Sony's first netbook

After all the noise Sony made about avoiding the term "netbook" with the release of its Vaio P ultraportable, and the statements Senior Vice President Mike Abary made about the Eee PC before that, it was beginning to look like Sony was never going to release a device in the netbook/mini-note form factor. But that has changed.

Today, Sony officially launched its first netbook. The 10.1-inch Windows XP-based Vaio W runs on a 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280, has 1 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB SATA HDD. It's equipped with 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, a built-in Webcam, and offers 1366 x 768 screen resolution -- higher-than-usual for netbook screens.Unlike many other companies who are aligning with mobile broadband chipmakers and network operators to make their products truly mobile, Sony says the Vaio W is for use in the home as a secondary or maybe even tertiary computer.

To retain the traditional Vaio emphasis on multimedia, the W comes with Vaio Media Plus streaming multimedia software, which lets the netbook interact with DLNA-compatible household devices, such as a PC, PlayStation 3, or HDTV. But since it is a netbook after all, it is being touted less as a media portal, and more as a creature comfort.

The company paints the device as an Internet companion suitable only for the most superficial tasks. Sony's introduction of the Vaio W in Europe says, "While watching TV or reading a magazine, you've probably experienced the urge to look up something on the Internet that you've just seen or read but couldn't be bothered getting up to your desktop PC..." That's where the Vaio W is useful.

It's quite emblematic of Sony's attitude toward netbooks. The $999 Vaio P offers a smaller footprint, is equipped with GPS, mobile broadband, and the same Vaio Media Plus software mentioned earlier, but is absolutely not a netbook. The W, which Sony calls a "mini-note" in English language releases, and an "Internetbook" in Japanese language releases, is stripped of most of its mobility features and is being marketed as a mostly superfluous and unnecessary device. After all, Abary did say if netbooks caught on, "We're all in trouble. That's just a race to the bottom."

If you can be bothered to get up off the couch and buy one, the Vaio W will debut in August for $499, and can be pre-ordered at Sonystyle.com.

China accuses Google of breaking the law

The Chinese government has blocked access to Google across large swathes of the country and accused the internet giant of breaking Chinese law.

An initial nationwide ban saw screens go blank between 9pm and midnight on Wednesday.

However, Google was inaccessible in several cities and on some mobile phone networks yesterday evening, almost 24 hours after the ban expired.

China's Foreign ministry accused Google's English-language search engine of spreading vulgar content and made it plain that various "punishment measures" had been carried out by the government.

"I want to stress that Google China is a company operating within China to provide Internet search services and it should strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations," he said.

A spokesman for Google admitted that a range of Google services, including Gmail, its email site, had been cut off. "We hope that service will be fully restored soon".

Google has been repeatedly blocked in China for upsetting the government. The first block came as long ago as 2002. However the latest action is the biggest crisis the company has faced so far and could endanger its future business on the mainland.

Although the government accused Google of spreading pornography, several commentators speculated the block may be connected to competition with the local internet search engine, Baidu.

Google was roundly criticised by CCTV, the state broadcaster, which relies on Baidu for a large slice of advertising revenue. Although Baidu leads Google in the Chinese market, it has been suffering lately, particularly since its marketing department went on strike in May.

Jeremy Goldkorn, the founder of Danwei, a website that analyses Chinese media, said that the order to ban Google had probably been vaguely communicated to local internet companies, who continued to block the website after the ban had been lifted.

"Google's stated mission is to organise all the information in the world. The Chinese government has a similar idea. The two have always had an uneasy relationship," said Mr Goldkorn.

Facebook wants you to do it live

When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.

First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.

Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.

But, wait. There's more.

In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."

It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.

"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."

This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?

Block scripts in Firefox

The Internet is full of threats like cross-site scripting attacks and clickjacking. A lot of these attacks work by injecting scripts in web pages that you don't even know are there. You can give yourself a modicum more protection by running a Firefox plug-in calle

d NoScript.

NoScript blocks all scripts from running until you authorize them. Let me show you how it works.

Go to addons.mozilla.org and search for NoScript or get it from Download.com. Intsall it like you would any add-on. Once you have it installed, look in the bottom right corner at the little S with the cross-out symbol.

Clicking on it brings up a sub-menu that allows you to choose how to handle scripts on the page you're at. The safest way to go is not to allow any scripts. You'll never fall victim to code that doesn't run.

But some sites won't work without scripts so, the next safest thing is to Temporarily allow only the scripts you need and or trust. A lazier and slightly less safe method is to temporarily allow all on a page.

The next more convenient level, but also next less safe is to permanently allow scripts either individually or all for a page. This becomes necessary for things like your Bank's website or Google Docs where you don't want to constantly allow scripts every time you launch your browser. If you permanently allow scripts from a site, you're putting your trust in that site that it will never allow itself to be infected by a malicious script.

The worst thing you can do is globally allow all scripts. You might as well not run NoScript at that point. If you have allowed a script on a page and you change your mind about it, you can always choose forbid, to start blocking it again.

Running noScript means you're going to have to do a bit more thinking about pages you surf to. It was enlightening when I first started running NoScript which of my banks and utilities worked just fine without scripts and which became disabled. If nothing else, NoScript gives you more control over what risks you expose yourself to on the Net.

VMware releases its 'cloud OS'

VMware has released the latest version of its core virtualisation platform, vSphere 4, claiming it acts as a cloud operating system to the datacentre.

The product, the renamed successor to VMware Infrastructure 3, was made generally available on Wednesday, having been announced in April. The company says vSphere 4 will allow companies to centrally manage servers, storage and networks in the datacentre as though they were a single pool of computing resource.

Potentially, the new platform can reduce capital and operational costs by up to 30 percent in consolidation ratios, and 20 percent in power consumption, according to VMware.

"The bottom line is that this will enable customers to remove a lot of unnecessary overhead costs in the datacentre, where they might currently only be using 10 percent of server capacity," said Fredrik Sjostedt, VMware's EMEA director of product marketing. "vSphere 4 operates within the datacentre like a normal OS on a single server, but it provides access to the entire infrastructure, from storage to memory and switches."

The key improvements in the latest version of the platform are improved scalability for large-scale environments, more sophisticated management tools to control security and service levels, and an increased flexibility for customers choosing heterogeneous hardware, software and service-delivery models.

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One of the key new features of vSphere 4 is the additional functionality provided by the 'virtual distributed switch', says Sjostedt. Previously, virtualised servers each needed their own virtual switch, a complex and time-consuming process. With vSphere 4, it is possible to create a single virtual switch that can manage the entire infrastructure.

"What's interesting is that the physical networking team can now manage virtualised infrastructure for the first time, using the normal management tools. This makes the entire configuration process much easier, and reduces overall complexity," Sjostedt said.

VMware is building private rather than public clouds, but potentially organisations will be able to move virtual machines to third parties, according to Chris Ingle, a research analyst with IDC. "It's hard to measure who is ahead in the market, but VMware is showing some strong performance numbers with this release," Ingle said.

The most useful new feature in vSphere 4 for customers is likely to be the increased level of support for CPU, memory and storage, said Ingle. This may persuade enterprises that currently do not use virtualisation to make the leap, he said.

Virgin Media trials 200Mbps broadband

Broadband speed freaks take note: cable broadband purveyor Virgin Media has upped the ante by announcing a trial of 200Mbps broadband - four times faster than its current fastest fat pipe service.

The company said it will use the trial to assess the commercial viability of deploying a 200Mbps service in the UK - and to investigate the kind of applications consumers could use regularly in such a speedy future.

Around 100 'pilot customers' will eventually be involved in the trial, which started last week in Ashford, Kent and will run for at least six months. The ISP claims it is the fastest implementation of DOCSIS3 technology (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) in the world - faster even than cable services in Japan and the US which have 160Mbps and 101Mbps respectively.

Possible next-gen broadband apps could include HD and 3D TV entertainment services, remote delivery of IT support to home users, videoconferencing and home surveillance, according to the ISP.

At the end of last year Virgin launched its current fastest 50Mbps service - still the fastest consumer broadband service available in the UK. However BT has been making noise on the speed front - pledging to roll out fibre to 10 million homes by 2012, enabling speeds of up to 100Mbps and opening up the possibility that Virgin could be lose its headline-speed crown.

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told silicon.com that while he doesn't believe Virgin will be offering a commercial 200Mbps service anytime soon the company is nevertheless firing "a shot across the bows" of DSL providers to let them know it has more to offer.

"Virgin Media is clearly positioning around the speed of its broadband service and they're looking to make hay while the speeds of their rivals using DSL are limited by the copper telephone line," said Fogg.

"Virgin Media are shaking up the UK broadband market. They're looking to increase [consumer] dissatisfaction with speed."

But the analyst said the trial is not just about posturing: "There's a genuine piece of work to be done here," he said, adding: "It's all very well testing something in the lab but actually giving even a small number of consumers this service into their homes will deliver different information, different feedback."

One area where the trial could well shine a light in Fogg's view are on "bottlenecks" lurking elsewhere in the network.

"You get a point where the web servers, the general speed of the internet becomes the bottleneck - not the connection into someone's house. And I would expect that 200Mbps would reveal those bottlenecks elsewhere," he said.

"How fast a particular service is depends on all sorts of things - the speed of the web server to deliver the webpage, the speed of the connection of that web server onto the internet, the connection across the internet, the connection through that internet service provider's network and then there's the connection into the house… and of course there's the connection inside the house."

Fogg added that wi-fi routers can't currently support 200Mbps - so wireless home networks would also constrain users' speed dreams.

Is the Chip Canary Starting to Tweet Again?

Chip sales are up slightly for March, but it's too soon to pop the champagne corks.

Further evidence that a tech sector recovery, however weak, is beginning to take place came from the Semiconductor Industry Association, which reported that global chip sales rose 3.3 percent in March over February.

However, it's not party time just yet. Because January was such a disaster, and February not much better, the SIA reports Q1 2009 sales were $44 billion, down 30 percent from $62.8 billion in the first quarter of 2008, and down 15.7 percent from the fourth quarter 2008 sales of $52.2 billion.

The $14.7 billion in March, a modest uptick from the $14.2 billion in February, comes across all regions except Japan, which is being hit with a very hard economic downturn.

Chip sales are considered a leading indicator of the health of the tech sector, since everything is built on semiconductors. Every desktop, laptop, server or smartphone has a number of chips in it. If sales can continue to bounce back, that would be a leading indicator of recovery.

However, a number of market researchers, including SIA and iSuppli as well as Gartner, IDC and In-Stat have all said it would be years before the market recovers to 2007 levels.

The first hints of recovery came earlier this month when Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) chief executive Paul Otellini said during the company's conference call to discuss earnings that sales picked up during the quarter. By March, he said Intel was actually getting expedited orders, meaning customers were asking them to hurry with the delivery.

"The modest sequential rebound in worldwide sales in March suggests that demand has stabilized somewhat, albeit at substantially lower levels than last year," said SIA President George Scalise in a statement.

"There are some bright spots such as smartphones and netbook PCs, but there are no clear signs of early firming of demand in other major end markets such as automotive, corporate information technology, and consumer electronics," he added.
Scalise also said he expected global stimulus packages by various governments would begin to take effect beginning in 2010.

Intel Improves Power Management in Datacenters

New software gives a more accurate measure of power in use, and shifts it to where it is needed, so long as you buy a Nehalem server.

Intel has unveiled the Intel Data Center Manager, a software development kit for monitoring power consumption on datacenter servers and adjusting power consumption on an as-needed basis.

The caveat? The servers have to utilize Intel's Intelligent Power Node Manager embedded in Intel's newly launched Xeon 5500 "Nehalem" generation of server chips to fully use this software.

The software can monitor intelligent power supplies, but to get the full benefit of thermal and power management, the Intelligent Power Node Manager has to be present on the hardware and exposed.

The software, released Thursday, is designed to give a more accurate look into the power being consumed in a server's cabinet, which can hold a number of racks or blades. The problem, as Jon Khazam, vice president and general manager of the manageability and middleware division at Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) noted, is that people build to the wrong specs.Each cabinet has a few power supplies, as much for redundancy as for powering the racks. If a cabinet has, for example, three power supplies with a combined 6,000 kilowatts, then the cabinet won't be populated with anything beyond 6,000 kilowatts total power draw, and usually less. The maximum power is listed on the power supply's nameplate.

The problem is people build to the maximum spec. If a rack-mounted server says it has a 300 kilowatt draw, then the most racks going into that cabinet is 20. The problem is, Khazam noted, servers don't run at their maximum draw. They usually operate at some power level below that.

"There's been the general challenge of dealing with power and constraints of power," he told InternetNews.com. "They tend to design a datacenter at the maximum of the nameplate power spec, which ends up introducing a lot of overbuild into the datacenter, where there's a lot more capacity to handle servers than they end up deploying."

The Data Center Manager works in two areas; on the individual rack and on the datacenter at large. On an individual rack, it gives an accurate measure of the overall average power draw, not the maximum draw. It shows individual units and the total power draw in the entire cabinet. Administrators can then limit each rack's power draw. For example, a 300 watt max rack might be limited to 150 or 200 watts. This allows for more compute density to be added.

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When one rack in the cabinet is running at the upper limits of its power capacity, the software can then examine the other racks, find ones that are drawing much less power than they have allocated, and give the power to the racks that need it.

In one example, Intel worked with Chinese search engine provider Baidu and found it could increase cabinet density by 20 to 40 percent just by populating the cabinet according to average draw, not theoretical maximum. The research is detailed in a Intel white paper.

On a larger scale, power management can be aggregated not just among individual racks in a cabinet but across the whole datacenter. Data Center Manager's console lets admins set thermal and power policies for all systems, so if there are computers needing more power while others are idle, the idle ones give up their available juice for the ones that need it.

Smiling EV Debuts on Earth Day

The long-awaited, often-advertised Peapod will be available for order on Earth Day, April 22. Coincidentally, the 22nd also is Administrative Assistant's Day. We expect to see a lot of greenies and maybe some secretaries tooling around in their $12,500 Peapods at no more than 25 miles an hour.

While the Peapod prototype had clear driver and passenger doors that looked like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the production version (shown above) of the neighborhood electric vehicle resembles George Jetson's Deux Chevaux. Company director and brand guru Peter E. Arnell, whose initials inspired the company's name, told Treehugger.com the car's appearance was inspired by "Japanese bullet trains, storm troopers from the film Star Wars, space helmets and turtles." There's also a very prominent "smile" to the car's grill, but what else would you expect from a man whose firm devised Pepsi's new logo with the Cheshire grin and laughably pretentious backstory?

The feel-good vibe continues with a glance at the in-dash iPod (sold seperately). Edmunds says every trip concludes with a carbon-footprint analysis, while another app tells you exactly how much money you've saved by leaving the family truckster at home.

Arnell says the Peapod isn't a neighborhood electric vehicle, even if the National Highway Transportation Safety Board and his company's own website do. Arnell callls it a Mobi, a new category he's "branded" in much the same way automakers branded 4x4s "SUVS." Regardless of what you call it, the Peapod tops out as 25 mph as required by law for NEVs.

This pod has been cast from Peapod Mobility. Originally a division of GEM, a Chrysler subsidiary that's been churning out small electric vehicles for more than 10 years, the new Peapod Mobility is a wholly owned subsidiary of Chrysler. While GEM's e-series NEVs are popular in retirement communities, as utility vehicles on college campuses and as runabouts for Republican presidential candidates, the entire Peapod experience is aimed at high-tech urban commuters. Edmunds reports the all-electric four-seater will be sold direct to consumers from the Peapod website and marketed extensively to college students. Zune holdouts need not apply: The Peapod requires an iPod or iPhone to start the car, which doesn't make much sense to us.

The first 'pods will be delivered to buyers by October.

Photos: Peapod

Source

Conficker Attacks Pakistani Internet Users

The PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunications Company Limited), on April 3, 2009, alerted Internet users in the country about attacks from the dangerous Conficker worm, saying that the virus was striking most of the Pakistani online surfers just as it was hitting surfers in other countries.

Dr. Sadik Al-Jadir, Senior Executive Vice-President, (Commercial) PTCL, stated that the worm had slowed the speed of the Internet bandwidth, as reported by The Nation on April 4, 2009. Al-Jadir further said that the Conficker virus had targeted the popular operating systems worldwide, affecting a massive number of personal computers.

He also stated that most of the Internet and broadband users in Pakistan were encountering browsing problems because of the virus, and were reportedly dialing 1218 to contact Technical Support. The executive VP reported that there was a fourfold increase in the number of incoming calls to 1218 Broadband Technical Support since April 1, 2009.

Moreover, the security specialists stated that the malware prevents users from accessing websites, which offer the worm's removal programs.

Notably, the Conficker virus is a highly complicated and prevalent worm in the history of Internet. In recent days, security researchers remained largely troubled with this malware. However, IT security experts hope that the volume of PCs infected with the worm would decline soon.

This decline stems from the fact that two security investigators belonging to the global, non-profit research organization Honeypot Project have invented a technique with which administrators can easily detect infected computers on their wider networks. The technique would aid in eliminating the infection from the PCs as well as diminish the possibilities of the spread of infection across the entire network. Meanwhile, this method is already being used as part of the popular commercial and free network scanners.

Suggesting precautionary measures, the security specialists said that users needed to regularly update their computer systems with the most recent updates of Windows operating software as well as the latest antivirus as it would prevent the worm from penetrating into the systems. Also, users needed to turn off the Autorun facility to remain guarded from the virus, they added.

New technology translates human thought into robot action

An Asimo robot raises its left hand in response to the thoughts of a test subject. (Photo courtesy of Honda Research Institute Japan et al)

A research team gave the public a glimpse of the future Tuesday as it demonstrated technology allowing a person to move Honda's Asimo robot simply by thinking about it.

The technology, developed by the Honda Research Institute Japan (a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co.), the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) and Shimadzu Corp., allows a person to direct Asimo to raise its right and left arms, run, or "eat" by thinking of specific actions.

The system, a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), does not use electrodes in direct contact with the brain, but rather a helmet that reads brain activity. Specifically, the helmet processes patterns in brain waves and blood flow in the brain associated with each action and then transmits the appropriate commands to Asimo.

For example, if a person thinks about moving his or her tongue, then Asimo will raise its hand to its face as though eating. Among the three human test subjects to participate in the research, the system was successful in interpreting their thoughts and sending them on to Asimo about 90 percent of the time.

However, there is currently a 7-9 second delay between the human controller's thoughts and Asimo's reaction, and due to the wide differences in brain activity patterns between individuals, the system must be specifically calibrated to each user.

In the future, the research team hopes to apply the technology to hands and feet-free driving and household robots.

Intel details future graphics chip at GDC

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.

During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.

And Nvidia and AMD will no doubt be watching the progress intently. Intel's extensive and deep relationships with computer makers could give it an inside track with customers and upset the graphics duopoly now enjoyed by Nvidia and AMD. In the last decade Intel has not competed in the standalone, or "discrete" graphics chip market where Nvidia and AMD dominate. Rather, it has been a supplier of integrated graphics, a low-performance technology built into its chipsets that offers only a minimal gaming experience. (In the 1990s, Intel introduced the i740 GPU which, in relative terms, was not a success.)

Forsyth said that there is not yet a Larrabee chip to work with--it's expected late this year or early next year--and that "a lot of key developers are still being consulted on the design of Larrabee." But Intel will offer ways for developers to test the processor, he said. "On the Intel Web site there will be a C++ prototype library. It doesn't have the speed of Larrabee but has the same functionality. Developers can get a feel for the language, get a feel for the power of the machine."

Beyond games, Intel is also trying to catch a building wave of applications that run on the many-core architectures inherent to graphics chips. Nvidia and AMD graphics chips pack hundreds of processing cores that can be tapped for not only accelerating sophisticated games like Crysis but for doing scientific research and high-performance computing tasks.

One of the largest test sites for Larrabee is Dreamworks, which will use Larrabee for rendering and animation. To date, Dreamworks had to wait overnight to get a rendering project completed. "Using (the) Nehalem (processor), Dreamworks can almost do it in real time and it is only going to better with Larrabee," said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesperson.

Larrabee is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

"But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it's bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers," Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel's x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

ntel is touting the performance of Larrabee's vector unit.

(Credit: Intel)

"It's based on a lot of small, efficient in-order cores. And we put a whole bunch of them on one bit of silicon. We join them together with very high bandwidth communication so they can talk to each other very fast and they can talk to off-chip memory very fast and they can talk to other various units on the chip very fast." In-order processing cores are used, for example, in the original Pentium design and in Intel's Atom processor.

"It's the same programming model they know from multicore systems already but there's a lot more of them," he said.

The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," Forsyth said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set."

Forsyth described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."

At GDC, Intel is encouraging developers to experiment. "They're going to have questions about how do I find 16 things to do at once. But a lot of it is just getting in there and playing with the thing," according to Forsyth. The GDC sessions will be a tour around Larrabee's instructions--"how to actually use these new instructions," he said.

And what about markets beyond gaming? "A funny thing happened on the way to the architecture. We designed this architecture to be 100 percent graphics focused. Whatever we needed to do to get graphics good, we did. And then a year ago, we looked at what we had and said how much of this stuff is actually specific to graphics. It turns out, very little. Graphics workloads are increasingly similar to GPGPU (general-purpose graphics processor unit), increasingly similar to high-powered (high-performance) computing. So, we actually have very little that is specific to graphics. Most of the instruction set is very general-purpose."

Skype for iPhone: It's official

Months after teasing us at CES with an announcement of Skype's native VoIP client for the iPhone, the free Skype for iPhone will finally be available to download from the iTunes App Store sometime on Tuesday. We got a chance to sit down with the application's principal engineer before the announcement was made at CTIA 2009, to see Skype for iPhone do its thing. While most of the features aren't too surprising--Skype does want to maintain some consistency across its mobile applications, after all--there are a few capabilities that are notably missing, and a few iPhone-only perks that are refreshing to see.

At long last, Skype has come to the iPhone.

(Credit: Skype)

In terms of navigation, Skype's VoIP app for iPhone looks more like your traditional iPhone app than it does Skype 4.0 for Windows. For many who already prefer Apple's sleek interface archetype, that's a triumph, but those who enjoy Skype's branding may feel disappointed.

Skype's screens are well organized and use the iPhone's ability to add filters, for instance, to sort your contacts alphabetically, or by who's online. There's chatting as well, though Skype's flagship feature is its VoIP calling that's free to other Skype users and an inexpensive per-minute fee to landlines. Calls on Skype for iPhone work only if you're in range of a Wi-Fi network, so your call quality will in part be at the mercy and strength of wireless networks nearby--calls will not work over the cell phone network on the iPhone (but chatting will.) Assuming your connection is solid, you can dial a number or quickly call a contacts stored in your address book. iPod Touch users will need earphones with an embedded mic to talk. During a call, you can mute the line, go on hold, or put the call on speakerphone. In the My Info window, you can follow a link to buy more SkypeOut credit online.

Taking a photo from within Skype to serve as your avatar image, or pulling a picture in from the camera roll are two iPhone-only features that makes use of the phone's hardware attributes. Another imperfect, but still neat, feature is the ability to accept incoming conference calls. While you won't be able to initiate a call, we're told, you will be able to jump on one if a buddy invites you in. We hope the next version includes placing conference calls from the iPhone.

Skype left a few more skills out of its maiden iPhone voyage. SMS, setting up a conference calling group, purchasing SkypeOut credit directly, and being able to field a second incoming Skype call are a few. File transferring and getting Skype voicemail native on the phone are two more. We expect to see at least two of these added in the next version, but we'll hope for more.

Skype versus the competition
Here's the big question on our minds: will Skype's iPhone app replace competitors like Nimbuzz and Fring, which focus on cross-network IM but also include VoIP calls with Skype pals even though they've been available for the iPhone for months? Kurt Thywissen, the principal engineer for Skype for iPhone, thinks so. He says what the other apps use is a workaround that requires them to channel calls through a server and transcode audio, resulting in poorer-quality calls than Skype can do in its own app. He may be right, but those who IM more than they vocalize probably won't ditch the likes of Fring too soon. They might, however, let Skype handle the calls and let another app take care of the multinetwork chatting.

Inside Skype for iPhone--photos

Amazon, Microsoft reject 'Open Cloud Manifesto'

The cloud-computing field may be in its infancy, but there is a fight breaking out at the preschool.

A group of Web services providers, reportedly including IBM, is set to unveil a "manifesto" next week that lays out a number of principles for open cloud computing. Two of the biggest names in the field, though, say they aren't signing on.

Microsoft posted blog message to that effect on Wednesday night, while Amazon.com on Friday said it, too, is not among the companies signing the document.

"Like other ideas on standards and practices, we'll review this one," Amazon said in a statement. "Ideas on openness and standards have been talked about for years in Web services. And we do believe standards will continue to evolve in the cloud-computing space. But what we've heard from customers thus far, customers who are really committed to using the cloud, is that the best way to illustrate openness and customer flexibility is by what you actually provide and deliver for them."

Amazon noted that over the past three years, it has made its Web services available on different operating systems and programming languages.

Microsoft, for its part, said there were some things it agreed with in the manifesto, but others that were either too vague or did not reflect its interests. The company also objected to the fact that it was shown the document just last weekend, not allowed to make changes, and given just 48 hours to decide whether to sign.

"We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the (Open) Cloud Manifesto," Microsoft's Steven Martin wrote in the blog post. "What we heard was that there was no desire to discuss, much less implement, enhancements to the document, despite the fact that we have learned through direct experience. Very recently, we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input."

Martin wrote that "it appears to us that one company, or just a few companies, would prefer to control the evolution of cloud computing, as opposed to reaching a consensus across key stakeholders (including cloud users) through an 'open' process."

Although the document has yet to be released, one of its proponents, Enomaly's Reuven Cohen, has said it will be will be released on Monday. In a blog post, Cohen suggests that there will be at least a dozen signatories of the document, including "several of the largest technology companies."

"The manifesto does not speak to application code or licensing but instead to the fundamental principles that the Internet was founded upon--an open platform available to all," Cohen said. "It is a call to action for the worldwide cloud community to get involved and embrace the principles of the open cloud."

Cohen also posted a follow-up blog thanking Microsoft for the attention generated by the rejection of the manifesto.

"In one move, Microsoft has provided more visibility to our cloud interoperability effort than all our previous efforts combined," Cohen wrote.

As for the manifesto itself, we'll have to wait until Monday to see it, but Cohen's blog and this site give some idea where they are headed.

YouTube Blocked in China, Google Says

Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China.

Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Xinhua did not identify the video, but based on the description it appears to match a video available on YouTube that was recently released by the Tibetan government in exile.

It purports to show police officers storming a monastery after riots in Lhasa last March, kicking and beating protesters. It includes other instances of brutality and graphic images of a protester’s wounds. According to the video, the protester later died.

“We don’t know the reason for the block,” a Google spokesman, Scott Rubin, said. “Our government relations people are trying to resolve it.”

Mr. Rubin said that the company first noticed traffic from China had decreased sharply late Monday. By early Tuesday, he said, it had dropped to nearly zero.

China routinely filters Internet content and blocks material that is critical of its policies. It also frequently blocks individual videos on YouTube. YouTube was not blocked Tuesday or Wednesday in Hong Kong, the largely autonomous region of China. Beijing has not interfered with Internet sites there.

“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.

Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable.

The video about the beatings was pieced together from different places, Xinhua said on Tuesday, citing an unidentified official with the Tibetan regional government in China.

There has been no independent assessment of whether the video is authentic. In a statement sent via e-mail, Lobsang Nyandak, a representative of the Tibetan government in exile, said that the video was authentic.

The government did not directly address whether YouTube had been blocked. When asked about the matter at a news conference, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said: “Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.”

Even as China steps up its censorship efforts, the country’s Internet participation is booming. Often, critics often find a way to avoid censors and debate controversial topics.

Ai Weiwei, a prominent Chinese artist, has been using his blog on Sina.com to criticize the government’s management of the rescue and relief efforts after the devastating earthquake in May in Sichuan Province.

In recent months, Beijing has announced major crackdowns on pornographic Web sites, even citing Google and other large companies for listing the sites on their search engines. Many critics say they believe that Beijing is using the word “pornography” as a rationale to eliminate Web sites that it deems troublesome.

YouTube has been blocked for varying periods of time in several countries, including Pakistan, Thailand and Turkey. These countries often state directly why they have acted.

David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai.

PTCL doubles its broadband speed at no extra cost

Islamabad—“As out gift to the nation on this Pakistan Day, PTCL has doubled your Broadband speed, at no extra cost” this was announced by Dr Sadik Al-Jadir, SEVP Commercial.

He further stated that “PTCL aspired to provide the fastest and most cost effective broadband access to all users in Pakistan. Being the largest IP Serviced provider, we have a vision to provide broadband access in all cities throughout the country.” PTCL broadband has made Kbps speeds obsolete by upgrading all packages to Mbps. The minimum package speed offered by PTCL is now 1 Mbps.

An existing user paying Rs 1199/- per month for a DSL 512K connection will now be upgraded to 1Mbps connection at no extra charge. The same goes for existing 1Mbps and 2Mbps connects, these will be upgraded to 2Mbps and 4Mbps connections at existing rates. This will make PTCL the fastest and the largest Broadband Service in Pakistan.

PTCL is the leading and the largest broadband service provider in Pakistan offering broadband in more than 130 major cities and towns i.e. Karachi, Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Hala, Sukkur, Jacobabad, Khairpur, Larkana, Multan, Bhaipheru, Okara, Pakpattan, Sahiwal, Faisalabad, Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Abbottabad, Attock, Gujar Khan, Jehlum, Peshawar, Quetta etc.

Terrafugia's flying car makes maiden voyage

It may look like a Volkswagen Beetle in the belly of a carp, but the Terrafugia Transition (at right) is a bona fide flying car.

(Credit: Terrafugia)

This story has been updated. See below for details.

The start-up Terrafugia first popped up on our radar screens in early 2006 with a one-fifth scale model, $30,000 in prize money, and an urge to build a car that could fly. Or is that an airplane you can take on the highway?

Some signs point strongly to the latter. Terrafugia describes its Transition vehicle as a "roadable aircraft" and is pitching it in part as giving private pilots an easy travel alternative when bad weather makes flying a bad idea, or simply to avoid having to take a separate car to the airport. Also, in the eyes of the Federal Aviation Administration, the vehicle falls into the light sport aircraft category.

On March 5, Terrafugia got to show that--whatever the eventual business prospects--the Transition can indeed fly. The maiden voyage (the duration wasn't specified) took place at the Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, with a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel in the pilot's seat. The flight followed six months of static, road, and taxi testing.

As a car, the two-seat Transition is designed to be easy on garages and oncoming traffic--its wings fold up quite snugly. In folded mode, the approximately 19-foot-long vehicle is 80 inches wide, and 6 feet, 9 inches high. As an airplane, it stands a few inches shorter and has a wingspan of 27 feet, 6 inches.

The vehicle runs off unleaded fuel from your run-of-the-mill gas station for both terrestrial and aerial travel, cruising at highway speeds on land and better than 115 miles per hour in the air.

But Woburn, Mass.-based Terrafugia (Latin for "escape from land") still has a long road ahead of it. The vehicle that flew earlier this month is still just a proof of concept, and a production prototype has yet to be built, tested, and certified. The company says it expects to make the first customer delivery of a Transition in 2011.

Photos: Terrafugia's flying car flies

Update March 20, 9:41 a.m. PDT: Terrafugia CEO/CTO Carl Dietrich rolled out the Transition for an appearance on the CBS Early Show. He said that the price tag for the carbon fiber-built vehicle is $194,000, and that the (refundable) deposit is $10,000.

In the video below, you can get a look at the controls inside the cockpit--er, at the driver's seat?--and watch the wings unfold.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Apple leaks 17-inch iMac for $899?

(Credit: Apple)

It's kind of funny when an Italian-language site breaks a wee bit of English-language-based Apple news, but that's what happened when SetteB.IT spotted a small mention of an $899 17-inch iMac for the education market on Apple's own Web site.

Currently, Apple is offering iMacs only in 20- and 24-inch screen sizes. The 20-inch model starts at $1,199, while the 24-incher starts at $1,499.

No word on when the "new" 17-incher will arrive (or if it's really new), but we'll await official confirmation from Apple.

Anybody interested? In this economy, I think the sub-$1,000 market is a good spot for Apple to play in--especially when it comes to cash-strapped parents of students.

The holy grail at security conference

VANCOUVER, B.C.--That innocent-looking mobile phone you use to call your mother and check e-mail represents the next frontier for malicious hackers, though it eluded researchers who stood to earn $10,000 for exploiting a smartphone at the CanSecWest security conference this week.

TippingPoint Technologies, which sponsors a Pwn2Own hacking contest each year at the event, was offering the prize money for each successful exploit of an iPhone, BlackBerry, and phones running Google's Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian operating systems.

Researcher Dino Dai Zovi, on the left, discovered a vulnerability in QuickTime and won the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest two years ago remotely by having a friend act on his behalf. At this year's show, he served as a proxy for a researcher in Italy who was participating in the contest remotely, trying to exploit a Symbian-based smartphone. The exploit attempt failed, and no one won the $10,000 smartphone exploit prize. Next to him is TippingPoint security researcher Aaron Portnoy.

(Credit: Elinor Mills/CNET News)

On Friday, a researcher in Italy wanted to participate in the contest remotely and was told he had to find someone at the show to serve as his proxy and physically use the mobile device to surf to the site where the malicious code is located. He found a proxy, but the exploit attempted on a Nokia phone running Symbian failed. Another researcher had tried to exploit the Symbian and BlackBerry systems on Thursday but failed.

Much of the first day of the three-day event on Wednesday was devoted to mobile security. Dragos Ruiu, who first organized CanSecWest 10 years ago, said he wanted to focus on mobile this year because of the ubiquity of the devices and the increasing risk they pose to information security.

"I carry two phones at any one time," he said, pointing to one in his pants pocket and another in his jacket pocket. "And now, they are more capable computers."

Ruiu wasn't sure why the mobile devices hadn't been hacked, while a similar browser-hacking contest had seen the major browsers exploited on the first day of the conference. "Maybe they are too bleeding-edge; maybe they are just difficult to develop exploits for," he said of the mobile platforms. "It's good news."

In an informal survey, attendees said they suspected that researchers were just being lazy in not turning their attention to mobile attacks at the show.

"Mobile-phone research is an emerging field," said Aaron Portnoy, a security researcher at TippingPoint. "Not many people have the prerequisite knowledge to exploit them, nor do they have an exploit prepared."

Things will undoubtedly be different by next year's CanSecWest, he said, adding that already, there are mobile exploits in the wild.

"There's a lot we don't know yet about them," said Charlie Miller, who exploited the Safari browser in about 10 seconds on Wednesday, winning $5,000 and the MacBook Pro used to perform the feat. (The other major browsers were exploited shortly thereafter.)

"They are all different platforms, different hardware," he said, adding that "there's a learning curve associated with it."

In his presentation on security in Google's Android mobile platform, University of Michigan graduate student Jon Oberheide said the code in mobile software is newer than that found on the desktop and less robust against attacks. Attackers aren't really targeting it yet because mobile phones aren't seen as being much use for sending spam and launching denial-of-service attacks, however, they are good for attacks targeted at individuals, he said.

Oberheide said smartphones are at risk of a man-in-the-middle type of attack in which a malicious attacker could interfere with data communications between the device and a trusted Web server. For instance, an attacker could send a spoof message saying an update for a Facebook app is available and instead send malicious code, he said.

In a presentation titled "The Smart-Phones Nightmare," researcher Sergio Alvarez pointed out all the different attack vectors for mobile devices, including e-mail, attachments, Web pages, SMS, MMS, Facebook, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Craigslist bests MySpace as top search term

People apparently turn to Craigslist in a down economy.

(Credit: Hitwise)

Craigslist overtook MySpace as the most searched-for term on the Web last week, according to traffic-tracking firm Hitwise.

"U.S. searches on the term 'Craigslist' have increased 105 percent for the week ending March 14, 2009, compared with the same week last year," Hitwise reported. MySpace has been the top term since March 11, 2006.

This was the first time in three years that searches for Craigslist topped MySpace, Hitwise said.

The research group suggested more consumers are logging on at Craigslist, the Web's largest classifieds publication, as the ailing economy prods them to look for bargains.

Craigslist spokeswoman Susan MacTavish Best said the privately held company, headquartered in San Francisco, has seen a sharp uptick in business.

Over the past year, bartering on the site is up 100 percent while roommate ads have jumped 65 percent, she said. Classified ads for garage sales have doubled and For Sale postings are up 75 percent.

Google designer leaves, blaming

Douglas Bowman, Google's visual design leader, is leaving the company after finding the company's reliance on detailed Web page performance data too confining.

Bowman clearly had mixed feelings about departing, but he wasn't shy with his opinion about what he didn't like. From Bowman's blog post Friday on the matter:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data...that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions...

Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions...

I'll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

Bowman also gripes that Google's designers came from a background of computer science and human-computer interaction rather than classical design, and that none of them rank high in the pecking order.

Google's vice president of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, is pretty high-ranking and cares a lot about design. But it's not hard to see how her philosophy might rankle. Here's one thing she said about design in a 2008 speech: "On the Web in general, (creating sites) is much more a design than an art...You can find small differences and mathematically learn which is right."

I can't speak for Bowman's experience, though I can see how a classical designer might feel stifled by code monkeys. There are plenty of considerations that go into design in general, and pragmatism can be at odds sometimes with passion, boldness, and innovation. And Bowman earlier was a designer at Wired, which is definitely at the bold end of the spectrum.

Overall, however, I find Google's approach to design refreshing and radical in its own way. Choosing color shades and pixel widths on the basis of the behavior of millions of Web page users is a fascinating development to the form-follows-function school of design.

StarWind Software Becomes IBM Business Partner

StarWind to Offer Open iSCSI SAN on IBM Servers Making Leading Storage Virtualization Solution Available to IBM Server Customers and VARs

BURLINGTON, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 03/18/09 -- StarWind Software, the global leader in storage virtualization and iSCSI SAN software, today announced it has joined IBM's PartnerWorld technology alliance program. By becoming an IBM partner, StarWind is further enhancing its relationship with IBM and is taking the step to integrate its signature StarWind iSCSI SAN software with IBM servers such as IBM x3655 and IBM BladeCenter to provide its channel partners with more choices and flexibility for their customers' SAN and virtualization deployments.

As part of the PartnerWorld program, StarWind and IBM commit to working together on joint marketing, collaborative selling, software integration and performance optimization. The relationship will deliver enhanced disaster recovery and business continuity for IBM customers. StarWind will enable IBM customers to cluster their IBM System X servers running Windows Server 2008 for high availability and disaster recovery allowing StarWind iSCSI SAN to function as shared storage for server clusters, offering enterprise-class features such as CDP & Snapshots and Mirroring & Replication.

"We are pleased to join the PartnerWorld network to market our joint solutions to customers. IBM customers can now run StarWind iSCSI SAN on high-performance IBM System X servers for disaster recovery and virtualization projects," said Zorian Rotenberg, President and CEO, StarWind Software. "Our partnership with IBM not only broadens our reach but also provides IBM customers with one of the most advanced, reliable and affordable iSCSI SAN solutions available today."

StarWind iSCSI SAN Server 4.0 is a cost-effective, open iSCSI SAN software solution that can be installed on a high-performance server such as IBM x3655 running Windows Server 2008, converting it into a reliable, powerful, and full-featured SAN. Designed to work with leading virtualization solutions such as VMware ESX, StarWind iSCSI SAN supports IBM System X and IBM BladeCenter servers listed within VMware ESX Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). The combination of IBM x3655s with its 1.8 TB hot-swap, high-performance, serial-attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives or 4.5 TB hot-swap SATA drives with StarWind iSCSI SAN is an ideal choice for high I/O and transactional applications such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Oracle. StarWind also supports IBM's AIX iSCSI Initiator.

IBM's PartnerWorld is a marketing and enablement ecosystem designed to create new revenue and market opportunities for IBM's Business Partners and provide customers with e-business solutions including products, services, technologies and financing. The partnership provides StarWind with access to IBM's customers and partners and assures IBM customers that StarWind iSCSI SAN has passed rigorous testing with IBM System X servers.

IBM customers can download StarWind iSCSI SAN 4.0 trial at the company website www.StarWindSoftware.com which takes less than 20 minutes to download and install.

About StarWind Software Inc.

StarWind Software is a leading global provider of reliable, powerful and affordable iSCSI SAN and storage virtualization solutions. StarWind Server is an iSCSI SAN software that converts any Windows Server into a powerful SAN and is designed for use with solutions such as VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 and Microsoft Windows Server clusters for databases applications such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint Server. StarWind is an affordable IP SAN solution and combines an ease of use with enterprise-class features such as Mirroring and Replication, CDP and Snapshots, Thin Provisioning and Virtual Tape Library (VTL). Since 2003, StarWind has pioneered the iSCSI SAN industry and has been the solution of choice for thousands of global customers in over 50 countries, from small and mid-size businesses, to governments, and to Fortune 1000 clients.

StarWind Software and the StarWind logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of StarWind Software Inc. or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Fujitsu Announces First Color E-Paper Terminal FLEPia

Color e-books are indeed coming. Fujitsu Frontech and Fujitsu Laboratories Limtiedhas announced the first color e-paper mobile terminal called the FLEPia. It is available for purchase now in Japan. It has an 8 inch high definition display capable of showing up to 260,000 colors. It comes with Bluetooth and WiFi radios and supposedly will run up to 40 hours of continuous use.

According to the press release it does not require power to display a screen image only drawing down the battery for screen refreshes. Yes there is a touch screen and it also includes a stylus. Storage for e-books looks to be on an SD card.

The device currently reads two e-book formats: XMDF and .book. The FLEPia also runs Windows CE for web browsing, email, and according to the users can use Microsoft Office to generate and view documents.

Check out the press release after the jump.

Tokyo and Kawasaki, Japan, March 18, 2009 – Fujitsu Frontech Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced the start of consumer sales in Japan of the world’s first color e-paper mobile terminal, FLEPia, available for purchase from today through Fujitsu Frontech’s online store “FrontechDirect”. Developed by Fujitsu Frontech and Fujitsu Laboratories, FLEPia is the first ever mobile information terminal to feature color electronic paper (color e-paper). In addition to being lightweight and thin, the color e-paper mobile terminal features an easy-to-view 8-inch display screen capable of showing up to 260,000 colors in high-definition, in addition to being equipped with Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN. FLEPia is also power-efficient, enabling up to 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged, and does not require power for continuous display of a screen image, consuming power only during re-draw. Featuring significant storage capabilities, when used with a 4GB SD card, the color e-paper terminal can store the equivalent of 5,000 conventional paper-based books when each book is 300 pages long at 600KB per book, thus being environmentally friendly. In Japan, FLEPia can now be easily ordered from Fujitsu Frontech’s online store. As an additional option, through Fujitsu Frontech’s dedicated website, FLEPia users can purchase e-books from the largest e-book online retailer in Japan and download the e-books directly into FLEPia. As the only color e-paper mobile terminal commercially available, FLEPia offers a convenient, paper-free and eco-conscious enriched innovative mobile reading experience to users.

Social networks 'are new e-mail'

Facebook is the dominant platform for status updates

Status updates on sites such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are a new form of communication, the South by SouthWest Festival has heard.

"We are all in the process of creating e-mail 2.0," David Sacks, founder of business social network Yammer said.

Tens of millions of people are using social networks to stay in touch.

The growth in such services is being heralded as the start of the real-time, pervasive web.

'New communication'

Mr Sacks said: "What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it's all people want to do."

Yammer is an enterprise social network, designed to facilitate communication within companies and organisations.

It is one of a growing number of services that lets users share micro-updates. Other services have a richer mix of content, including sharing photos and video, and allowing comments from people within your social network, building a so-called activity stream.

"I think it's a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it," said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

FriendFeed lets users share content from other services, such as Twitter and Flickr, and comment directly on the postings in real-time.

Simplicity and ubiquity

With more than 175 million users Facebook is the dominant platform for status updates.

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: "It's been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate.

"You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn't know if your friends even wanted to see it.

"Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it."

The simplicity and ubiquity of some of these services is beginning to see activity feeds and status updates replace many of the uses to which e-mail was once put.

Mr Sacks said: "It's no coincidence that these products are all looking like e-mail.

"These products are all standardising around a message form at the top, and the inbox which is a feed then folders around the side."

'Open system'

The problem with the current crop of status update services is that they are to varying degrees interoperable.

For example, while Twitter can be used to power a status update on Facebook the same is not true in reverse.

"We want to see a more open system where everything links together, the same as it does with e-mail," he said.

While e-mail has common protocols which allow people to send and receive messages even if they are with different services, such as Hotmail or GMail, the same is not completely true with status updates and activity feeds.

There are some standard protocols but the rapid development in the complexity and breadth of activity feeds, to include comments and ratings, has led to a series of walled gardens.

Dare Obasanjo, a program manager at Microsoft, said the firm was working on a set of standards.

"You need to give sites permission to get your data," he said.

'Hard to compete'

The complex nuances of relationships on social networks, with users having different degrees of openness with different friends or followers, further complicates the introduction of standards.

Facebook has also been accused of being unwilling to open up its system and work with other status update firms, and there is a belief among some that the social network is enacting a "land grab" in an effort to become the de-facto platform.

Mr Sacks said: "On the consumer side Facebook could become the one site for all social messaging. That becomes very hard to compete with."

But Mr Buccheit said he believed the different firms were moving towards a more federated system.

"There will be no separation between Facebook and Friendfeed and Twitter."

Mr Steinberg said: "We are totally happy to interoperate with other sites."

He told BBC News that interoperability wasn't necessary for activity streams to become a global messaging service.

"It's definitely something and a pretty cool thing we would like to enable. Conceptually it makes a lot of sense.

"It's in our interests to let people share. Twitter has had a lot of success in letting people taking their data and sharing it externally.

"We'd love to be able to let people tap into that."

Microsoft Opens Blinds on Windows Mobile App Store

Microsoft has offered more detailed information about how it will manage its upcoming mobile application store. Developers' fee structures were detailed, as were revenue-sharing models -- a 70/30 split, just like Apple's mobile app structure. It also promised a great deal of transparency about what types of applications would be allowed to distribute through the store.

Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) on Wednesday revealed more details about how its upcoming Windows Marketplace for Mobile app store will work and its strategy for luring more developers to the Windows Mobile platform.

The software giant will give developers a 70 percent cut of all sales generated by their applications on the new app store -- the same percentage that Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) gives to app developers for the popular iPhone.

Microsoft will also "provide transparency throughout the certification process of each app submitted" as well as "guidance and support from the stage of development to the final sale to the consumer," the company said.

Developers will set the prices for their applications and can also choose to distribute their applications at no cost. In other words, the new Windows Mobile app store isn't the only place where developers can sell their wares.

Microsoft will charge a US$99 annual registration fee to developers who want to submit their applications for sale on the new app store. The first five application submissions to Windows Marketplace for Mobile are included in the introductory fee. Each additional submission within the annual period will cost $99.

Microsoft's stock was up 1.82 percent to $16.78 per share in mid-day trading on Wednesday.

YouTube vs. Royalties, Spy vs. Spy, Dell vs. a Firehose

YouTube, UK royalties agency get into it ... U.S. Cybersecurity czar takes a hike ... Dell rolls out rugged laptop ... Google tries out expanding advertisements ... sheriff sues Craigslist over prostitution ... Google's Schmidt denies interest in Twitter purchase, and more.

MTV pretty much gave up on music years ago in order to concentrate on how many different variations of "The Real World" and "Road Rules" it could squeeze out. But YouTube has largely picked up MTV's slack -- type in just about any video you want to see, and Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) sharing site will play it for you.

Or perhaps not, if you're living in the UK. YouTube is in a legal standoff with PRS for Music, a UK outfit that collects royalties for musical artists.

YouTube says PRS wants it to pay too much money each time users click on a music video of one of their artists. It also alleges that the arrangement PRS has proposed wouldn't even specify which songs would be included in each license it wants to sell. The deadlock's been going on for months, and YouTube has finally crimped the hose -- no more music videos for UK viewers.

They'll have to resort to music videos the old-fashioned way, which involves holding your breath and spinning in circles while listening to a tune. Works every time, and it's usually just as good.

Google ad exec tapped to head AOL

Time Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes announced this evening that AOL's current chairman and CEO Randy Falco will be replaced by Tim Armstrong, President of Google's American Operations and board member of the Advertising Council, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and The Advertising Research Foundation.

Bewkes called Armstrong an advertising pioneer, who has "a stellar reputation and proven track record." Armstrong will also be of crucial importance in Time Warner's decisions about the future of the AOL brand.

The timing of this appointment could prove critical in several aspects of AOL's business. The advancement of AOL Classifieds, which is a classified advertisement service, for one, stands to benefit from Armstrong's expertise in the advertising field. AOL Classifieds is stepping up to Craigslist and the weakening eBay by selling classified ad listings based upon their visibility. The pool of listings comes from some 80,000 sources from Oodle, including MySpace Classifieds, Washington Post Express, and Petfinder.com.

Even further into Armstrong's realm of expertise is AOL's Platform-A advertising network, which is actually more successful than both Yahoo and Google in terms of US online audience reach.

Bewkes announced that CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant will be leaving the company after Armstrong transitions into the leadership position. "Under Randy and Ron, AOL's programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories," Bewkes said. "They also assembled Platform-A, the number one display ad network in the US with a reach of more than 90%. They also aggressively cut costs as they restructured the Audience business portion of the company into three distinct operating units: People Networks, MediaGlow, and Platform-A. As Randy and Ron move on, they leave AOL with our gratitude and appreciation for remaking the company and bringing it to a new and promising level."

This is all part of a continuing evolution at AOL, which has successfully transitioned the company from the number one ISP of the dialup era into the #4 Web property owner in the US, whose sites attract some 57% of all US Internet users.