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Monday, November 8, 2010

Amazon to buy Diapers.com owner Quidsi for $500M (AP) : Technet

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Amazon to buy Diapers.com owner Quidsi for $500M (AP) : Technet

Amazon to buy Diapers.com owner Quidsi for $500M (AP)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:10 PM PST

By BARBARA ORTUTAY, AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay, Ap Technology Writer – Mon Nov 8, 6:10 pm ET

NEW YORK – Expanding its online retail empire, Amazon.com Inc. said Monday that it is buying Quidsi, the owner of Diapers.com and Soap.com, for $500 million in cash.

Amazon said that privately held Quidsi will continue to operate independently after the acquisition, which is expected to close in December.

Amazon plans to assume about $45 million in debt and other obligations as part of the deal, which has been approved by Quidsi's shareholders.

Soap.com sells health, beauty and cleaning products online, while Diapers.com sells baby-care items, including food and maternity wear. And Quidsi recently launched BeautyBar.com, which sells higher-end skin care, makeup and other products online.

The deal "positions Amazon to dominate the baby category," said Cowen and Co. analyst Jim Friedland in a note to investors. Quidsi, he added, is expected to generate $300 million of revenue in 2010, up 67 percent from last year.

Amazon, more closely associated with items like books and DVDs, already has an online baby store where it offers diapers and other childcare products.

But the acquisition of Quidsi "will help Amazon become a category killer in the baby segment," Friedland wrote. "In our view — and this is coming from a dad with a 9-week-old — Diapers.com has been beating Amazon at its own game in the nonapparel baby category."

Diapers.com usually has better selection, better stock levels and lower prices, he said. The acquisition thus eliminates a key rival, and "prevents online and offline rivals from buying the asset to compete more aggressively in the baby category," Friedland said.

Amazon, based in Seattle, bought popular online shoe retailer Zappos.com, for $850 million last year. Zappos also operates independently as a unit of Amazon.

Like Zappos, Quidsi is known for "high levels of customer service," and the company has invested heavily in its supply-chain logistics, including proprietary software, said Shawn Milne, an analyst with Janney Capital Markets, in a note to clients.

"If you can't beat them, buy them," he said.

At the end of the last quarter, Amazon had $1.54 billion in cash and equivalents and $4.35 billion of marketable securities.

Shares of Amazon rose $1.22 to close at $171.99.

Ellison: Oracle has $4 billion case against SAP (AP)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 05:24 PM PST

By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Jordan Robertson, Ap Technology Writer – Mon Nov 8, 8:24 pm ET

OAKLAND, Calif. – Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison turned up the pressure in an industrial espionage trial Monday by testifying that archenemy SAP AG should have paid $4 billion for licenses to Oracle software.

SAP and Oracle, two of the world's biggest business-software makers, are fighting over how much SAP should pay to atone for the shady tactics of a now-shuttered software support subsidiary called TomorrowNow.

SAP has already admitted to bad behavior. It acknowledged that TomorrowNow stole customer support documents from Oracle password-protected websites and used them to steal business from Oracle by offering similar services at a cheaper price.

Oracle has said that it is owed billions for the value of the intellectual property that was taken from it. Ellison's $4 billion estimate concerned the amount of money SAP would have paid for the appropriate licenses to Oracle's software, under certain conditions.

SAP claims TomorrowNow wasn't that effective at stealing customers, and it should only have to pay $40 million for Oracle accounts it did manage to lure away.

The trial, in its second week in federal court, offers a rare look at the corners big companies might be tempted to cut in the battle for new business.

It is also as much a public relations bonanza for Oracle as it is an attempt to recover damages, since Oracle gets to pillory two rivals at once: SAP and Hewlett-Packard Co.

The conflict with SAP has grown as Oracle has moved beyond its core business of selling database software and into SAP's stronghold of applications that help companies manage payroll, human resources and other tasks.

The beef with HP stems from Oracle's decision to start selling computer servers, an HP mainstay. Also, Ellison has taken HP to task for hiring Leo Apotheker, SAP's former CEO, as HP's new CEO. Apotheker is replacing Ellison's friend and tennis buddy Mark Hurd, who was ousted as HP's CEO over expense-report lapses. Ellison has since hired Hurd to serve as an Oracle co-president.

Apotheker may not wind up testifying live about his role in the TomorrowNow espionage.

Oracle has tried to force him to appear in court but says HP has refused the subpoena. Apotheker has proven so elusive that Oracle has hired investigators to try and track him down and serve him with the subpoena if he appears within 100 miles of the federal courthouse in Oakland, which includes HP's headquarters in Palo Alto.

If Apotheker stays out of range, Oracle can't force him to testify.

HP accuses Oracle of harassing its new executive and says Oracle had ample time to question Apotheker during an earlier sworn deposition. If Apotheker doesn't appear, Oracle could play the videotaped testimony.

Ellison's testimony injected some celebrity drama into the trial. Although he is known for trash-talking against rivals, his courtroom appearance was devoid of theatrics, and he didn't give any public comments afterward.

Ellison testified that he was deeply worried that his company would bleed customers because of what seemed like SAP's masterstroke of an acquisition of TomorrowNow in 2005. Ellison called the TomorrowNow deal a "brilliant idea" that posed a "grave risk" to Oracle because of its ability to let SAP steal business, even without the theft of Oracle's documents.

The extent of those fears, and how they squared with the amount of business SAP actually poached, consumed most of his hourlong testimony.

Lawyers from Oracle and SAP questioned Ellison on his initial fears that Oracle could lose as much as 30 percent of the customer contracts it got as part of its $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005.

That deal sparked SAP's interest in TomorrowNow, since TomorrowNow supported PeopleSoft software.

SAP insists that it owes far less than Oracle is demanding because TomorrowNow stole far fewer customers than Oracle thought it would. SAP's lawyers have repeatedly cited SAP's claim that TomorrowNow stole only 358 Oracle customers, out of the thousands that came to Oracle through the acquisition.

Upcoming color E Ink display is ‘milestone,’ but still can’t do video (Ben Patterson)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 09:14 AM PST

By Ben Patterson ben Patterson – Mon Nov 8, 12:14 pm ET

A Chinese company is primed to launch a color e-reader early next year—and unlike the recent Nook Color from Barnes & Noble, the new device will have an actual E Ink display (similar to those on the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader) rather than going the LCD way (like the iPad).

But the upcoming Hanvon e-reader, slated to be unveiled Tuesday at a Tokyo trade show (according to the New York Times), will also come saddled with several of the inherent drawbacks of current E Ink technology—particularly a glacial refresh rate that renders smooth, full-motion video next to impossible.

Hanvon's 9.68-inch, touch-enabled e-reader is poised to go on sale next March in China for about $440—almost the same price as the 16GB iPad—according to the Times.

The slate uses a color display developed by E Ink, which manufacturers the black-and-white e-paper display on such current e-readers as the Kindle, the Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble's original, monochrome Nook.

The secret, the Times reports, is a color filter that sits atop the usual black-and-white E Ink display.

The Hanvon reader will also support Wi-Fi and 3G, says the Times, and it'll be primarily aimed at business users.

Of course, it's not like we haven't already seen color e-readers here in the U.S. There's the iPad, of course, not to mention Barnes & Noble's new Android-based Nook Color.

But the iPad and Nook Color tablets use traditional LCD displays, which can be hard to read outdoors and are battery hogs compared with E Ink readers like the Kindle, which  keep going and going ... and going, for days and even weeks at a time.

The Hanvon color E Ink slate will also have extra-long battery life, the Times reports, and it will be nearly as easy to read outdoors as current black-and-white E-Ink devices.

Just don't expect to watch episodes of "Mad Men" on the Hanvon. As with the Kindle, the Sony Reader and the first Nook, the E Ink display on the Hanvon reader can't refresh nearly as fast as an LCD screen can, resulting in "simple animations" at bestâ€"and no video, of course, says the Times.

Even the color images themselves on the Hanvon are "muted" like a "faded color photograph," and the color filter "does reduce the brightness" on the E Ink display, the story continues.

So while a commercially available color E Ink reader probably is a "milestone" in the e-reader market, as one analyst told the Times, it'll still represent a trade-off—one that some players in the e-reader field, like Amazon, still appear unwilling to make.

Back in July, when Amazon unveiled its revamped Kindle, I asked Amazon reps when a color and/or touchscreen Kindle might be on the way—and the answer I got was that for the "vast majority" of readers, a sharp black-and-white screen is "a feature, not a bug." The Amazon spokesperson also argued that an extra layer of touch-sensitive glass would cut down on the contrast of the screen, which would be too high a price to pay given that Kindle users spend most of their time simply tapping the "next page" button over and over.

So for now, it appears we're still years away from the holy grail of display technology: a screen that looks great outside, works for days and weeks on a single charge, and is fast enough to display razor-sharp video, just like LCD.

At least the Hanvon e-reader sounds like a step in the right direction, albeit a small one.

— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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New cable service lets you ‘look back’ to recent shows (with ads) (Ben Patterson)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 08:23 AM PST

By Ben Patterson ben Patterson – Mon Nov 8, 11:23 am ET

It's no secret that network and pay-TV executives are looking for ways to keep you from skipping commercials on your DVR. One oft-proposed solution is an "in-the-cloud" DVR that would let you tee up any recent show, whether you'd set it to record or not—but you wouldn't be able to fast-forward through the ads. Enter Time Warner Cable and its new Look Back service.

Launching Monday for most of its 13 million subscribers, Time Warner Cable's Look Back is an "enhanced TV" service that lets you watch shows up to three days after they've aired, Reuters reports.

Look Back launches on 24 channels including ABC, NBC, Discovery and the Food Network, Reuters says, and more channels will be added as Time Warner Cable ups its server capacity in the months ahead. Apparently the cable giant has already secured the rights for another 40-odd channels in addition to the first two dozen.

With Look Back, subscribers who discover they've forgotten to record, say, last night's episode of NBC's "Outlaw" can simply call up the episode using the enhanced TV menu (just click "select" on your remote when you're tuned into your local NBC affiliate) and clicking the Look Back option.

From there, you'll get a list of available Look Back'ed shows. On Monday morning, Look Back for WNBC New York was offering four: "School Price," "Outlaw," "Dateline NBC" and "Law & Order: SVU."

Click the show you want to watch, and it'll start playing after a brief pause. Unlike a typical on-demand show, the Look Back episode of "Outlaw" that I watched (well, the first few minutes, anyway) looked like it had been recorded on a DVR -- starting abruptly in the middle of a mattress ad immediately preceding the show and complete with NBC promos, local news teasers and all the usual TV commercials.

Basically, the appeal here is convenience: With Look Back, you don't have to program your DVR in advance to watch a show that had aired the previous night, or any time up to three days prior. (Ideally, of course, Time Warner would roll out more channels and a better selection of shows.)

And there's the catch. For the convenience of not having to program your DVR in advance, the trade-off is that you can't fast-forward through the commercials. (That's also true of another Time Warner Cable "enhanced TV" feature, called Start Over, which lets you jump back to the beginning of some TV shows after they've started.)

I went ahead and tried to fast-forward through the ads with the Look Back version of "Outlaw." When you press the fast-forward button on the remote, a little circle-slash symbol appears in the info bar where the fast-forward arrows normally pop up. Rewind still works -- but if you rewind through a batch of commercials, you'll have to watch them all over again.

Reuters makes the point that Time Warner's Look Back service is similar to Cablevision's plans for a "networked" DVR—a DVR in the sky that will record your shows without having a physical DVR in your den. But Cablevision's virtual DVR will still let you fast-forward through commercials.

That's not very "advertiser-friendly," as one network TV exec recently put it. TV execs envision a future when viewers can "watch shows any way they want to," all on-demand -- but with commercial breaks intact.

Time Warner's Look Back would appear to be a baby step in that direction.

What do you think? Would you deal with commercials if it meant being able to watch a previously aired show that you hadn't recorded on your DVR?

— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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RockMelt Offers a Browser for Social Networking (NewsFactor)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 06:42 PM PST

Barry Levine, newsfactor.com Barry Levine, newsfactor.com – 2 hrs 19 mins ago

There have been smartphones, an iPad magazine, and digital cameras designed specifically for social networking. Now a start-up has released a browser optimized for that popular activity.

During the weekend, Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt announced the limited beta availability of the new browser. It's built on Chromium, the open-source project that underpins Google's Chrome browser. The company said the new browser "enables you to interact and share with friends on Facebook, Twitter and other sites instantly from anywhere on the web."

'Does More' Than Navigating Pages

The company was founded two years ago by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, and is backed by Marc Andreessen, who, as the developer behind Netscape, knows something about browsers. Howes, the chief technology officer, is a former Netscape executive.

Other backers include Bill Campbell, an Apple Board member and former CEO of Intuit; Ron Conway, a key investor in Google, Facebook and Twitter; and VMware cofounder and former CEO Diane Green.

Friends are directly available through the browser, so chatting, sharing a video, or keeping up with news updates are relatively quick. Sharing is also built directly into the browser, providing a one-click ability to update a status, tweet or share content. The company said this avoids having to copy and paste web addresses or deal with various sharing widgets on different sites.

Icons for social-networking sites and services appear on one side of the browser, and feeds from those sites and services are displayed in a layer over the main browser. Friends' icons appear on the other side, and sharing can be accomplished by dragging and dropping.

Push Notifications

The company also said RockMelt is the "first browser with push notifications." This allows it to track favorite sites, providing alerts if new information is posted, such as when a new item, picture or video is posted by a friend. Open application programming interfaces will allow integration with services and add-ons provided by Facebook, Google, Twitter and others.

There is also a new approach to search, which, the company said, enables a user to reach "the right search result radically faster." With the same results and suggestions as a regular Google search, RockMelt lets users flip through the pages rather than just click back and forth through URLs.

The business model for the new browser is based on advertising related to web searches. Additionally, interaction with the social-networking sites will be through the RockMelt-run cloud, which will allow the company to acquire a user base since users must register and log in. Capturing a large market share is going to be very challenging, but the company's technology could make it a prime acquisition target.

RockMelt is not the first browser designed specifically for social networking. That distinction falls to Flock. Released three years ago, it has never achieved a large following, arguably because it was released before the social-networking craze really got going.

Remains of the Day: Passive? Aggressive. (Macworld)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 04:30 PM PST

Dan Moren Dan Moren – Mon Nov 8, 7:30 pm ET

Passive-aggressive. It's not always an either/or scenario: take Steve Jobs dishing truth on the fate of the Xserve and compare to an Adobe executive complaining about Apple's attitude towards Flash. Then there's T-Mobile trying to, what, horn in on iPhone sales? Nobody knows, least of all the remainders for Monday, November 8, 2010.

Xserve: Pour ainsi dire, personne ne les achetait (MacGeneration)

Yes, that's French, and though Steve Jobs hasn't begun writing his personal correspondance in the language of love, the latest alleged e-mail from the Apple CEO has surfaced at French site MacGeneration. In it, Jobs says that the reason behind the death of the Xserve was simple: "Hardly anyone was buying them." Granted, that hasn't stopped Microsoft from selling the Zune.

Next-gen iPhone displays may support touch with gloves on (Patently Apple)

The tea leaf readers at Patently Apple contend that the company's next iPhone will feature multitouch displays that work even when you're wearing gloves. Which is great news for those who live in cold climates, those who wear gloves at work, and Dr. No.

Adobe CTO on MacBook Air, HTML5: Flash battery problems a "false argument" (Fast Company)

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has taken issue with the argument that Flash kills battery life, saying that any technology that is used to display items on the screen will have the same effect, and blaming Apple for "choosing to incite…and condone" a negative campaign against Flash. I mean, Adobe would never do something like that.

GarageBand: E chords and low E notes not detected by Learn To Play with acoustic guitar (Apple)

Apparently, GarageBand '11's Learn To Play feature can't detect certain low notes on an acoustic guitar. The solution? "For best results, try using an electric guitar." Somewhere, Jack Johnson is crying.

Why is T-Mobile selling an iPhone cable? (Engadget)

Interestingly enough, it's actually a scratch-and-sniff cable. And it smells like desperation.

Mobile Network Controls, Pricing Still Taking Shape (PC World)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 06:40 PM PST

Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson – 2 hrs 21 mins ago

A top U.S. carrier and a major mobile infrastructure vendor acknowledged on Monday that charging for mobile data services is still a moving target.

While carriers think of mobile data on their networks in terms of bits, subscribers think of it as useful or entertaining content. Finding the right way to charge for those services is hard, executives from Verizon Wireless and Nokia Siemens Networks said during a panel discussion at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco. It involves both ensuring the network can handle the traffic and making sure consumers think they're getting good value, they said.

"The simplicity of 5GB or 10GB, or whatever, may not be so simple to the users," said Hossein Moiin, CTO of Nokia Siemens. "The value of the content and the quantity of data that is consumed are entirely independent of each other today."

The real problem is network congestion, Moiin said. He suggested carriers might charge more for data consumption during busy hours and less when the network is lightly loaded.

The tiered mobile data plans that Verizon, AT&T and others have recently introduced have sparked a heated debate over customer "bill shock" and the best way to allow new third-party services to flourish. The issues partly overlap with the debate over net neutrality, with Verizon and Google proposing to the FCC in August that mobile networks be exempt from net neutrality rules. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is still seeking input on the issue.

The CTO of Verizon Wireless said his company hasn't found all the answers to those questions.

"The pricing structure is changing, has changed and obviously will continue to evolve," said Verizon Wireless CTO Tony Melone. But one thing that's needed is a way to make sure consumers understand how their usage is going to affect their bills. "You can't solve it on the back of consumers," he said.

To satisfy both consumers and the industry, there need to be both elegant and intuitive ways to deal with constraints on the network, Melone said. One example is switching the subscriber's connection to a Wi-Fi hotspot where it's available, without the user having to make a decision, and making the network adapt to changing coverage conditions by sending a smaller or larger version of a file, he said.

A content provider, MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman, told the panel that application and service developers already think about network capacity when building their products. MLB.com delivers online video and other media about Major League Baseball to about 10 million visitors a day, 37 percent of whom use the service on mobile devices, Bowman said. He expects mobile usage to surpass access on PCs next year.

MLB.com pays attention to file size, bit rates and other factors when building its mobile content offerings, Bowman said. For example, a high-definition video stream to a big-screen TV requires far more network capacity than a sharp-looking stream to a phone's display.

"(If) the user hits 'hi-def' on his or her iPhone, it's not truly hi-def, it just looks like it is," Bowman said.

Developers are tailoring their applications for efficient use of networks because they don't want to run up customers' mobile bills, Bowman said. "At a certain point in time, customers will want a good experience, but also an economic experience," he said. "We don't want customers thinking about, 'Can I use this app now?' That's a loser for all of us."

Asked about "best-effort" video delivery versus enhanced performance, Verizon's Melone said LTE networks have tools for "shaping" the user experience in ways that benefit carriers as well as subscribers and content providers. Those mechanisms are far more fine-grained than the ones available in the 3G era. But regulatory issues come into play as well, he said. "It is a dynamic situation and I'm not prepared to be explicit in terms of exactly what we're thinking along that front," Melone said.

Facebook grabs bigger slice of display ad pie (Reuters)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:57 PM PST

By Alexei Oreskovic Alexei Oreskovic – Mon Nov 8, 6:57 pm ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook, the world's No. 1 Internet social network, is proving as popular among advertisers as it is among Web surfers.

Nearly one of every four graphical, online display ads viewed in the United States in the third quarter was on Facebook's website, according to a new report by Web analytics firm comScore.

Facebook's 23.1 percent share of display ad impressions was up sharply from 17.7 percent in the second quarter and more than double the No. 2 ranked company, Yahoo Inc, which had 11 percent share.

In fact, Facebook's website racked-up more ad impressions in the third quarter than the next four companies combined, which includes Yahoo, Microsoft Corp, News Corp's Fox Interactive Media and Google Inc, according to comScore.

Analysts note that Facebook ads sell at a significant discount to display ads sold on traditional Web portals such as Yahoo. According to Evercore Partners analyst Ken Sena's estimates, the effective CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for Facebook's U.S. display ads is roughly $1, compared with the $3 CPM for display ads on Yahoo's family of websites in the United States.

But Sena notes that Facebook's ad rates are on the rise, as marketers make increasing use of the ability to target ads to Facebook users based on their interests and other information.

"It certainly is an issue for the portal sites," he said.

"While you still have the sort of traditional display players benefiting from strong growth trends in display (advertising), social is probably taking a disproportionate share of that growth."

The U.S. online display ad market is expected to grow roughly 13 percent to $8.56 billion in 2010, according to eMarketer, a digital market research firm. Yahoo is expected to remain the No. 1 seller of display ads by revenue this year, with 15.4 percent share of the market, according to eMarketer, with Facebook in second place with a 9.5 percent share.

Privately held Facebook, which counts more than 500 million users, does not disclose its financial results. Two people familiar with the matter told Reuters in June that the company generated up to $800 million in revenue in 2009.

Facebook delivered 297 billion impressions of display ads in the United States in the third quarter, according to comScore. The comScore data includes various types of graphical Web ads, but does not include video ads.

ComScore's Andrew Lipsman said that Facebook's increasing share of the display ad market probably resulted from the company's fast-growing audience size, an increase in the number of ads per page that Facebook delivers and an increase in the amount of time that users spend on its website.

According to comScore, users spent an average of five hours per month on Facebook during the third quarter, compared with three hours per month in the third quarter of 2009.

"The more people in your social network that are online, the more value it creates to you as a user, the more you are likely to engage and contribute," said comScore's Lipsman.

(Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Andre Grenon)

New music releases for the week of November 8 (Digital Trends)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 06:09 PM PST

Kelly Montgomery Kelly Montgomery – 2 hrs 52 mins ago

Here's the lowdown on what new music is coming out this week. Stay tuned tomorrow to see our picks of the week, otherwise known as the DT3.

Hip Hop/Rap

Kid Cudi – Man On The Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager

3D – Fast Lane

Bronze Nazareth – School for the Blindman

Lil Keke – 713 The Album


Pop/Rock

30 Seconds To Mars – This is War

Susan Boyle – The Gift

Cee Lo Green – The Lady Killer

Dave Matthews – Live In New York City

Poison – Nothing But A Good Time Box

Solange – Sol-Angel & The Hadley St. Dreams

Amy Speace – Into The New


Alternative/Indie

The Tallest Man On Earth – Sometimes The Blues Is Just A Passing Bird

Bad Books – Bad Books

Luke Gibson – Another Perfect Day

Hellogoodbye – Would It Kill You?


Country

Reba McEntire – All The Women I Am

Charlie Louvin – The Battles Rage On

Dev Builds Bot to Buy Stuff Junk Online (Mashable)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:35 PM PST

Jolie O'Dell Jolie O'dell – Mon Nov 8, 6:35 pm ET

Like many awesome ideas, this one began with an xkcd strip.

One developer has just created a bot that searches for specific kinds of inexpensive items in online auctions then buys the items for him.

The concept comes from this strip from xkcd, a webcomic popular among the physics/computer science/general nerdist set. (If you haven't added xkcd to your must-read-daily RSS feed, please do so now.)

Paul Hunkin, a New Zealand developer, has a penchant for combining scripts and online P2P auction sites to great effect. This particular project involved Kiwi site TradeMe, an eBay-like auction site.

Hunkin wrote a Python script that would scrape the certain categories on the site for cheap, buy-now items with free shipping. The script is optimized to search for rare, esoteric items, as well. The bot gets $1 added to its savings every day, and all purchases are deducted from the savings.

Not only does the bot buy these treasures on Hunkin's behalf; it also shares its finds with the world via Twitter:

If the bot doesn't find any items that meet its parameters, it simply tweets that it's putting its dollar into savings.

In other scripts-that-do-things-we'd-rather-not news, another developer recently wrote a Twitter bot that debates climate change critics.

What interesting automations of mundane tasks have you seen around the web lately?

Image courtesy of xckcd.

Why the first generation of iPad competitors will die on the vine (Appolicious)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 09:40 AM PST

SAP grills Oracle as Apotheker absent from trial (Reuters)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 05:26 PM PST

By Dan Levine and Gabriel Madway Dan Levine And Gabriel Madway – Mon Nov 8, 8:26 pm ET

OAKLAND, California (Reuters) – Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) CEO Larry Ellison testified that SAP's (SAPG.DE) theft of its software cost his company $4 billion, doubling his previous estimate but failing to cite written evidence of it.

SAP lawyers immediately challenged Ellison to back up the new figure, but Silicon Valley's richest man said he could not point to documentation proving his claim of the cost of lost business. Germany's SAP asserts that it owes Oracle merely tens of millions of dollars.

Oracle's star witness was unusually subdued in court on Monday, a departure from his sometimes heated public rhetoric.

He also failed to produce testimony of his public assertion that Hewlett-Packard Co's (HPQ.N) new CEO, Leo Apotheker, knew of the theft when he headed SAP and did nothing about it until Oracle sued.

A source told Reuters that Oracle had hired private detectives to locate Apotheker so he could be subpoenaed to appear in the trial.

The normally outspoken Ellison left the courtroom on Monday without speaking to reporters.

Oracle's lead trial attorney, David Boies, said outside court it was important for the jury to hear Apotheker in person, and thus it was "appropriate" to try to locate the HP CEO. Boies declined to discuss specifics of Oracle's search.

"The more detail we go into publicly, the less chance we have to find him," he said.

Ellison's highly anticipated testimony on Monday fell short of his brash, accusatory statements against Apotheker and SAP in recent weeks, in both tone and substance.

But JMP Securities analyst Pat Walravens said Ellison succeeded in his most important task in court.

"What they accomplished was to get that $4 billion figure out there to the jury from a credible source," he said. "Ellison was the best chance to do that."

A FEISTIER CATZ

Walravens said it is too soon to say whether Oracle is winning, as SAP has not yet begun to present its side. Oracle is expected to rest its case this week.

"Mr. Ellison's testimony was anti-climactic given his statements these past weeks," SAP spokesperson Saswato Das said in an emailed statement.

The two software companies, which together dominate the global market for software that helps businesses run more efficiently, are slugging it out in court to determine the amount of damages for the software theft.

SAP has accepted liability for its TomorrowNow subsidiary having wrongfully downloaded thousands of Oracle files, but argues it owes tens of millions -- not billions -- of dollars in compensation.

Dressed in a black mock-turtleneck and suit and using glasses at times to read documents, Ellison said top Oracle executives had feared SAP's purchase of third-party software maintenance firm TomorrowNow would allow the German company to woo customers away.

SAP attorney Greg Lanier asked Ellison if he could produce a "scribble on a napkin" of proof that he really believed, in 2005, that TomorrowNow posed a grave risk to Oracle.

"I've had that discussion with people, but I tend not to write those things down," Ellison replied simply.

Oracle president Safra Catz -- who often shuns the public spotlight -- testified after Ellison, and took on a feistier tone. Had SAP sought a license from Oracle for the software TomorrowNow downloaded, Catz said, SAP would have had to pay up front.

"We didn't pay for PeopleSoft on layaway," she said.

So far, Oracle has been unable to subpoena the man whose testimony would likely be the mostly closely watched in the five-week trial: Apotheker.

Oracle has hired private investigators to track him down, believing testimony by the former SAP chief will support its case, according to a source familiar with the situation.

HP has declined to say whether Apotheker is working out of the company's Palo Alto, California, headquarters or one of its other offices scattered across the globe. Apotheker's attorneys at the Gibson Dunn & Crutcher law firm have also declined to accept an Oracle subpoena, the source said.

For now, Ellison is the star witness in the trial.

Ellison began his testimony by saying Oracle would come close to going out of business if his company's software was not protected by copyright laws. Oracle spends several billions of dollars a year on product development.

"We'd have a hard time paying 100,000 employees," he told the jury of eight men and women.

Oracle could have charged SAP $4 billion to license the programs that were wrongfully downloaded, he said.

Ellison has claimed that TomorrowNow could have taken 20 percent to 30 percent of the customers for its PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards brands of business management software.

But he could not cite any documentation from 2005 to back that up.

SAP has admitted TomorrowNow wrongly downloaded files from Oracle's customer service website but says SAP executives did not know of any wrongdoing when they bought the company in 2005. SAP shut TomorrowNow, which provided software maintenance services such as upgrades and bug fixes, after Oracle filed its lawsuit.

In 2005, SAP launched a marketing program dubbed "Safe Passage" through which it tried to persuade Oracle customers to switch to SAP software. It offered discounted maintenance on existing Oracle products through TomorrowNow, and then encouraged customers to gradually replace that software with SAP programs.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Oracle USA, Inc., et al. v. SAP AG, et al, 07-1658.

(Writing by Jim Finkle; Editing by Richard Chang, Gary Hill)

Arm Faces Uphill Battle in Server Market (PC World)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 03:10 PM PST

Agam Shah Agam Shah – Mon Nov 8, 6:10 pm ET

Arm has entered the server market with Marvell Semiconductor announcing a chip based on its processor architecture, but customer acceptance and design issues could affect its chances of winning market share from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, analysts said.

Marvell on Monday announced a quad-core server chip, Armada XP, which is based on an Arm design. The chip puts Arm in direct competition with Intel and AMD, which currently offer chips based on x86 architecture for servers.

Arm licenses processor designs to chip makers like Marvell, Texas Instruments, Samsung and Qualcomm. Arm processors go into most of the world's smartphones and are making their way into tablets and servers. Arm has talked about entering the server market since 2008, and Marvell is one of the first to announce a server chip based on Arm designs.

Arm's low-power processors could provide better performance-per-watt than Intel or AMD chips, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

Arm-based servers could make a mark in the low-end server space, where applications don't require heavy computation, Brookwood said. For example, the servers could be well-suited for fast-moving Web transactions. Many Web servers rely on the Linux OS, which Arm processors support, he said.

"Intel is trying to get into Arm's territory with smartphone and tablet [processors], and Arm is trying to get into Intel's territory with low-end server [processors]," Brookwood said. "This will be an interesting battle over the next two to four years."

There is a growing interest in building servers with low-power chips as companies look to cut energy costs. For example, SeaMicro currently offers the power-efficient SM10000 server, which packs 512 Intel Atom netbook processors on miniature motherboards the size of credit cards. AMD has also said it may consider putting its upcoming low-power chips in servers.

Though low-power servers are being increasingly implemented in data centers, organizations may not readily shift architectures, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

Companies place the weight of their businesses on IT infrastructures and are hesitant to migrate entrenched server installments unless they find the new architecture reliable, McCarron said. Beyond reliability, Arm also needs to support a wide range of applications to find adopters.

"Any time you have a new product in a category, it takes a while to ramp," McCarron said.

Arm in September announced the Cortex-A15 processor, which was designed to handle server-type operations. The processor includes virtualization capabilities, supports up to 1TB of physical memory and can scale performance with the help of more cores. However, no official chip based on the processor has been announced yet.

There are also some architectural limits for current Arm-based chips that could hamper server adoption, Brookwood said. For example, memory limits of up to 4GB could limit server operations from a software standpoint.

The current and Cortex-A15 architectures are also based on 32-bit processor design, Brookwood said. While Intel and AMD moved up to 64-bit design a while ago, Arm is behind its rivals.

"The next iteration of Arm in 2011 or 2012 will come out with 64-bit extensions," Brookwood said.

Zscaler Develops Free Tool to Detect Firesheep Snooping (PC World)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 04:40 AM PST

Jeremy Kirk Jeremy Kirk – Mon Nov 8, 7:40 am ET

A security company has developed a free Firefox add-on that warns when someone on the same network is using Firesheep, a tool that has raised alarm over how it simplifies an attack against a long-known weakness in Internet security.

Firesheep, which was unveiled at the ToorCon security conference in San Diego last month by Eric Butler, collects session information that is stored in a Web browser's cookie. The session information is easily collected if transmitted back and forth between a user's computer and an unencrypted Wi-Fi router while a person is logged into a Web service such as Facebook.

While most Web sites encrypt the traffic transmitted when logging into a Web site, indicated by the padlock on browsers, most then revert to passing unencrypted information during the rest of the session, a weakness that security analysts have warned of for years, particularly for users of public open Wi-Fi networks.

Firesheep identifies that unencrypted traffic and allows an interloper to "hijack" the session, or log into a Web site as the victim, with just a couple of clicks. The style of attack has been possible for a long time, but because of its simple design, Firesheep has given less-sophisticated users a powerful hacking tool.

Zscaler's The Blacksheep add-on, however, will detect when someone on the same network is using Firesheep, allowing its users make a more informed security decision about their behavior while on an open Wi-Fi network, for example.

Once Firesheep has intercepted someone's session credentials for a Web site, it makes a request to that site using the same cookie values. Blacksheep plays on this by making HTTP requests every five minutes to those sites monitored by Firesheep -- but using fake cookie values. If Blacksheep then detects Firesheep making a request to the site using the same fake cookie values, it can raise a warning, Zscaler said.

Security analysts have recommended that Web sites encrypt all traffic, but many sites have been unwilling to do it because of the extra processing power needed to maintain encryption. However, there has been progress: In January, Google turned on HTTPS encryption for all users of its Gmail service, where previously it had only been an option.

Other defenses against Firesheep include simply not using open Wi-Fi networks. If that's not an option, the Electronic Frontier Foundation built a Firefox add-on called "HTTPS Everywhere," which will automatically trigger an encrypted session with those Web sites capable of providing one. A VPN connection can also thwart attacks.

Nokia Reclaims Symbian from Open-Source Foundation (NewsFactor)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 02:11 PM PST

Barry Levine, newsfactor.com Barry Levine, newsfactor.com – Mon Nov 8, 5:11 pm ET

Nokia is taking back the Symbian platform. On Monday, the handset maker announced that it is taking control of the Symbian operating system about 18 months after the Symbian Foundation was first set up.

Nokia's control will begin next April, and the foundation, which is composed of companies that use the platform, will become a licensing organization. Tim Holbrow, executive director of the Symbian Foundation, told news media that there has been "a seismic change in the mobile market, but also more generally in the economy." As a result, he said, the structure where the foundation guided the Symbian platform "is no longer appropriate."

'Unlikely' Employees Needed

The foundation's role will be so diminished, Holbrow said, that it is "unlikely" any employees will be needed at that organization.

The purported aim of the foundation was to create an open-source operating system in the hope that it would find broad acceptance among device makers. As with Google's open-source Android platform, this meant that any manufacturer could modify the source code.

But Symbian's world market share is shrinking. Industry research firm Gartner said in September that Symbian's market share in 2009 was 46.9 percent, still the top global mobile operating system. But that share is shrinking, and Gartner projects that Android will match it by 2014, with both platforms having about 30 percent.

In setting up the foundation, Nokia spent about $365 million to buy out other owners of Symbian, and then it enlisted the support of major players. Initially, these included AT&T, LG Electronics, Motorola, NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, and Vodafone.

One by one, most of the backers dropped out. About a month ago, both Samsung and Sony Ericsson dropped support for Symbian. Neither handset maker was hugely invested in releasing Symbian devices, but they helped to broaden the base of the platform. LG Electronics, among others, also recently indicated it was jumping ship, leaving only Nokia, Fujitsu, Huawei and Sharp as members of the foundation.

'No Impact' on Nokia's Symbian Devices

Nokia been criticized for not revamping Symbian to compete with the two hottest mobile platforms, Apple's iOS and Google's Android. In addition to working to update Symbian, Nokia has also developed MeeGo, an operating system for high-end smartphones, and it's expected to release Windows Phone 7 devices.

In a statement, Nokia "reaffirmed" its commitment to the Symbian platform and said it will invest its own resources into strengthening it.

"The future of Symbian as a platform does not depend on the existence of the foundation," Nokia Senior Vice President Jo Harlow said. Harlow added that the foundation's changes will "have no impact on Nokia's Symbian device road maps or shipping commitments."

The Finland-based company, the world's largest handset maker, said it expects to bring greater efficiency and speed of evolution to the Symbian platform through its recent decision to focus on a new, cross-platform application-development framework, called Qt.

Student Who Hacked Bill O'Reilly Gets 30 Months (PC World)

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 06:20 PM PST

Robert McMillan Robert Mcmillan – 2 hrs 41 mins ago

A 23-year-old Bellevue, Ohio, man has been sentenced to 30 months in prison following a 2007 online crime spree in which he used a network of hacked computers to attack and knock offline websites belonging to conservative pundits Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter.

Mitchell Frost must also pay US$40,000 in restitution to O'Reilly and $10,000 to the University of Akron, where he was enrolled at the time of the hacking. He had pleaded guilty to the charges in May.

Frost was a first-year student at the university at the time of the attacks. He used the school's computer network to control a botnet he'd built up between August 2006 and March 2007, and launched denial of service (DOS) attacks against Rudy Giuliani's Joinrudy2008.com website, Billoreilly.com and Anncoulter.com. He attacked the Bill O'Reilly site five times, ultimately forcing it offline.

The University of Akron was disrupted too, when Frost knocked its network offline for eight-and-a-half hours while trying to DOS-attack a gaming server hosted by the university. That happened on March 14, 2007. Frost's dorm room was raided two weeks later. He wasn't charged, however, until May of this year.

Prosecutors asked the court for a tough sentence after Frost lied to his probation officer about an online business he'd set up following his arrest. In a letter to the court, Frost said he set up the Discountjwh.com website earlier this year after quitting his job as a Stanley Steemer carpet cleaning technician. JWH is a form of synthetic cannabis that is legal for sale in some U.S. states, including Ohio.

Frost said he was selling the product as a bonsai plant fertilizer and never meant for it to be consumed by humans. He said that he lied to his probation officer in a moment of panic.

"I thought that if they see I am making this money through my online business [and] if I were to go away to prison they would want it all as a penalty," he wrote in his letter.

Frost was sentenced Thursday by Judge Lesley Wells of the Northern District of Ohio. He must serve three years' probation after his 30-month sentence.

Robert McMillan covers computer security and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Robert on Twitter at @bobmcmillan. Robert's e-mail address is robert_mcmillan@idg.com
at 9:27 PM

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