lots of 3D TVs that use inexpensive passive glasses instead of the $300 a pair active ones that were common just a couple of years ago. These new developments are a good sign, but I’m still not convinced that people will want to spend more on 3D TV. As CES chief Gary Shapiro said in a podcast interview posted at CNET, 3D is a feature, not a new category of TV. Ultrabooks : Apple has done very well with its thin and lightweight MacBook Air but the so-called Windows “netbooks,” never did catch on big time. That’s because they were under-powered and often had skimpy keyboards. Ultrabooks are thin and light but they’re not cheap and they don’t skimp on power. Expect Lenovo, Dell, HP and others to feature them at CES and expect Ultrabooks to be the hot category of PCs in the coming year. OLED and Connected TVs : OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode and unlike other technologies, there is no need for a backlight so it’s more energy efficient. It also allows for thinner TVs and for richer colors, better contrast and resolution. LG has already blogged that it will be showing the “world’s largest OLED,” a 55-inch model. It should come as no surprise that the hottest thing on TV has nothing to do with an antenna or even a cable or satellite connection but the ability to bring in streaming video from the likes of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and others. As with previous years, there will be plenty of TVs with built-in Internet connectivity. I wouldn’t be surprised if it emerges as an almost standard feature. Connected Cars : There will be keynote speeches from the CEOs of both Ford and Mercedes and plenty of connectivity solutions for cars. There will also be mobile apps to control cars, such as Ford’s MyFord Mobile App to help owners of its electric cars find charging stations. iStuff : As usual Apple won’t be at CES but there will be plenty of vendors with apps, cases and accessories for the iPhone and iPad. There will even be an “iLounge,” with 300 exhibitors who are focused on supporting Apple products. This post is adapted from one that appeared on Forbes.com and LarrysWorld.com

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Tweeting On Empty: The Problem With Twitter

January 7, 2012

I recently helped a friend sign up for Twitter, coaching him on the site’s features and how to populate his feed. He is a voracious reader, never leaves home without an Apple device and has an insatiable appetite for news and commentary. In short, he had all the makings of an up-and-coming Twitter addict — or so I thought. He didn’t stick with Twitter, and after scrutinizing his timeline of incoming tweets, I can understand why. It looked nothing like my own Twitter feed, which offers a satisfying mix of commentary, personal updates, photos, news and quality recommendations from an assortment of accounts I’ve spent years curating and tweak almost daily. His Twitter timeline was dominated by generic blathering from various news accounts and institutions. My friend could have groomed his assortment of accounts, but why would he have? Like many others, he was open to trying Twitter, but not especially determined to stay on it, and his initial experience failed to deliver information he couldn’t have found elsewhere in a more efficient way. The time he’d invested in it hadn’t sold him on the service, and he wasn’t keen on investing more. One of Twitter’s greatest strengths is its ability to be anything for anyone. For some users, it’s a way of communicating within small groups of friends. For others, it’s a news site or a source of celebrity gossip or a way to participate in a political movement. What Twitter amounts to — tool, tabloid, messaging service or news feed — depends entirely on whom you follow. Yet the site’s fill-in-the-blank nature also poses problems for some. Twitter greets newcomers with a blank slate that they’re forced to fill out on their own. Being a Twitter newbie is like arriving for dinner at a restaurant that’s received rave reviews — only instead of being offered a menu, diners must make a dish themselves and select all the ingredients, down to the spices and herbs. The experience might be a pleasant one, but it takes work. This initial emptiness, and the effort required to address it, stands between Twitter and the mainstream success it needs to make money. The six-year-old, San Francisco-based company has swallowed more than $800 million in funding and has been valued at $8.4 billion , more than Delta Air Lines or the New York Times. Yet the company is still struggling to prove it has a business model that fits. Its current approach, to sell advertising on its site, will be sustainable only if Twitter can continue to expand its reach and grow far beyond the geek elite. Twitter has more than 100 million active accounts worldwide — an impressive number but one that pales in comparison to Facebook’s over 800 million users. As part of its efforts to attract more diverse users, Twitter has revamped its site to make its hashtag-laden, symbol-spotted lingo more intuitive. Next, it must help users find people to follow. Twitter knows full well it will lose users unless it can deliver a chatty, engaging timeline, without requiring Twitterers to expend too many clicks. “For people to immediately have a compelling, valuable experience on Twitter, one of the most important things we can do is help them build a timeline and find interesting, relevant accounts to follow when they first sign up,” Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner told The Huffington Post in an email. For Twitter users to see the thriving “information network” the site claims to provide , they must do the legwork. They must research people to follow, spend time curating their feed, watch their timelines evolve and experiment with new accounts. But no doubt many people lack the patience to do so. Having to pick through possible accounts can be a chore, and an unlikely one to be taken on by someone not even convinced he wants to stay with the service. Twitter has already made numerous efforts to help users populate their feeds. Individuals can sync their email accounts to find friends on Twitter, and the service offers customized suggestions about “who to follow.” Twitter’s redesigned registration process, introduced last fall, holds users’ hands and nudges them to add accounts to their feed. After claiming a Twitter handle, new users are now shown a curated list of other users, with the recommendation to start off by picking five to follow. This follower-focused signup process is a start but not necessarily effective. I recently created a new Twitter account to give the revamped registration process a go. After dutifully following Twitter’s instructions, I was delivered my first page of tweets, all from one hyperactive tweeter. This would have been a total turnoff to a Twitter newbie. Pressure is mounting. People are losing patience with social media sites and, as the number of social networking sites grows, individuals will be less tolerant of services not delivering instant gratification, warned Shama Kabani, author of “The Zen of Social Media Marketing.” “One of the issues Twitter has to face in 2012 and beyond is social networking fatigue,” Kabani said. “Because there are so many sites, if someone struggles to get into Twitter, their threshold for giving it a shot will be much smaller now than it might have been. Before, they might have given it a few months. Now, if you’re not offering what people want, they can go next door.” What has attracted you to — or turned you off from — from Twitter? Weigh in below.

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PayPal Testing Out New In-Store Payment System

January 7, 2012

By Alistair Barr (Reuters) – EBay Inc’s PayPal unit is testing in-store payments with Home Depot, one of the largest retailers in the United States, as the online payments provider moves to expand into the physical world of brick and mortar. A pilot program for PayPal’s new point-of-sale, or POS, technologies is being run in five Home Depot stores and involves a “small number” of PayPal employees, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said. PayPal is a dominant player in online payments, with over 100 million users. But the business is trying to expand into offline payments, a much larger market. The move pits the eBay unit against payments giants, including Visa Inc, MasterCard Inc and American Express Co. In September, PayPal pitched its new in-store payments system to about 120 retailers, including Sports Authority, at an event in Los Angeles. EBay Chief Executive John Donahoe spoke about the initiative several times last year, but the company had not disclosed which retailers agreed to test it first. While the Home Depot trial is small, Wall Street analysts are excited about the potential. “We believe a full Home Depot roll out would increase PayPal’s addressable market by more than 35 percent overnight,” Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a note to investors on Friday. “Although penetration would start at zero, we believe that by adding value to consumers and merchants, PayPal may eventually approach penetration rates comparable to its online presence.” (Reporting by Alistair Barr; editing by Carol Bishopric and Andre Grenon)

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Fired Over Email: Tips On How To Deal

January 5, 2012

By Eileen Gunn (Reuters) – When Lauren Bossers, who lives in Pittsburgh, worked for a supply chain management software company in Dallas, she dealt with work and staff in the main office virtually, by phone and email. When she was laid off after her company was acquired in January 2010, well, that happened by phone, too. With increasing numbers of people working outside of the office, when it comes to pink-slip time, companies often relay their message the most convenient way they can if their employees aren’t physically present – by phone or video chat. The Telework Research Network estimates that 20 to 30 million people work from home at least once a week, while another 15 to 20 million work remotely while on the road. Bossers said receiving the bad news remotely had an upside. She was able to absorb it and react to it in the privacy of her home, rather than in an office full of coworkers. But, on the flip side, if a person telecommutes part-time, an office cubicle may require clearing out, and if they work from home full-time, there may be computers and work material that need returning to the business. Sara Fell, a former human resources officer and founder of the website http://Flexwork.com (which helps clients find flexible work situations) has the following tips for those dealing with a virtual layoff: GET YOUR EXIT TERMS IN WRITING Those who are laid off in person are typically handed a packet that lays out the terms of their layoff and provides supporting information, such as what their options are regarding a company retirement plan. If you’re laid off by phone, make sure such a package is forthcoming. A follow-up email will help, meanwhile, spell out issues such as your official end date and how leftover vacation days will be handled. It should address details such as what your access will be to an in-office computer and cubicle, or how you’ll return work-related materials you have at home. If anything needs to be shipped, the company should send a postage-paid mailer so you aren’t footing the bill for this, Fell says. Since some questions may not crop up until you’ve had a chance to absorb the news, ask that the email includes contact information for someone with whom you can liaise about additional issues over the next several weeks. BID YOUR ADIEUS As inclined as you may feel to hide out at home, Fell advises taking the high road and “showing that you can be proactive in the face of adversity.” Put on your game face and head back into the office one last time. Collect your stuff, say your goodbyes, let people know how to reach you and make a token offer to help with any projects that need to be wrapped up. This presents you in the best professional light, Fell says, and could help you with job-hunting or consulting opportunities down the road. As visiting the office wasn’t an option for Bossers, she spent the days following her layoff “burning up the phone lines” with calls to her former colleagues. It was time consuming to do so, and she was weary of repeating her story ad nauseum. But, she says, “I’d built up great relationships over the 10 years I was affiliated with the company. I wanted some opportunity to say good bye.” MIND YOUR MANNERS While Bossers’ manager had given her one day’s advance notice of her layoff, the news was still “shocking,” and her contributions to the phone conversation with the HR officer who rang her comprised mainly of yeses and nos. “I wasn’t rude, but I didn’t think it was my job to make them feel better,” she said. This reaction isn’t unusual, but Fells cautions against being curt or even hostile on the phone. “You should try to take the high road here and not burn bridges,” she says. If you’re afraid of what you might blurt out, then, like Bossers, just don’t say much at all. SOME EXITS COULD BE ROUGH Jeff Langr was working remotely as a software developer when he received an email last January, which said that his employer, a company in Des Moines, had been acquired. He was blind copied on another email soon after, asking him to join a Skype teleconference, where he and several co-workers were laid off. This call, he says, “was short and to the point; not more than five minutes, and not at all a forum for asking questions or responding.” The company was “impersonal to the point of being cowardly,” he says, and he blurted out an expletive before hanging up. While that was an extreme situation, Fell says remote layoffs are new for many companies. and that the “process might be a little rougher than more traditional layoffs.” Still, she advised, “Try to emphasize professionalism. Appeal to your manager or the HR representative as a person and remember that they’re people too.” And don’t hesitate to ask for what you think you need, whether it’s an escort around the office to say goodbye or a recommendation on LinkedIn. After all, Fell says, “There really is no harm in asking.” — The author is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed are her own. (Editing by Bernadette Baum and Beth Pinsker Gladstone)

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Apple To Pay $5 Million In Patent Infringement Case

January 5, 2012

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Elan Microelectronics Corp, a Taiwanese touch design company, said on Thursday that Apple Inc will pay $5 million as part of a settlement in a patent infringement case. The statement said the two companies would also exchange authorizations to use each other’s patents. In 2009, Elan sued Apple in the United States over two patent infringements and the California-based giant counter-sued later the same year. The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled in favour of Apple in June last year, saying Apple had not violated U.S. trade law. Apple is involved in a number of patent disputes following the massive popularity of the company’s flagship products the iPhone, iPad and MacBook among consumers. Apple is also embroiled in acrimonious lawsuits over Google Inc’s Android players as the two camps battle for market share. Lawsuits, especially patent disputes, are common in the technology sector as makers seek to protect their newest technologies from being commoditized and exploited by rivals. But most are settled out of court as big companies prefer to avoid long fights and patented technology can be out of date by the time a case is over. (Reporting by Clare Jim; Editing by Chris Lewis)

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Steve Blank: Why the Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result Is SOPA

January 4, 2012

This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S. ) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion . Where did the other $57 billion come from? From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads. The Movie Industry and Technology Progress The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market. 1920′s – the record business complained about radio. The argument was because radio is free, you can’t compete with free. No one was ever going to buy music again. 1940′s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. “It’s all over,” complained the studios. In fact, the number of screens went from 17,000 in 1948 to 38,000 today. 1950′s – broadcast television was free; the threat was cable television. Studios argued that their free TV content couldn’t compete with paid. 1970′s – Video Cassette Recorders (VCR’s) were going to be the end of the movie business. The movie businesses and its lobbying arm MPAA fought it with “end of the world” hyperbola. The reality? After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets. 1998 – the MPAA got congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ( DCMA), making it illegal for you to make a digital copy of a DVD that you actually purchased. 2000 – Digital Video Recorders (DVR) like TiVo allowing consumer to skip commercials was going to be the end of the TV business. DVR’s reignite interest in TV. 2006 – broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers. Today it’s the Internet that’s going to put the studios out of business. Sound familiar? Why was the movie industry consistently wrong? And why do they continue to fight new technology? Technology Innovation The movie industry was born with a single technical standard — 35mm film, and for decades had a single way to distribute its content — movie theaters ( which until 1948 the studios owned ). It was 75 years until studios had to deal with technology changing their platform and distribution channel. And when it happened (cable, VCR’s, DVD’s, DVR’s, the Internet), it was a relentless onslaught. The studios responded by trying to shut down the new technology and/or distribution channels through legislation and the courts. Regulation/Legislation But why does the movie business think their solution is in Washington and legislation? History and success. In the 1920′s individual states were beginning to censor movies and the federal government was threatening to do so as well. The studios set up their own self-censorship and rating system keeping most sex and politics off the screen for 40 years. Never again wanting to be at the losing side of a political battle they created the movie industry’s lobbying arm, MPAA . By the 1960′s, the MPPA achieved regulatory capture (where an industry co-opts the very people who are regulating it) when they hired Jack Valenti , who ran the studios’ lobbying efforts for the next 38 years. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership. Management of Innovation The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets , particularly to content/copyright owners whose sell through well-established distribution channels. The incumbents tend to have short-sighted goals and often fail to recognize that more money can be made on new platforms and distribution channels. In an industry facing constant technology shifts the exec staff and boards of the studios have lawyers, MBAs and financial managers, but no management skill in dealing with disruption. So they rely on lobbying ( $110 million a year), lawsuits, campaign contributions (wonder why the President won’t be vetoing SOPA? ) and Public Relations. Ironically, the six major movie studios have a great technology lab in Silicon Valley with projects in streaming rights , Video On Demand, Ultraviolet , etc. But lacking the support from the studio CEOs or boards, the lab languishes in the backwaters of the studios’ strategy. Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation .) Piracy One of the claims that studios make is that they need legislation to stop piracy. The fact is piracy is rampant in all forms of commerce. Video games and software have been targets since their inception. Grocery and retail stores euphemistically call it shrinkage. Credit card companies call it fraud. But none use regulation as often as the movie studios to solve a business problem. And none are so willing to do collateral damage to other innovative industries (VCRs, DVRs, cloud storage and now the Internet itself.) The studios don’t even pretend that this legislation benefits consumers. It’s all about protecting short-term profit. SOPA When lawyers, MBAs and financial managers run your industry and your lobbyists are ex-Senators , understanding technology and innovation is not one of your core capabilities. The SOPA bill (and DNS blocking ) is what happens when someone with the title of anti-piracy or copyright lawyer has greater clout than your head of new technology. SOPA gives corporations unprecedented power to censor almost any site on the Internet. History has shown that time and market forces provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology is a video recorder, a personal computer, an MP3 player or now the Net. It’s prudent for courts and congress to e xercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude . What the music and movie industry should be doing in Washington is promoting legislation to adapt copyright law to new technology– and then leading the transition to the new platforms. The U.S. State Department has been championing the Internet Freedom initiative across the world. Secretary of State Clinton said, “…when ideas are blocked, information deleted, conversations stifled, and people constrained in their choices, the Internet is diminished for all of us.” It’s too bad the head of the MPAA — an ex-senator — made a mockery of her words when he wondered ” why our online censorship can’t be like China ?” We wonder, “Why can’t the film industry innovate like Silicon Valley?” Lessons Learned Studios are run by financial managers who have no corporate DNA to exploit disruptive innovation Studio anti-piracy/copyright lawyers trump their technologists Studios have no concern about collateral damage as long as it optimizes their revenue Studios110M/year lobbying and political donations trump consumer objections Politicians votes will follow the money unless it will cost them an election Steve Blank’s blog: www.steveblank.com

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Apple’s Design Chief Receives Major Honor

December 31, 2011

iPhone. iPad. iKnight. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, has been honored with a knighthood in the United Kingdom. Per BBC News , Ive, a native of Chingford, was awarded with the title Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE). The design guru worked closely with the late Steve Jobs and played a key role in the creation of such iconic Apple products as the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. As the San Jose Mercury News reports, Ive released a statement responding to the knighthood announcement: “I am keenly aware that I benefit from a wonderful tradition in the UK of designing and making,” Ive, 44, said in a statement. “To be recognized with this honour is absolutely thrilling and I am both humbled and sincerely grateful. I discovered at an early age that all I’ve ever wanted to do is design. I feel enormously fortunate that I continue to be able to design and make products with a truly remarkable group of people here at Apple.” Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported on Ive’s background : Ive started out far from Apple Inc.’s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple. In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, the company’s design chief at the time, Robert Brunner, hired Ive as a senior designer. Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked under Ive at Apple in the `90s, believes Ive came because he understood Apple was different from other computer companies. Bloomberg Businessweek , profiling Ive in 2006, explained that he became head of Apple’s design team in 1996 . Upon Steve Jobs’ 1997 return to Apple, the late CEO recognized Ive’s incredible talents. Jobs, quoted by biographer Walter Isaacson , explained that he set up a structure at Apple in which “There’s no one who can tell him [Ive] what to do.” As AppleInsider reports, Jobs viewed Ive as his “spiritual partner” at Apple . Ive’s designs can be found on the desks and in the pockets of millions of people. In addition, the Museum of Modern Art in New York houses six classic products designed by Ive: the G4 Cube Computer, the G4 Cube Speakers, the Harman Kardon iSub, the iBook, the iMac G4 Desktop and the original iPod. His massive impact on the design of technology was recognized by FORTUNE magazine in 2010 when the publication named Ive the Smartest Designer in Tech .

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10 Most Embarrassing Quotes From The Letter That Led To A Huge CEO’s Resignation

December 30, 2011

For Mark Hurd , the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, life surely just got a lot more embarrassing. The Supreme Court of Delaware ruled Wednesday that a letter from celebrity attorney Gloria Allred detailing Hurd’s alleged sexual advances towards her client, Jodie Fisher, a former HP contract employee, could be made public. The letter spawned an internal investigation at HP last year, ultimately leading to Hurd’s resignation in August 2010. The letter alleges that Hurd made a number of unwanted sexual advances towards Fisher. In addition, it features some bizarre anecdotes including an incident where Hurd allegedly took Fisher to an ATM and attempted to impress her by showing his $1 million balance. He also allegedly told Fisher that the singer Sheryl Crow was crazy about him. Hurd, now the CEO of Oracle, had tried to keep the letter private, saying that he was protected by California privacy laws. But the court ultimately found that though the letter contained “mildly embarrassing” information , it isn’t protected in the same way as financial information or trade secrets. The internal investigation that the letter sparked didn’t find evidence of sexual harassment, but it did uncover inaccurate expense reports , according to Reuters. The question of whether the letter should be released has been the subject of much controversy, particularly because Alldred’s client, Jodie Fisher, has said some of it is untrue. The week that he resigned, Hurd settled with Fisher , according to Bloomberg. Here are some of the most embarrassing alleged moments from the letter:

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New Facebook For The 99 Percent

December 29, 2011

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.

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China To Limit Exports Of Materials Essential To Smartphone Makers

December 28, 2011

BEIJING — China announced a cut Tuesday in its rare earths export quota as it tries to shore up sagging prices for the exotic metals used in mobile phones and other high-tech goods. China accounts for 97 percent of rare earth output and its 2009 decision to curb exports while it builds up an industry to create products made with them alarmed foreign companies that depend on Chinese supplies. In its latest quota, the Commerce Ministry said exporters will be allowed to sell 10,546 tons of rare earths in the first half of 2012. That is a 27 percent reduction from the quota for the first half of 2011. China’s export restrictions have strained relations with the United States the European Union, Japan and other governments that have called on Beijing to remove its curbs and make its intentions clear. Despite production and expor curbs, rare earths prices in China have tumbled as U.S. and European economic woes dent demand for its exports. The government ordered its biggest producer to suspend output for a month in October to shore up prices. But the restrictions have made rare earths much mor expensive abroad, giving Chinese makers of products that use them a price advantage and foreign manufacturers an incentive to shift operations to China. In a sign of unusually weak demand, the Commerce Ministry said actual Chinese exports of rare earths in 2011 totaled 14,750 tons for the first 11 months of 2011 – the equivalent of just 49 percent of the total annual quota. In another possible move to tighten control over exports, the ministry’s announcement Tuesday said only 11 companies will be allowed to sell abroad. That is down from 26 companies given licences for the first half of 2011. Rare earths are 17 elements including cerium, dysprosium and lanthanum that are used in manufacturing flat-screen TVs, batteries for electric cars and wind turbines. They also used in some high-tech weapons. The United States, Canada and Australia also have rare earths but stopped mining them in the 1990s as lower-cost Chinese ores flooded the market. Surging demand has prompted ccompanies in Canada, California, India, Malaysia, Russia and other other countries to develop rare earths mines, some of which are expected to start producing by 2015. Prices in China have fallen sharply since August, declining by 45 percent for neodymium oxide, by 33 percent for terbium oxide and by 31 percent for lanthanum oxide, according to Lynas Corp., an Australian rare earths producer. Its figures showed an equally striking gap between prices in China and abroad, with lanthanum oxide costing triple the Chinese level on global markets, neodymium more than twice as much and terbium oxide near twice as much.

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Groupon Makes Stealthy Acquisition

December 28, 2011

Groupon has continued its (talent) acquisition spree with the recent purchase of a hot Silicon Valley startup before they even launched — and with extremely little fanfare.

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Wikipedia Makes Bold Move Over ‘Net Censorship Bill

December 26, 2011

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia and Wikia would be moving its domains off of GoDaddy, an Internet domain registrar, to protest GoDaddy’s support for the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, a controversial anti-piracy bill under consideration by Congress. “I am proud to announce that the Wikipedia domain names will move away from GoDaddy. Their position on #sopa is unacceptable to us,” Wales wrote in a tweet . He later added , “Wikia is also moving several hundred domains from godaddy. Which registrar has quality and price right?” GoDaddy has been hemorrhaging domains in a backlash against the company’s endorsement of SOPA. Though GoDaddy said in a blog published December 20 that it was withdrawing its support for SOPA, GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman acknowledged in an interview with TechCrunch that the company had not yet officially registered with Congress its plans to switch sides. According to VentureBeat , GoDaddy has lost more than 37,000 domains in total. Other companies that have joined in the exodus include the Cheezburger Network, which runs popular sites such as FAIL Blog, Failbook and I Can Has Cheezburger. Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh tweeted, “Not happy with @godaddy. Emailed CEO, asking for clear, unequivocal dropping of SOPA support. Still planning on moving off.” Commenters on Reddit have also called for a GoDaddy boycott and one Reddit user suggested December 29 should be “move your domain away from GoDaddy day.” The Next Web writes that GoDaddy has been “calling customers, begging them to stay,” noting that one customer shared an anecdote about a conversation with a GoDaddy representative in which the company’s rep attempted to clarify GoDaddy’s stance on SOPA. Wales previously contemplated protesting SOPA with a Wikipedia black out that would have seen many or all English-language Wikipedia pages taken offline. “A few months ago, the Italian Wikipedia community made a decision to blank all of Italian Wikipedia for a short period in order to protest a law which would infringe on their editorial independence. The Italian Parliament backed down immediately. As Wikipedians may or may not be aware, a much worse law going under the misleading title of ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’ is working its way through Congress on a bit of a fast track,” Wales wrote on Wikipedia . “My own view is that a community strike was very powerful and successful in Italy and could be even more powerful in this case.”

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Apple Poised For Loss In Claim Against iPad Competitor

December 22, 2011

DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) – A German court rejected Apple’s claims that Samsung Electronics’ reworked tablet PC still looks like a copycat version of the iPad, in a preliminary assessment. Apple is fighting several rival makers of smartphones and tablet PCs in courts worldwide over intellectual property. Its battle with Samsung, which is Apple’s supplier as well as a competitor, has been especially bitter, with some 30 legal cases in 10 countries. “According to the court’s assessment, the defendant has moved away sufficiently from the legally protected design,” Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in court on Thursday. Brueckner-Hofmann added that a ruling was slated for February 9. In response to an earlier court ruling in Apple’s favour, Samsung had redesigned its Galaxy Tab 10.1 for the German market only and named it Galaxy Tab 10.1N. But Apple challenged the reworked version as well, seeking an injunction that would ban Samsung from marketing the product in Europe’s largest consumer market. Samsung, for its part, earlier this week filed new claims in a separate dispute related to telecommunications standard technology with Apple for alleged patent infringements in Germany. (Reporting by Matthias Inverardi; Writing by Ludwig Burger; Editing by Helen Massy-Beresford)

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Dems, Reps Agree On Reducing Jobless Benefits

December 21, 2011

WASHINGTON — Republicans and Democrats have clashed frequently over federal unemployment insurance ever since the unemployed first became eligible for 99 weeks of benefits at the end of 2009. Despite the high-profile disagreements, which have repeatedly led to lapsed benefits for millions of people, Republicans and Democrats broadly agree on what to do next: reduce the duration of benefits and make sure their cost isn’t added to the federal budget deficit. But unless Congress reaches a compromise in the next week or so, federal unemployment benefits will lapse again for nearly 2 million people come January. In December, Republicans proposed reducing the number of weeks available by 40. Democrats are willing to meet them halfway by cutting 20 weeks, albeit in a backdoor fashion: Congress would reauthorize the two federal unemployment programs, but the second would automatically phase out in one state after another over the course of 2012. The phaseout would begin under a bill that passed the Senate on Saturday per a deal between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his GOP counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Democrats in the House of Representatives want the House to pass the Senate bill immediately. Although the Senate legislation would keep the federal programs in place for just two months, the second Extended Benefits program would phase out in 11 states during that time. It’s a “wholly inadequate” outcome, said Rep. Sander Levin (D-Mich.), the top Democrat on the committee overseeing unemployment, because “with very little warning, tens of thousands of long-term unemployed Americans will be cut off unemployment insurance.” Levin did not say, however, that he opposed the bill. The Extended Benefits program, which provides help for up to 20 weeks, kicks in after workers exhaust up to 53 weeks of federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation following 26 weeks of state benefits. The program is restricted to states with high and rising jobless rates. If a state’s jobless rate isn’t significantly higher than its rate three years ago, the program is not triggered. Democrats in both the House and Senate initially proposed reauthorizing Extended Benefits to allow states to extend their “lookback” period to four years ago, which would have meant more states kept the benefits through 2012. Those proposals have been pushed aside. As Republicans have noted, the Obama administration was the first to suggest letting Extended Benefits dwindle in 2012. Cynthia Rogers of Minneapolis received a letter last week telling her that Extended Benefits would end on Jan. 8. Rogers, 55, has been drawing unemployment benefits since September 2010, after she lost her job as a registered nurse due to an injury. She’s currently on the third “tier” of Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which lasts only 47 weeks in Minnesota (the duration of federal unemployment programs varies by state ). Rogers will be eligible for 13 weeks of Extended Benefits starting in January — if Congress renews the program and allows states to change their triggers. Rogers could use the money. “I’d be able to pay my medical premium for another month or two, and my car insurance and my rent,” she said. “But I still need a job.” She said she has already sold her house and is grateful her children are grown. She’s applied for pet store jobs as well as nursing positions. She’s planning to enroll in dog grooming school and launch a new career in Texas as soon as she can. “At age 55, no one wants to hire you,” she said in an email. “So, unless a Christmas miracle happens, I am at the mercy of Congress and the Lord Himself. I place my trust in God, not Congress.” As recently as 2010, Democrats insisted that the cost of federal unemployment compensation not be offset with spending cuts or tax hikes elsewhere in the budget, arguing that deficit spending stimulates the economy. They’ve since abandoned that stance and only disagree with Republicans on how the benefits should be paid for. Another area of agreement: Both parties support making millionaires ineligible for unemployment insurance. If such a policy had been in place in 2009, it would have saved $20 million out of $135.9 billion spent on benefits, according to the National Employment Law Project. The worker advocacy group argued in a recent report that cutting off higher earners could undermine what is supposed to be an entitlement for anyone who loses a job through no fault of his or her own: “[E]xaggerating the extent to which millionaires, a group of potential beneficiaries who garner little or no public sympathy, are drawing UI [unemployment insurance] benefits opens the door to means-testing of unemployment benefits at any level of income by essentially eliminating UI for certain workers at the highest income levels.” Republicans are on their own, however, when it comes to allowing states to drug-test the jobless and require layoff victims who haven’t finished high school to enroll in GED courses as a condition for receiving benefits. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have said they’d be willing to drop extended unemployment compensation altogether, something Congress has never done with a national jobless rate above 7.2 percent. But the latest deal has fallen apart, and most members of the House and Senate have returned to their districts for a Christmas break that ends in late January. As many as 1.8 million long-term jobless will lose assistance over the course of the month. Arthur Delaney is the author of ” A People’s History of the Great Recession ,” HuffPost’s first e-book.

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Immigrants Founded Half Of Top U.S. Startups, Study Finds

December 21, 2011

(Sarah McBride) – Immigrants founded or cofounded almost half of 50 top venture-backed companies in the United States, a new study shows, underscoring some of the high stakes in potential immigration reform. The venture capital community argues the study, completed by research group National Foundation for American Policy, proves the need to overhaul rules governing how entrepreneurs can immigrate to the United States to spur job development. “It’s a gamble whether an entrepreneur should stay or leave right now, and that’s not how the immigration system should work,” said Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, on a call with reporters. “What we need is legislation that helps these entrepreneurs from outside the United States.” Of the 50 top venture-backed companies, 23 had at least one immigrant founder, the study found. In addition, 37 of the 50 companies employed at least one immigrant in a key management position such as chief technology officer. Companies with immigrant founders include some of Silicon Valley’s hot start-ups, such as textbook-rental service Chegg, founded by Indian Aayush Phumbhra and Briton Osman Rashid; online craft marketplace Etsy, founded by Swiss Haim Schoppik; and Web publisher Glam Media, founded by Indians Samir Arora and Raj Narayan. The countries that supplied the most founders included India, Israel, Canada, Iran and New Zealand, the study found, and the immigrant-founded companies created an average of 150 jobs. The study looked at the top 50 venture-backed companies as measured by research firm VentureSource, based on factors such as company growth and the amount of capital raised. VentureSource considered only companies valued at less than $1 billion. Young companies and their backers say the rules are too cumbersome and encourage non-U.S. citizens to launch start-up businesses elsewhere, or bog down companies in red tape if they commit to basing in the United States. One obstacle to the loosening of immigration rules for entrepreneurs is a tendency in Congress to consider legal and illegal immigration jointly, Heesen said. Because illegal-immigration issues are so divisive, he said, overall immigration reform has bogged down. The NFAP identified bills pending in the House of Representatives and the Senate that would help through measures such as lowering the amount of capital an entrepreneur has to raise before being eligible for an immigrant visa. (Source: http://www.nfap.com/pdf/NFAPPolicyBriefImmigrantFoundersandKeyPersonnelinAmericasTopVentureFundedCompanies.pdf ) (Reporting by Sarah McBride; Editing by Steve Orlofsky) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Amazon Reportedly Weighed Purchase Of BlackBerry Maker

December 21, 2011

By Nadia Damouni (Reuters) – Research In Motion Ltd has turned down takeover overtures from Amazon.com Inc and other potential buyers because the BlackBerry maker prefers to fix its problems on its own, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Amazon hired an investment bank this summer to review a potential merger with RIM, but it did not make a formal offer, said one of the sources. It is not clear whether informal discussions between Amazon and RIM ever led to specific price talk, or who else had approached RIM about a takeover. RIM’s board wants co-chief executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie to focus on trying to turn around the business through the launch of new phones, better use of assets such as BlackBerry Messaging and restructuring, two sources said. They did not want to be identified as the discussions are private. RIM and Amazon declined to comment. While RIM could strike technology licensing deals and other kinds of commercial partnerships to boost revenue, an outright sale or joint venture is not on the cards for now, they said. “They have had approaches from folks who have wanted to have discussions,” said one head of technology investment banking at a Wall Street bank. “The issue is it is hard to find a value that makes sense with a falling knife.” Battered shares in the Canadian smartphone maker jumped 10 percent in after-hours Nasdaq trade after the Reuters report. RIM’s market value has plunged 77 percent in the last 12 months to about $6.8 billion following a series of disappointing quarterly reports, delayed phone launches, weak sales of the PlayBook tablet and other missteps. The shares tumbled last week on weaker-than-expected quarterly results and the announcement of a delay in the launch of the new BlackBerry 10 phones. A RIM investor who declined to be named said the company was now essentially on the block. “This story puts RIM in play, because shareholders are going to put it in play,” the U.S.-based investor said. “It’s over. This is now a company where the activists are in charge.” Activist shareholder Jaguar Financial Corp has called for a sale of RIM as a whole or in separate parts, such as the handset business, the network services operation, or the patent portfolio. But RIM’s management has told interested parties they do not want to sell or break up the company at this juncture, the sources told Reuters. After last week’s news, the board instructed the co-CEOs to set aside any options for a sale, one person briefed on the situation said. “Selling the company or an economic joint venture is probably not in the cards right now,” said the source. “Until you stabilize the platform, people are going to be very nervous about spending $10 billion or more.” Some potential corporate and private equity suitors are holding out for RIM’s valuation to fall further, people familiar with the matter said. AMAZON, RIM STILL IN DISCUSSIONS Amazon and RIM are still discussing ways to expand their commercial ties, which currently include a service launched last year to make Amazon’s music catalog available to some BlackBerry users, according to the sources. Amazon launched the Kindle Fire tablet in November, which, along with the content the company can package with it, is seen as a potentially formidable contender to Apple Inc’s iPad and iTunes store. Amazon does not make smartphones. As for RIM, it feels it could better leverage its assets, such as the BBM instant messaging and the network operation centers that allow for messages to be processed, the sources said. RIM could also look at licensing out its QNX operating system after the late 2012 launch of BlackBerry 10, which will be the first smartphones using that software, to give handset makers an alternative to Google’s Android operating system. DISTRACTION RIM’s co-CEOs have spent months listening to ideas from investment bankers, strategic parties and private equity firms. These discussions are now viewed as distracting for management, sources briefed on the situation said. One of them said the board has backed both Lazaridis and Balsillie, but is of the view RIM needs to develop a “deeper bench” of executives. Spurred by RIM’s share drop and Google Inc’s $12.5 billion bid for Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc in August, Wall Street bankers have tried to pitch RIM to other mobile phone makers, including Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and HTC Corp, in recent months. But HTC and Samsung already have licensing agreements with Google’s Android and did not see the value in tying up with BlackBerry, people familiar with the companies said. Samsung and HTC declined to comment. (Additional reporting by Soyoung Kim in New York and Alastair Sharp in Toronto; Editing by Tiffany Wu, Paritosh Bansal and Andre Grenon, Phil Berlowitz)

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Sony Handheld Sales Fall Short Of Rival

December 20, 2011

TOKYO (Reuters) – Sony Corp shifted 321,400 units of the PlayStation Vita, its new handheld game device, in Japan in its first two days on sale, research firm Enterbrain said on Tuesday. That falls short of rival Nintendo Co Ltd’s 3DS, which sold 371,000 in its first two days, Enterbrain said. Sales of the 3DS, however, slumped weeks after the launch, forcing Nintendo to slash the price and crushing its profit outlook for the year. Sony seeks to avoid suffering a similar fate by offering a big slate of 24 games for the Vita at launch. But executives admit the real challenge will come in maintaining sales over the next few years. Fans in Japan lined up to be among the first to pick up the latest portable game device, which kicked off a global rollout on Saturday. The Vita will be launched in the United States and Europe in February. Sony’s previous portable game device, the PS Portable, sold 166,000 units on the first day of sales in 2004. It has sold 73 million units to date. (Reporting by Isabel Reynolds; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

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Senators Turn Up Heat On Google Antitrust Probe

December 19, 2011

Google’s high-stakes antitrust hearing in September seems to have raised more questions than it answered — and lawmakers are asking regulators to take a closer look at the search giant’s operations. The leaders of the Senate antitrust subcommittee that held a hearing on Google’s business practices are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company is guilty of antitrust abuses. In a letter to the chairman of the FTC, Senators Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, respectively, argued that “a number of concerns” raised at the Google antitrust hearing “merit serious scrutiny by the FTC.” Google confirmed in June that the FTC was reviewing the company, though stated it was “still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are.” Among other “concerns” the Senators listed in their letter to the FTC, Kohl and Lee highlighted testimony by the CEOs of Yelp and Nextag that Google had stolen traffic from their sites by preferencing its own products; cited Google executive Marissa Mayer’s 2007 admission that the search giant has intentionally ranked its own services ahead of other sites’; and pointed out that Google’s lone competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, has been hemorrhaging around $2 billion a year. The Senators cited statistics indicating Google claims 65 to 70 percent of the Internet search market and powers “at least” 95 percent of queries performed on mobile devices. They also wrote that Google’s business model has “changed dramatically in recent years” as the company “now seeks not only to link users to relevant websites, but also to answer user queries, provide a variety of related services, and direct customers to additional information on its own secondary web pages.” Kohl and Lee noted that when Google chairman Eric Schmidt was asked in the antitrust hearing whether Google was a monopolist in the online search market, Schmidt conceded, “I would agree, Senator, that we’re in that area.” The former Google CEO also denied that Google had “cooked” its search results to favor its services ahead of other sites’ offerings. “Senator, may I simply say that I can assure you we’ve not cooked anything,” Schmidt told Lee during the hearing. “We believe these allegations regarding Google’s search engine practices raise important competition issues,” Kohl and Lee wrote. “We are committed to ensuring that consumers benefit from robust competition in online search and that the Internet remains the source of much free-market innovation.” In a written response to questions posed by the Senate antitrust subcommittee , Schmidt attempted to position Apple’s Siri technology, which allows for voice-controlled search, as a “competitive threat” to Google. The Senators seem unconvinced: their letter made no mention of Siri and stated that Google “faces competition from only one general search engine, Bing ” Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Apple Wins Legal Battle Against iPhone Competitor

December 19, 2011

‪ ‬ By Ina Fried, Trade Body Says HTC Is Violating Apple Patent, Bans Some Imports via All Things D In a closely watched case, the U.S. International Trade Commission on Monday ruled that Taiwanese cell phone maker HTC is violating an Apple patent and ordered an import ban on some of the company products. The organization found that HTC devices infringed on two claims related to an Apple patent. However, the ban will not take effect until April, the ITC said in a ruling, giving time for carriers to make transition plans and for HTC to demonstrate ways it has avoided infringement (by working around the patent, dropping infringing features or other means). “Notice is hereby given that the U.S. International Trade Commission has found a violation of section 337 in this investigation and has issued a limited exclusion order prohibiting importation of infringing personal data and mobile communications devices and related software,” the agency said. “The Commission has determined that exclusion of articles subject to this order shall commence on April 19, 2012.” HTC will be able to import some refurbished products to satisfy repair claims on already sold products, but will not be able to bring new products into the country after April 19, unless the ruling is reversed or it can show its products no longer infringe the patent in question. The ruling had been delayed several times. HTC said in a statement it was pleased the commission reversed a ruling that HTC infringed on another of Apple’s patents and that it narrowed the ruling on the patent in which it did find infringement. “While disappointed that a finding of violation was still found on two claims of the ’647 patent, we are well prepared for this decision, and our designers have created alternate solutions for the Œ647 patent,” HTC said in a statement. See the ruling here. Trade Body Says HTC Is Violating Apple Patent, Bans Some Imports via All Things D More From All Things D: AT&T Dropping Its T-Mobile Bid, Owes Billions to Deutsche Telekom Beyond Tablets: The Next Five Computing Form Factors IBM Predicts Home Electricity From Your Bike, Mind-Reading Computers Facebook’s Social Ad Strategy Suffers Legal Blow

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Man Who Hung Jury In $1 Billion Microsoft Case At Peace With Decision

December 19, 2011

SALT LAKE CITY — The lone holdout juror who prevented a Utah company from getting as much as $1.2 billion from one-time rival Microsoft Corp. for alleged antitrust violations says he’s at peace with his decision. Novell sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming the software giant duped it into developing the once-popular WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own product. Novell says it was later forced to sell WordPerfect for a $1.2 billion loss. “I walk away feeling honestly myself, and I can’t speak for the other jurors, that I made the right decision even if it resulted in a hung jury,” Alvey said Saturday. “There were so many inferences that needed to be drawn that I felt that it was unfair to Microsoft to go out on a limb and say, `yes.’” Alvey described the three days of jury deliberations as stressful. The 11 other jurors sided with Novell. “Obviously, I wanted to convince them to agree with me and they wanted to convince me to agree with them,” he told KSL. Bill Gates testified last month that he had no idea his decision to drop a tool for outside developers would sidetrack Novell. Gates said he was acting to protect Windows 95 and future versions from crashing. Novell argued that Gates ordered Microsoft engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 word processing application because he feared it was too good. Alvey said the jury agreed on the technical aspects of the case but disagreed on what Novell could have accomplished “but for” Gates’ decision. “There was a lot of speculation in this `but for’ world,” he said. As for Gates’ testimony, Alvey said, “The man was a little sarcastic at times. If anything, it provided a little break from the monotonous questions and answers … I think from his testimony, what I heard, and what I saw in the emails, Bill Gates was a man who took every threat extremely seriously.” Jury foreman Carl Banks said he tried hard to get a verdict. “It was a tough case. It was long and it was hard and it was grueling,” he said. “We gave it our best shot.” Novell attorneys have said they would seek to retry the case with a new jury. Microsoft said it would file a motion asking the judge to dismiss Novell’s complaint for good and avoid a second trial. ___

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Verizon Secures Deal With Huge Cable Company

December 16, 2011

NEW YORK — Cable company Cox Communications on Friday said that it has agreed to sell some of its airwave licenses to Verizon Wireless for $315 million and will resell Verizon service in its stores. The deal mimics on struck between Verizon Wireless and three other cable companies two weeks ago. Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks gave up their ambitions to run their own wireless network and signed co-marketing agreements with Verizon. Unlike the other cable companies, Cox had taken steps to use its spectrum. But it gave up on its plans to build a wireless network earlier this year, saying it couldn’t compete with bigger cellphone companies. Privately held Cox is the third-largest cable company in the country. It is based in Atlanta and has about 6 million customers. The spectrum Cox is selling is in the same frequency band as the licenses the other cable companies agreed to sell, which makes it easier for Verizon Wireless to put it to use. It covers 28 million people, chiefly in areas where Cox provides cable service. Cox also has spectrum in another frequency band, which is not part of the deal. Spectrum sales are subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of phone company Verizon Communications Inc. of New York and Vodafone Group PLC of Britain. An odd consequence of the deals the cable companies is that Verizon Wireless stores will be selling cable TV service, in competition with Verizon Communications’ own FiOS TV service. Verizon Communications shares edged up 23 cents to $38.65 in midday trading.

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Phil Simon: 10 Technology and Business Trends for 2012

December 16, 2011

It’s that time again — time to look around the corner and make predictions about the new year. Here are 10 technology and business trends that will affect businesses and consumers alike in the coming year. The continued proliferation of platforms We have entered the Age of the Platform and many companies have started embracing ecosystems, partners, and crowdsourcing. Even Twitter’s recent redesign is a clear attempt to mimic the functionality and success of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other powerful platforms. The rise of mobile payments You can now pay for Apple products by yourself if you have an iPhone and the Apple Store App . Jack Dorsey’s Square has even more ambitious plans: to turn your phone into your own portable payment system. Continued dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google The Gang of Four isn’t going anywhere. Those who believe that there will be “one winner” from the Great Tech War of 2012 are in for a surprise. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will each dominate, but in separate areas. A more semantic web Semantic technologies — i.e., those that enable data to be understood across multiple languages — are becoming more prevalent. Case in point: Teenagers are building apps that make sense of increasingly noisy search results. The continued consumerization of IT In the 1990s and before, tech companies catered to CIOs — not to the ultimate end users of their products. This has changed. In 2012 and beyond, we will continue to see a more democratized tech playing field. Significant consolidation and M&A activity Expect Netflix, Hulu, and other standalone products and services to be absorbed by larger companies. Rumors are swirling that Verizon will gobble up Netflix , especially since Netflix’s stock price has dropped by more than 60 percent from its high. Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Fire, and Google’s play in movies will make it harder and harder for video-specific sites to survive. The continued emergence of new business platforms More and more companies are building platforms — and adding planks. Force.com and Jive Software are but two examples of emerging business platforms and powerful ecosystems that have stalwarts such as Microsoft scrambling to play catch up. The continued demise of old new tech heavyweights Don’t expect any magic turnarounds from RIM, HP, AOL, and Yahoo! Android will continue to steal mindshare away from BlackBerry. AOL’s recent restructuring is unlikely to return it to prominence. A continued drop in traditional index searches We know that people are more prone to do traditional index searches on desktops and laptops than mobile phones. (By some estimates, only one percent of an individual’s time on a mobile device is spent doing searches.) As we spend more time on the latter than the former, fewer people will use search engines. This is a big reason that Google has made such large bets with Android and Motorola. Big business gets more social Whether it’s on Pages for Google+ or the recently announced Twitter branded pages, expect the last dominoes to fall. Those big and large businesses loathe to embrace social media will realize that they’ll have to get with the program — or else.

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Zynga Prices Shares

December 15, 2011

(Reuters) – Zynga Inc priced its shares at the top end of its expected range at $10 per share on Thursday, a source close to the process told the International Finance Review. The company, which is the top publisher of games on Facebook such as “FarmVille” and “CityVille”, sold 100 million shares raising $1 billion, the source told IFR on Thursday. At $1 billion, Zynga’s IPO would be the largest from a U.S. Internet company since Google Inc raised $1.7 billion in 2004. Based on a fully diluted share count of 890 million shares, the IPO values Zynga at $8.9 billion. Zynga is selling about 11 percent of diluted shares in the offering. Zynga had previously been targeting a share price of $8.50 to $10. Underwriters on the deal were lead by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The International Finance Review is owned by Thomson Reuters. (Reporting By Liana B. Baker, editing by Bernard Orr) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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BlackBerry Maker’s Net Income Plummets

December 15, 2011

TORONTO (AP) — BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. said Thursday that new phones deemed critical to the company’s future will be delayed until late 2012. Mike Lazaridis, one of the company’s co-CEOs, said the BlackBerry 10 phones will need a highly integrated chipset that will not be available until mid-2012, so the company can now expect them to ship late in the year. He disclosed the delay on a conference call with analysts. Analysts say RIM’s future depends on the new software platform. RIM needs to come up with a compelling BlackBerry as U.S. users have moved on to flashier touch-screen phones such as Apple’s iPhone and various competing models that run Google’s Android software. Earlier Thursday, RIM said BlackBerry sales will fall sharply in the holiday quarter, providing further evidence that it is struggling to compete. It also has been having a hard time finding a niche in the tablet-computer market, which is dominated by Apple’s iPad. RIM continues to enjoy success overseas, but market researcher NPD Group says RIM’s market share of smartphones in the U.S. has declined from 44 percent in 2009 to 10 percent this year. The company’s stock fell 7 percent in extended trading Thursday. The delay in BlackBerry 10 phones is the latest in a series of setbacks for the once-iconic Canadian company. Its PlayBook tablet computer hasn’t been selling well, forcing the company to sell them at a deep discount. A widespread outage frustrated tens of millions of BlackBerry users in October. RIM fired two executives after their drunken rowdiness forced the diversion of an Air Canada flight. The head of its operations in Indonesia faces charges related to a stampede at a recent promotional sale where dozens of consumers were injured. RIM said its net income sank 71 percent as revenue fell and the company took a large accounting charge on the PlayBook. RIM earned $265 million, or 51 cents per share, for its fiscal third quarter that ended Nov. 26. That compares with $911 million, or $1.74 per share, a year ago. The company said revenue fell 6 percent to $5.2 billion. The PlayBook charge was $485 million before taxes. The company shipped 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones during the third quarter and 150,000 PlayBook tablets, but its fourth-quarter guidance was what investors focused on because it had warned about the third-quarter results earlier. Although RIM has said it would sell fewer BlackBerrys in the current quarter, the forecast given Thursday appeared worse than expected. RIM said it would only ship between 11 million and 12 million BlackBerrys in the fourth quarter compared to 14.8 million in the previous fourth quarter. RIM also said its fourth-quarter earnings would be in the range of 80 to 95 cents per share on revenue in the range of $4.6 billion to $4.9 billion. Analysts had been expecting earnings of $1.15 a share on revenue of $5.04 billion, according to FactSet. Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. in New York, said earlier that if RIM reveals that it will ship no more than 12 million BlackBerrys in the current quarter, then the company needs to get its new phones out fast. Otherwise, RIM could lose money in future quarters as it continues to struggle to sell the current, stopgap models. On Thursday, BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis said the guidance was terrible and wondered if it was the start of a collapse. “If consumers abandon this platform it can happen pretty quickly,” Gillis said. “Don’t think this is the bottom.” Jim Balsillie, the other co-CEO, said the last few quarters have been among the most challenging times in the company’s most recent history. He said executives are working to turn it around, but said it may take time. “We are not satisfied with the performance of the business in the United States,” Balsillie said. Balsillie said he and Lazaridis have reduced their cash salary to $1 per year, though they will continue to earn stock options and other compensation. RIM’s stock fell $1.11 to $14.02 in extended trading Thursday after the results were released. The stock has lost about 75 percent of is value this year. A company that was worth more than $70 billion a few years ago now has a market value of around $8 billion. “We recognize our shareholders may feel we’ve fallen short,” Balsillie said.

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Jury ‘Confused’ By Huge Tech Lawsuit

December 15, 2011

SALT LAKE CITY — Jurors deliberating Wednesday in a Utah company’s $1 billion federal antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. appeared confused, sending at least five questions to the judge, one of which couldn’t be answered. Novell Inc. sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming the Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant duped it into developing a version of its WordPerfect writing program for Windows 95 only to pull the plug so Microsoft could gain market share with its own word program. Jurors started deliberating at about 8:45 a.m. Wednesday and didn’t go home until about 7:45 p.m., the Salt Lake Tribune reported. They’ll resume their discussions Thursday. During the day, the judge received notes from the panel seeking clarification on some of the technical testimony throughout the two-month trial. One message so baffled U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz that he told jurors to simply disregard their own question in deliberations. Tensions were high among lawyers waiting for what could be an enormous verdict. Novell is seeking up to $1.3 billion from Microsoft. If the jury rules against Novell, its attorneys will have little to show for a decade of effort. Throughout the trial, Novell lawyers argued that because its office products worked on multiple operating systems, Microsoft’s snub of WordPerfect for Windows 95 was an illegal effort to maintain its monopoly. Microsoft countered that it had valid business reasons to deny WordPerfect a set of software tools that threatened to crash new Windows technology. They say Novell could have worked around the problem but moved too slow. Microsoft says Novell’s ensuing loss of market share was its own doing because the company didn’t develop a compatible WordPerfect program until long after the Windows 95 rollout. WordPerfect once had nearly 50 percent of the market for word processing, but its share quickly plummeted to less than 10 percent as Microsoft’s own Office programs took hold. “Novell was late. It was always behind. It was playing catch-up,” Microsoft attorney David Tulchin said during closing arguments Tuesday. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates testified last month that he had no idea his decision to drop a tool for outside developers would sidetrack Novell. He denied Novell’s claim that Microsoft intentionally deceived the company. Gates also said Novell just couldn’t deliver a compatible WordPerfect program in time for the rollout, and that Microsoft’s own Word program was actually better. He said that by 1994, the Word writing program was ranked No. 1 in the market, above WordPerfect. Novell argued that Gates ordered Microsoft engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 application because he feared it was too good. Novell’s lawsuit is the last major private antitrust case to follow the settlement of a federal antitrust enforcement action against Microsoft more than eight years ago. The trial began in October in federal court in Salt Lake City. Novell is now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group, the result of a merger that was completed earlier this year.

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Gorgeous New Apple Store Opens Its Doors

December 9, 2011

Apple on Friday treated New Yorkers to the official opening of its Grand Central mega-store. Occupying the roomy area behind the east and northeast balconies, overlooking the terminal’s Main Concourse, the shop will employ 315 Apple sales experts and will offer ample display tables and three Genius Bars, as well as dedicated rooms where people can set up new devices and learn how to operate them, according to a press release from the company . Apple paid the former occupant, Charlie Palmer’s Metrazur restaurant, $5 million to vacate the space, reports the Wall Street Journal . At 23,000 square feet , the Grand Central store is one of the largest in Apple’s global chain. It is estimated that more than 750,000 people pass through the terminal per day ; during the holidays, that number soars to over 1 million. New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority will rake in over $1 million per year as a result of the Apple’s lease on the terminal’s balcony space, although some have pointed out that Apple may have signed on for a sweeter deal than other Grand Central tenants. Writes CBS New York , the MTA “collects ‘percentage rent’ from every retailer except Apple. That is because the retailer cut a deal with the MTA for a straight lease, totaling about $1 million a year.” New York’s Committee on Corporations, Authorities and Commissions is currently investigating the 10-year agreement between Apple and the MTA, according to Pix 11 . The store is Apple’s fifth location in Manhattan. Take a look at the slideshow (below) to see photos from the new Grand Central Apple Store.

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Clinton Delivers Warning For Tech Companies

December 8, 2011

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is warning Internet and software companies to beware what they sell to autocratic governments. Clinton says authoritarian governments are trying to use the same tools of online connection to spy on or restrict citizens. She says those governments sometimes get help from companies that knowingly sell online surveillance software or other tools. Clinton says that when companies sell surveillance equipment to the Syrian or Iranian security agency – or to Libya in the past – “there can be no doubt that it will be used to restrict human rights.” She spoke at an international conference on Internet freedom in the Netherlands partly sponsored by Google. She did not identify any companies by name for alleged bad practices.

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Eric Schmidt: Google Is Buying One Company A Week

December 7, 2011

Huffington Post… Original post: Eric Schmidt: Google Is Buying One Company A Week Find our Weekly Commercial Real Estate, Private Equity and Fund Newsletters at www.WeeklyBrief.net

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Facebook Flaw Exposed CEO’s Private Photos

December 7, 2011

A security flaw on Facebook temporarily allowed users to access other members’ private photos — including images posted in Mark Zuckerberg’s friends-only collection. Several of the Facebook chief executive and founder’s pictures were then uploaded to public sites on the Web . According to ZDNet , Facebook users could access someone’s private photos by using the site’s image reporting tool. All someone had to do was: click on the report/block option select “inappropriate profile photo” choose the “nudity or pornography” option check “report to Facebook” click on the item marked “Help us take action by selecting additional photos to include with your report” At that point, portions of the user’s private photo collection were then revealed. A member of a forum on BodyBuilding.com discovered the bug and posted a message about it, complete with step-by-step instructions and screen grabs. After being notified of the problem, Facebook issued a statement that said it had disabled the reporting feature. “The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user’s most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos,” Facebook said in a statement. “This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.” The world’s largest social network did not disclose how long the bug had been live or how many users were affected, CNN reported . In his most recent post on The Facebook Blog , Zuckerberg discussed the company’s commitment to privacy and security. I founded Facebook on the idea that people want to share and connect with people in their lives, but to do this everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times. This idea has been the core of Facebook since day one. When I built the first version of Facebook, almost nobody I knew wanted a public page on the internet. That seemed scary. But as long as they could make their page private, they felt safe sharing with their friends online. Control was key. With Facebook, for the first time, people had the tools they needed to do this. That’s how Facebook became the world’s biggest community online. We made it easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things about their real lives. We’ve added many new tools since then: sharing photos, creating groups, commenting on and liking your friends’ posts and recently even listening to music or watching videos together. With each new tool, we’ve added new privacy controls to ensure that you continue to have complete control over who sees everything you share. Because of these tools and controls, most people share many more things today than they did a few years ago. Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information. Facebook has also urged users to privately report vulnerabilities in the site’s code/design. Those who do so can receive a $500 bounty and a public thank you from the company.

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Nathan Newman: Who Will Watch the Watchers? Google & Facebook Privacy Audits Should be Fully Public

December 6, 2011

Facebook this past month agreed to twenty years of independent audits of its privacy practices, joining Google which agreed earlier this year to similar audits following its breaches of user privacy when it introduced its aborted Buzz social network. As this piece outlines, the audits should be moderately extensive in examining how consumers’ personal information is being used internally at these companies — how it’s aggregated or repurposed — and when it’s being shared with third parties (such as advertisers). “Problems that come out in audits could be costly — $16,000 per violation per day, if the FTC decided to pursue the fines in court.” So far all to the good, but the problem is in the “if” the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decides to pursue the problems. Where will the public pressure be on the regulators to pursue problems? As we saw in the financial crisis, without pretty broad public scrutiny of the regulators themselves, you often don’t get the vigilant regulation needed to restrain corporate malfeasance. The Audits Won’t be Fully Public: And here’s the big problem with these privacy audits. When they were first being discussed, consumer groups like the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) asked that any audits be made public. The response from the Federal Trade Commission was not encouraging. They told the groups the audits would not be published but “the public may have access to the submissions required pursuant to the order” using tools like the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA). Having to jump through bureaucratic hoops to get the information is bad enough, but the real kicker is in the ” may” in that sentence, since the FTC writes: In some cases, these documents may contain trade secrets or other confidential commercial or financial information, or information about consumers or other third parties, that would be exempt from public disclosure. Accordingly, as provided by statute, companies may request confidential treatment for these documents or portions of these documents under Commission procedures. Upon receipt of such a request, the Commission conducts a review to determine whether confidential treatment is warranted. So the company may be using innovative strategies to violate consumer privacy and will demand that the FTC hide those methods from the public by deeming them “trade secrets.” The joke here is that these companies are systematically violating consumer privacy but are demanding secrecy for the regulatory review of those violations. I’m sure that companies would love to deem a lot of financial information required in Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filings to be “trade secrets” but thank god the SEC disclosure laws were written before companies had mastered the art of suppressing government information they don’t want public. Google’s Track Record of Evading Public Accountability: This suppression of information companies don’t want public, especially by tech companies like Google, has become all too common. A recent report by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press , Uncivil Secrecy , detailed the rising problem of Google in particular getting information arising from litigation in the courts suppressed: far from making its own legal documents “universally accessible,” Google routinely uses overly broad requests to seal court filings, according to critics, in apparent contravention of its commitment to the public interest in the free flow of information…Google’s use of sealing requests to suppress information contained in court documents it files is remarkable — both in the frequency with which the company makes such requests and the material underlying them. The report cites multiple examples of the company trying to suppress evidence of alleged illegal practices revealed during court proceedings. Courts too often agree to companies like Google seeking to seal such court record. Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen which has regularly litigated to open up such corporate information to the public, argues, “The effect is the removal of an important check on the accountability of courts and lack of understanding about why courts make the decisions they do.” Allowing the FTC to leave potentially large portions of any privacy audits of Google and Facebook secret will similarly remove accountability not just for those companies but for the regulatory agencies themselves, since the public will not know whether lack of action is due to the agency finding no real privacy problems or because the agencies are too cozy with the companies they are regulating. Ever Expanding Corporate Surveillance Requires Openness of Those Company’s Privacy Policies: The need for publicly available audits of companies’ privacy actions is becoming all the more important as those companies know almost everything about consumer activities. Just last week, Google announced it will soon start offering one-day shipping for merchants it works with on online commerce. Taking control of a large portion of e-commerce delivery will allow Google to harvest a massive new amount of data about consumers to feed Google’s datamining efforts and behavioral profiling of consumers. Google will be able to track consumers from initial search for an item to finding a merchant to deciding to purchase the item to where the item is delivered, how it is paid for and track an aggregation of all sales going through its system. Google will have data about the whole consumer cycle of consumerism — the holy grail of the advertisers from which the company makes its money. Whether consumers will ultimately benefit from such a move is an open question — especially if it just reinforces Google’s monopoly dominance in more sectors and undermines e-commerce innovation — but the only way the public will have any clue whether company profits are just coming at the expense of their privacy is if the privacy audits of the company’s actions are public available. If Google wants to have the role of trustee of more information about more people than any other company and even more information in many areas than government has, then it should accept in turn public scrutiny of its actions as well. Google and Facebook have both promoted the idea that society benefits from more openness and sharing. Sharing the full results of their privacy audits is a good way to practice what they preach about openness. More broadly, as the FTC and DOJ move forward on a range of privacy and antitrust investigations, we should expect far more public disclosure of their decision-making and what those investigations are revealing about consumer rights in the age of ever increasing corporate surveillance.

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Facebook Announces Big New Buy

December 5, 2011

Facebook has acquired location-based social service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum. Both companies announced the deal on December 5. “We’re excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams,” a Facebook rep said in a statement emailed to The Huffington Post. According to a post on the Gowalla Blog , at least part of the startup’s staff will relocate from Austin, Texas, to Palo Alto, California. Gowalla services will be shuttered in January 2012. Facebook won’t acquire any of Gowalla’s technology or user data, and the Gowalla Blog explains that the service will give its two million users a chance to extract their data before the service shuts its doors for good. CNN Money published an unconfirmed report on December 2 that Facebook would buy Gowalla. According to CNN’s sources , Gowalla talent will join Facebook’s Timeline development team, which is currently finalizing Facebook’s new profile design that debuted at the company’s recent f8 conference and is expected to begin rolling out to users soon. Since launching in 2009, Gowalla had faced steep competition from check-in service Foursquare and daily deals giant Groupon, as well as a host of other location-based check-in and rewards services. In September, Gowalla announced that it had redesigned its mobile app and planned to shift focus away from check-ins and toward user-generated reviews of local places. Those plans are now kaput. Facebook also found itself struggling to keep up in the local mobile space. The social network’s location-based deals feature, Places , which launched in August 2010, failed to take off. Almost exactly a year later, Facebook said it would shutter the project .

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Exec Facing Charges For Chaotic BlackBerry Sale

December 5, 2011

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Police say a senior executive of Canada’s Research In Motion is a suspect in last month’s stampede at a BlackBerry promotion in Indonesia. Police spokesman Col. Baharudin Djafar said Monday that several people fainted and dozens were injured at the global debut of the BlackBerry Bold 9790. The $540 phones – commonly known as Bellagios – were being sold at half price to the first 1,000 shoppers. Djafar said Canadian Andy Cobham, the outgoing country director for RIM, is among four suspects who could face charges of negligence leading to injury. The crime carries a maximum penalty of nine months in prison. Indonesia, a nation of 240 million people, has experienced a come-from-nowhere tech frenzy in recent years. With 6 million users, BlackBerry is more popular in Indonesia that smartphones from other makers.

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Apple, Verizon, Google, Microsoft, AT&T And Others Speak Out On Phone ‘Tracking’ Controversy

December 2, 2011

Mobile software company Carrier IQ has responded to the massive outcry following researcher Trevor Eckhart’s damning video that exposes a CIQ app embedded deep into the operating software on many smartphones. According to Eckhart, the software shown in the video logs text messages, dialed calls, URL searches and more — all without the user’s knowledge. While some believe that CIQ’s software may violate users’ rights to privacy, the company disagrees. In a statement emailed to The Huffington Post, CIQ asserts that its software, which is not easily removed by the average user, is merely a diagnostic tool used by its mobile operator customers to assess and improve the quality of a network’s services. “Carrier IQ acts as an agent for the Operators,” the company said in its statement. “We measure and summarize performance of the device to assist Operators in delivering better service,” the statement also read. “[O]ur software does not record, store or transmit the contents of SMS messages, email, photographs, audio or video.” CIQ said that its services are used to address problems with call quality and device battery life. In an interview with AllThingsD , Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart said that operators — not Carrier IQ — decide what data to collect from users. “They make that decision based on their privacy standards and their agreement with their users, and we implement it,” Lenhart said . The emailed statement from CIQ goes on to state that users’ data is transmitted only to the mobile operators who use the company’s services. “Carrier IQ does not sell personal subscriber information to 3rd parties,” the company said. CIQ admitted that, while it transmits data to mobile operators via encrypted channels, the ultimate security of that data rests in the hands of the operators. On Thursday, Senator Al Franken said that Carrier IQ’s software may prompt Congress to consider new legislation regarding the protection of consumers’ personal information. Franken, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, wrote the following in a letter to CIQ: “The revelation that the locations and other sensitive data of millions of Americans are being secretly recorded and possibly transmitted is deeply troubling.” As a result of the controversy, a number of mobile carriers and device manufacturers have come forward to clarify their relationship with CIQ. Take a look at our slideshow (below) to read statements from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, HTC, Nokia, RIM and others.

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AT&T Defends $39 Billion Deal

December 1, 2011

NEW YORK — AT&T Inc. blasted the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday for compiling what it called an unfair and biased report on what would happen if AT&T were allowed to buy T-Mobile USA. AT&T agreed in March to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion, but the deal has encountered opposition, first from the Justice Department and then from the FCC. Analysts now give it only a slim chance of going through. The FCC took the unusual step of releasing its analysis of the merger on Tuesday. It found “questions of fact” about AT&T’s stated justifications for the merger and dismissed most of AT&T’s arguments. It said competition in the industry would suffer if AT&T swallowed T-Mobile, and potentially lead to higher prices for consumers. AT&T immediately attacked the release of the report, saying it was a draft that had never been voted on by the five-member commission. The “questions of fact” would have been addressed at an administrative hearing that now won’t take place, since AT&T has withdrawn its merger application. The company is expected to resubmit the application. On Thursday, AT&T released a more thorough, combative response to the report. It’s an unusual one for a company that spends heavily on lobbying and cultivates close relationships with regulators. “The document is so obviously one-sided that any fair-minded person reading it is left with the clear impression that it is an advocacy piece, and not a considered analysis,” the Dallas-based company said. The FCC report said the merger would threaten fragile competition in the industry, yet AT&T pointed out that it also cites existing competition from Verizon Wireless as a strong motivator for AT&T to build out its new data network, even without the resources it would gain by buying T-Mobile USA. The FCC report disputed AT&T’s claims that the merger would create jobs rather than eliminate them, as is usual for mergers. AT&T says the expansion of wireless broadband will stimulate job creation, and points out that the FCC itself says its own $4.5 billion broadband fund would create half a million jobs over six years. That’s counting not just phone-company jobs, but jobs created by the availability of broadband. “This notion – that government spending on broadband deployment creates jobs and economic growth, but private investment does not – makes no sense,” AT&T said Thursday. The war of words is unlikely to affect the outcome of AT&T’s quest to buy T-Mobile USA, since the chief hurdle is a suit filed in August by the Justice Department to block the deal.

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What You Need To Know About Facebook’s Privacy Settlement

November 30, 2011

NEW YORK — On Facebook, people talk about births and deaths. They share party shots, ultrasound scans and deliver news about serious illnesses in a way that was unimaginable just a few years ago. Facebook doesn’t want that openness to end, which is why the company has been trying to put its privacy problems behind it. But a big settlement with the Federal Trade Commission is once again putting this thorny issue front and center for the world’s biggest online social network. On Tuesday, Facebook agreed to settle federal charges that it violated users’ privacy by getting people to share more information than they agreed to when they signed up to the site. As part of a settlement, Facebook will allow independent auditors to review its privacy practices for the next two years. It also agreed to get approval from users before changing how the company handles their data. Here are some common questions and answers about Facebook’s privacy practices and what they mean for users. _ Why is Facebook constantly pushing people to share things? Even before it became a big business making billions in advertising revenue, Facebook’s purpose has always been to let people “connect and share” – its motto – with their friends, families and acquaintances. Over the years, as it grew from an online network open only to college students to one with more than 800 million users, the company has pushed the envelope, encouraging people to share more photos, updates, links, and music. Some of the latest apps are let people automatically share news articles they read or music they are listening to. Facebook’s view is that people want to share more and that the company is giving people the platform to do so. Says CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post Tuesday: “We made it easy for people to feel comfortable sharing things about their real lives.” _ So this isn’t all about making money? Facebook, which is expected to go public next year in what could be one of the biggest IPOs in history, makes the bulk of its revenue from online advertising targeted to its users. The ads users see are based on things they share on the site. Research firm eMarketer estimates that Facebook will bring in $3.8 billion in worldwide ad revenue this year and $5.8 billion in 2012. As a privately held company focused on building up its technology, Facebook has not made profits its outright goal. Rather, the company has cultivated an “if we build it, they will come” ethos. The more time people spend on its site and the more information they share about themselves, the better companies can target their ads. The more users Facebook attracts, the more people will see the ads so the more it can charge advertisers. However, as a public company with profit-seeking shareholders to answer to, Facebook’s goals could change. _ How does Facebook use the information people share to make money? Facebook, like Google and other companies that rely on advertising, targets ads to people based on their interests. Businesses can pick who they want to show their ads to – by location, age, hobbies and other things they share on Facebook. For example, a bridal magazine can target a promotion to women who’ve gotten engaged in the past six months. A soft drink company can show its ads to people who say they “like” a rival soft drink. Advertisers can narrow their target audience further by limiting the same pitch to football fans who live on the West Coast. People are more likely to click on ads that are relevant to them, making Facebook a virtual treasure trove of targeted advertising. _ Facebook says it has already addressed a lot of the issues raised in the FTC settlement. Are there things it didn’t address? Privacy advocates praised the settlement but many say more needs to be done to protect people’s private information. The nonprofit Consumers Union said it “sends a strong message to companies that they must live up to the privacy promises made to consumers.” Chris Conley, technology and civil liberties fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Facebook should do more to address outside applications’ access to users’ information. “There are settings for sharing information with third-party apps, but they are counter-intuitive,” he said. For example, an app your friend installs could have access to your information even if you do not install the app yourself. Though it’s possible to opt out of sharing some of your information with your friends’ apps, many people don’t know to do this because they are not aware that the sharing is happening in the first place. There’s also the issue of online tracking. Facebook (along with Google and companies that advertise online) tracks people’s activity around the Web. Facebook, Conley notes, tracks your activity on the Web even if you are not logged on to Facebook at the time. If you visit a page that has a “like” button, Facebook knows you visited the page even if you do not click “Like.” For its part, Facebook says it does not use the information it collects to create profiles about people’s browsing habits and it does not sell the data to anyone. But Conley said the challenge is that while this may be what Facebook is doing with it today, there could be others – law enforcement agencies, divorce attorneys, data miners – who would be very interested in where someone has been on the Web.

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AT&T’s ‘Audacious’ Plan To Save T-Mobile Deal

November 29, 2011

AT&T has been secretly working on an audacious 11th-hour deal to salvage the transaction: AT&T is knee-deep in talks with Leap Wireless, a second-tier but growing wireless player, to sell it a big piece of T-Mobile’s customer accounts and some of its wireless spectrum, according to people involved in the negotiations.

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New Software Makes Phone Calls, Video Searchable

November 29, 2011

U.S. group Hewlett-Packard has rolled out its first software using technology gained from its $12 billion acquisition of British group Autonomy, eight weeks after the deal closed.

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Malls Stop Tracking Shoppers’ Cell Phones

November 28, 2011

Two malls are axing their plans to track shoppers’ cell phones, after a U.S. senator raised privacy concerns over the weekend.

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Rick Tumlinson: Mars Science Laboratory — Product vs. Process

November 26, 2011

Dear Mars Science Laboratory team, Thank you! In the middle of a completely absurd debate about how much U.S. taxpayer money should be put into the pockets of congressional donors in the name of not building government rockets that will not support the opening of space in any way, you are going exploring. How crazy is that? It’s hard to get my head around the idea that you are in the same space program as the people who are willing to kill our exploration and opening of space in the name of control, constituency and, of course, cash. Indeed, it has often seemed over the years that there are two government space programs. One, like you, is bold and experimental in its style and approach — and yet building on its legacy to push outwards the boundaries of the known and drive back the edges of the frontier in science, knowledge and technology. Each step forward is into unknown territory, often simply guided by best guesses. This sometimes leads to higher costs and yes, even delays, but in the end there is always forward and outward motion. This is what the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) represents. Experimental, explorational science. Learning about Mars as a new world. Discovering new things that will tell us about the history of our solar system, help reveal the secrets of life and continue blazing the trail that may someday be traveled by the rest of us. You are NASA as Lewis and Clark or James Cook, and you make me proud. And like our commercial sector, you give me and the millions of other Americans who are paying for this something for our money. You give us a product. New worlds explored, new knowledge, new technologies, and oh yes, you inspire us — clear payback for our national investment — usually by doing things that would not happen any other way. Yes, some of your technologies spin off into our economy along the way as a bonus. And that is fine with me. I want you to go do science, go do exploration. It isn’t always about making money or directly enabling the private sector with every step of every project; that’s why this is a partnership. Yet even in that area you guys are doing things right. For example, your MSL is flying to Mars on a commercial rocket. Having decided on your mission — i.e., what you wanted to accomplish at your destination — you hired a commercial launch provider to get you there. You didn’t have to design the rocket; you bought the ride. The product drove the process, not the other way around. This stands in stark contrast with how some others in our space program operate, where process not only drives but exists independent of any specified product or goal. In fact, process and its profits are the goal. Those others don’t seem to care what I get for my tax money; they just want to be in control of a process, and the goal be dammed. They are focused on process rather than product and systems rather than success. Unfortunately, without clear goals, the process becomes a performance, easily subverted by those having no interest in achieving anything but their own short-term gain. They aren’t doing this for science and exploration, but for show and exploitation. They are doing theater. They are mouthing scripts and performing intricate dances invoking exploration, but they are doing nothing but selling tickets to a show about putting on a show. You, on the other hand, are the real deal. You may not be as efficient as our private sector, but you are doing something real, taking real risks, and staying focused on the product, not the process or the production. MSL will fly to Mars. It may or may not succeed in its goals, but at least it has goals, and they are goals based on American values and ideals. Your agency is about to face a budget cut that is deeper than anything since it was created. I want you to be able to keep on exploring. When it comes to the fat-cutting that lies ahead, We are going to fight to make sure it is the process and the pork it creates that are removed, not the product. You will have to tighten your belts, to be sure, but know those who are wrapping themselves in your sailcloth are not your friends. They do not care if you ever voyage again. These others will fail in their attempts to subvert our space program to their ends; the question is how much they will waste that could be spent exploring before they do. We who fight to turn space into a new economic frontier need you. You and your friends who want to return to the Moon, and those who want to develop the tools to make sure we can go to both places and anywhere else and not just stay but prosper, are our trailblazers. You are the ones who can work on things we can’t yet afford to work on. You are the ones who can go out there and tell us what you find. You are the ones who keep the fire of imagination lit. You make the government side of the multibillion-dollar investment we call our space program worth it. And you need us. If we can develop low-cost commercial access to space you will be able to explore and do more science than has ever been done before. For every monster government rocket that doesn’t fly, we will fly dozens, and you will be able to buy those rides for pennies on the dollar. For every meddlesome minuet of control we don’t have to dance on the stage of process, our costs will drop, our efficiency will increase, your opportunities will rise and the return on our taxpayer investment in you will soar. In the meantime, we will build and drive the trucks and ships, we will follow the trails you blaze, and we will turn what you find in those places you explore into new places for Americans to create wealth and homes. This is a partnership, based on exploration and enterprise. Those who would gut your budgets to do what we can do better for you are not your friends. We are. Science and business are based on product. We deliver you to the destination, you deliver the data. Simple, elegant. A marriage to make the heavens ours. I and the millions of others who are giving you our money and trust offer you our support and look forward to what is coming next. We want to see the results of life tests and feel the power of human life as we look through the helmet camera of the first woman to peer over the edge of the Valles Marineris. We want you to light the imaginations of new generations, while we will give them the chance to build lives, careers and fortunes in this amazing field and eventually follow you to the edge of the known. As I have said before, you just keep on exploring, and leave the driving to us. I salute you, MSL team, and wish you Godspeed.

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