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Monday, December 13, 2010

Yahoo preparing to lay off 600 to 700 workers (AP) : Technet

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Yahoo preparing to lay off 600 to 700 workers (AP) : Technet

Yahoo preparing to lay off 600 to 700 workers (AP)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 08:10 PM PST

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke, Ap Technology Writer – 54 mins ago

SAN FRANCISCO – Yahoo Inc. is preparing to lay off between 600 and 700 workers in the latest shake-up triggered by the Internet company's lackluster growth.

Employees could be notified of the job cuts as early as Tuesday, according to a person familiar with Yahoo's plans. The person asked for anonymity because Yahoo hadn't made a formal announcement.

The planned cutbacks represent about 5 percent of Yahoo's work force of 14,100 employees. It will mark Yahoo's fourth mass layoff in the past three years.

The latest two housecleanings have come under the company's current CEO, Carol Bartz, a Silicon Valley veteran hired nearly two years, despite a lack of experience on the Web or in advertising — Yahoo's main source of revenue.

This week's round of reductions is expected to be concentrated in Yahoo's U.S. products group, which already has been undergoing an overhaul since Bartz hired former Microsoft Corp. executive Blake Irving to run the division last spring.

The job cuts won't come as a shock. News of the looming layoffs was first reported last month by two popular technology blogs, TechCrunch and All Things Digital.

Yahoo's feeble financial growth, stagnant stock price and recent management defections have raised questions about whether Bartz herself might be shown the door before her contract expires in January 2013.

The company's revenue had edged up by less than 2 percent to $4.8 billion through the first nine months of the year, reflecting the difficulty Yahoo has had selling ads while other Internet companies such as Google Inc. and Facebook are thriving.

Google's revenue climbed 23 percent to nearly $21 billion through the first nine months of the year. Privately held Facebook doesn't disclose its results but it is growing so fast that it had to move into larger headquarters earlier this year.

Yahoo's stock price fell 31 cents to close Monday at $16.70, a few cents below where it ended last year. Meanwhile, the technology-driven Nasdaq composite index has risen by 16 percent so far this year.

The malaise has spurred speculation that opportunistic buyout firms might put together a takeover bid for Yahoo, possibly in partnership with another embattled Internet icon, AOL Inc.

Bartz, 62, has repeatedly insisted Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, is heading in the right direction, although she has cautioned it might be another year or two before there's a significant improvement in the company's financial results.

Dell pays $884M for data storage maker Compellent (AP)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 04:27 PM PST

– Mon Dec 13, 7:27 pm ET

ROUND ROCK, Texas – Dell Inc. said Monday it has a deal to buy the data storage company Compellent Technologies Inc. for $884 million.

The offer price is slightly more than Dell said it would pay last week, before the companies had signed a formal agreement. Dell will pay $27.75 per share, up from $27.50.

Compellent shares dropped 73 cents, or 2.5 percent, to close at $27.98 Monday. Dell shares fell 54 cents, or 3.9 percent, to close at $13.35.

The final offer price is still a 3 percent discount to Compellent's closing price of $28.71 on Friday. Investors had bid up Compellent's stock to as high as $34.16 in recent months, with a string of acquisitions in the storage industry heightening anticipation of takeovers. The stock closed at $11.86 on Aug. 13, the last trading day before Dell launched an unsuccessful bid for Compellent rival 3Par Inc. After a bidding war, Hewlett-Packard Co. walked away with 3Par for $2.35 billion.

Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, is trying to catch up with other tech companies that have expanded more quickly into the business of storing and organizing data for companies and governments. Dell has an agreement to sell products from EMC Corp., a major player in the data storage industry.

During a conference call discussing the Compellent deal, Dell executives said they will continue to sell EMC storage and support its existing EMC customers.

Providing data-center technology is shaping up as a more profitable line of business than selling personal computers, which is how Dell still generates the majority of its revenue.

The PC maker said both companies' boards have approved the deal. Dell said plans to incorporate Compellent into an expanding group of acquired storage businesses, including PowerVault and EqualLogic. Dell will also start selling Compellent storage products immediately.

Dell said it has retention agreements with Compellent's senior leadership and that it plans to maintain and invest in Compellent's existing operations in Eden Prairie, Minn., where the company is headquartered. Compellent employs about 490 people, and the companies said Monday that all of those employees will keep their jobs.

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.

Go Daddy gives $500K to fund women's health center (AP)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 02:36 PM PST

By DANA WOLLMAN, AP Technology Writer Dana Wollman, Ap Technology Writer – Mon Dec 13, 5:36 pm ET

NEW YORK – Make no mistake: GoDaddy.com loves women.

The seller of website domain names, whose Super Bowl ads with scantily clad women made it a household name, announced that it has donated $500,000 to the Southwest Center for HIV/AIDS to launch a women's health clinic in Phoenix.

The Go Daddy Women's Health Center, set to open in 2011, will provide HIV/AIDS prevention for women. In particular, the new center will cater to women with a heightened risk of catching the disease, particularly those suffering domestic violence. The center will be partially funded by the city of Phoenix.

The Southwest Center, founded in 1988, says it already serves 70 percent of the 14,000 people in Arizona affected by HIV/AIDS.

The Scottsdale, Ariz., company's philanthropy contrasts sharply with the ad it submitted to this year's Super Bowl. In it, a masseuse rubbing down race car driver Danica Patrick strips down to a tank top and underwear, wiggles her hips and eventually falls into a pool, causing her shirt to become wet. In a Web-only ad, mocking the brouhaha, another model rips off her clothing to reveal a similarly skimpy getup and does a more sexually suggestive dance.

Rumorville: Verizon iPhone to be LTE-capable after all? (Ben Patterson)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 01:07 PM PST

By Ben Patterson ben Patterson – Mon Dec 13, 4:07 pm ET

Just about every report we've seen in the last few months claiming that an iPhone for Verizon is on the way has specifically stated that the iPhone would support only Verizon's 3G network, not its just-launched 4G LTE network. One Apple rumor site, however, begs to differ.

Citing but a single source whom "we believe to be credible" (so make sure you've got a grain of salt handy, preferably a big one), MacDailyNews claims that the rumored Verizon iPhone — which, of course, has yet to be confirmed — will be "LTE-capable," and that the carrier plans on marketing it as the only "LTE iPhone" around.

MacDailyNews' source claims that Verizon has been busy training staffers on the new iPhone, which could be announced "right after" Christmas — apparently to give AT&T a little breathing room for holiday iPhone sales.

Verizon launched its new 4G LTE network barely a week ago, with coverage in 38 cities  including Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco and Seattle.

For now, Verizon is selling a pair of LTE modems: one from LG, and another by Pantech. The carrier says it will have LTE-compatible smartphones on sale by the middle of next year, but it hasn't tipped its hand on which LTE smartphones will come first.

One of the biggest reasons that many observers — myself included — figure that the first Verizon iPhone would be 3G-only is because Verizon's LTE network offers such limited coverage at the moment.

But MacDailyNews claims that the rumored LTE iPhone would be backward-compatible with Verizon's existing 3G network, which blankets most of the country.

Another interesting but unconfirmed tidbit in the MacDailyNews post is that Apple's original plan was to have a next-generation, LTE-only iPhone 5 ready for next summer, but that Steve Jobs is "upset" that the various U.S. carriers "cannot seem to get their LTE act together more quickly."

Enticing stuff, but even the bloggers at MacDailyNews admit that they "cannot independently confirm the information at this time" â€" and frankly, I simply don't believe the rumor.

Why not? Consider the very first iPhone, which arrived as an EDGE-only handset at a time (mid-2007) when there were already several 3G-enabled smartphones on the market (like the Motorola Q, the Palm Treo 700p and the HTC Touch, to name a few.) The reason, according to Jobs: Existing 3G chipsets were "not low-power enough" and "took up too much physical space."

If Apple is indeed prepping an iPhone for Verizon (and remember, Apple has yet to confirm it) my guess is that Cupertino would follow the same pattern that it did with the original iPhone, sticking with tried-and-true data technology first before taking the leap to a next-generation network down the road, after the kinks (like this one) have been ironed out.

That's not to say Apple's strategy is the right one, by the way â€" it's just what Apple's done before, and I bet they'll do it again.

So that's my non-insider prediction: a 3G-only Verizon iPhone early next year, with an LTE version later in 2011 or (more likely) 2012.

But hey — I've been wrong before.

What do you think: Will the rumored Verizon iPhone work on the carrier's LTE network? Or will Apple play it safe and wait before going the LTE way?

Related: EXCLUSIVE: Verizon's iPhone rumored to be LTE device; coming right after Christmas [MacDailyNews]

Correction: In my original post, I incorrectly stated the number of LTE modems available from Verizon; two models are currently on sale, not just one. Apologies for the goof.

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

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Verizon to shut off social services for remaining Microsoft Kin users (Ben Patterson)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 12:49 PM PST

By Ben Patterson ben Patterson – Mon Dec 13, 3:49 pm ET

Still keeping tabs on your Twitter and Facebook buddies over the Kin Loop, or tracking your daily texts, tweets and photos with the online Kin Studio? Enjoy it while it lasts, because early next year, your faithful Kin handset will abruptly — and permanently — turn antisocial on you.

The last remaining users of the Kin One and Two, the pair of socially minded slider phones that Microsoft launched in May and then abandoned several weeks later, reportedly received a snail-mailed pamphlet from Verizon Wireless announcing that the carrier will turn off most of the Kin's signature data services — including the Kin Studio, an online diary of your daily activity — come Jan. 31.

So says WP Central, which has authentic-looking snapshots of the pamphlet detailing which Kin features will continue to work and which won't, and laying out a couple of options: either keep using your Kin with an abbreviated set of data features, or pick out a new 3G phone in Verizon's lineup for free.

The notice (snapshots of which you can peruse right here) says that the most well-received features of the otherwise poorly reviewed Kin phones will be switched off, including the Kin Loop (which lets users view a steady stream of social-networking updates from their various pals), the Kin Spot (which will let you share only email and text, picture and video messages once Verizon pulls the plug — no more URLs or webpage snippets), and the Kin Studio (an interactive timeline chronicling your minute-to-minute Kin activities, which users could access on a secure website).

Kin users will also have to transfer any remaining snapshots from their handsets to a PC, as photos left on the Kins after the deadline will revert to low-resolution thumbnails, the pamphlet warns. Same goes for any contact info you may have downloaded from Twitter, Facebook or MySpace, which will up and disappear as of Jan. 31.

What will still work on the Kin? Voice calls, of course, according to the flier, as well as text, picture and video messaging. Also still functioning will be the Web browser (which you'll still be able to use to access Facebook and Twitter), the camera (although photos will have to be transferred using the Zune desktop software), the alarm clock, contacts and favorites (the ones you entered manually, at any rate), and Zune Pass streaming music subscriptions (so long as you listen over Wi-Fi).

Not happy with your Kin's impending antisocial behavior? If so, says the pamphlet, Verizon promises to let you choose another 3G phone for free, no contract extension required (and so long as you've been paying you bills on time).

Microsoft stunned the tech world back in June after announcing it would cease development on the two Kin phones, barely two months after they'd originally gone on sale and in the wake of poor reviews and rumors of dismal sales.

About a month ago, Verizon began to once again sell the Kin One and Two (presumably to clear out its remaining stock) as "feature" phones, demoting them from smartphone status.

The Kins available now from the carrier ($19 for the smaller Kin One, $49 for the larger Kin Two, both with two-year contracts) have already been stripped of most of their social data services, including the Kin Loop, Spot and Studio.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is hoping to move on from the Kin debacle with its just-relaunched Windows Phone 7 platform. The first WP7 handsets went on sale last month.

Related: Verizon: KIN Studio is closing January 31. Sorry. Here's a new phone? [WPCentral.com]

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

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ThumbDrive inventor out to prove he is no one-hit wonder (AFP)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 08:13 PM PST

by Bernice Tan Bernice Tan – 51 mins ago

SINGAPORE (AFP) – Henn Tan could have ruled the global market in what became the ubiquitous USB flash drive that helped consign the floppy disk to the dustbin of technological history.

But his grip on the ThumbDrive slipped and the market was flooded with a myriad of brands for the handy memory device which could be small enough to dangle on a key ring.

Now the Singaporean entrepreneur hopes to prove he was no one-hit wonder.

Tan, who holds the patent for the compact data storage device in over 30 markets and the global trademark for the ThumbDrive brand, now has a firmer hold on another invention with a rather unusual name.

The FluCard -- a postage stamp-size storage device that can also transmit data wirelessly -- is Tan's new baby, and he hopes to see it used by millions of people; just like the USB drive.

Tan said many thought the ThumbDrive was a one-hit wonder.

"I told them no, but many refused to believe me," the 54-year-old told AFP.

"We are more than just about ThumbDrives and the power of this FluCard is going to be immense," insisted the chairman and chief executive of Trek 2000 International, which is listed on the Singapore Exchange.

Tan laments that he made a mistake with the ThumbDrive by going it alone instead of partnering with an established player in 2000, an admittedly "naive" move that allowed rivals to get big slices of the USB-based data storage pie.

This time around, he has teamed up with Japan's Toshiba Corp to promote the FluCard and ensure its patent is protected globally.

Why the name?

"It's contagious and easy to recall," says Tan, a marketing man who employs technical experts to flesh out his ideas.

"You go to Afghanistan, you say flu, and they understand."

Marc Einstein, regional manager at technology consultancy Frost and Sullivan, said the FluCard is a sign of the convergence underway in consumer electronics and computer technology.

"I do think that this is where the future lies for technologies and consumer devices," he said, adding that securing Toshiba's support "is a good first step" for the Singapore firm.

Tan said his company and Toshiba, now the second largest shareholder in Trek 2000 International after him, formed a consortium of camera makers to adopt the FluCard as the industry standard.

Terence Wong, co-head of research at Singapore brokerage DMG and Partners, sees good commercial prospects for the FluCard and also feels partnering Toshiba is a right move for Tan.

"This FluCard can potentially kill off the dummy SD card if they get it right," Wong told AFP.

Shaped exactly like the Secure Digital (SD) memory cards now used widely in compact digital cameras, the FluCard comes embedded with WiFi to transmit data to other wireless-enabled devices such as mobile phones, laptops and tablet computers.

"It can do more than what an ordinary dumb, dumb SD card can do which is just to store data," Tan said.

"As long as you have a hardware embedded with WiFi, you can download anything from the FluCard."

Launched earlier this year, the FluCard works in any device that has an SD slot and the camera market is the most obvious target for Tan.

SD cards are predominantly used in compact digital cameras, 100 million of which were sold in 2009 alone, according to industry estimates.

Using a FluCard in the digital camera the user has the option of uploading new photos directly to the Internet for sharing with friends on Facebook and other social networks.

It also functions as a data storage back-up since the content inside the FluCard can be instantly transferred to a private user account on a portal set up by Trek 2000 International.

Tan's idea for the FluCard came about after a holiday with his family in China five years ago was ruined when they lost their camera.

"You can't be going back to the places to retake the photos, and I felt lousy there wasn't any data backup," said Tan.

"The power of this FluCard is going to be immense if I get it right," he said, adding it could catapult his company from a fringe player into the major leagues of the data storage industry with Toshiba's support.

Tan's anguish was clear as he recalled how his company lost out to the "big boys" of data storage who came out with their own USB-based devices -- and to pirates who simply made ThumbDrive knockoffs.

"Right now we are still generating income (from royalties) but not much," said Tan.

"Size counts, and I learnt my lesson real hard."

In retrospect, Tan said it would have been better if he had partnered one of the big brands when the ThumbDrive was launched in March 2000, but his eagerness got the better of him at the time.

"I was naive, I was gullible and I decided to take this product all alone, believing that we can do it."

"Now I have Toshiba, I am riding on the coat-tails of Toshiba."

Toshiba to make LCD panels for Apple iPhone: report (Reuters)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 04:49 PM PST

– Mon Dec 13, 7:49 pm ET

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Toshiba Corp will spend about 100 billion yen ($1.19 billion) to build a factory to make small LCD panels, mainly to supply to Apple Inc for use in iPhones, Japanese business daily Nikkei said on Tuesday.

Its subsidiary Toshiba Mobile Display Co will build the facility in Ishikawa prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast and it will churn out low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels, which allow for high-resolution images, the paper said.

A Toshiba spokesman said the report was untrue and nothing had been decided regarding a new plant to build LCD panels for Apple.

Work on the plant will start by early next year, with production due to begin in the second half of 2011, the paper said.

Toshiba Mobile Display already makes low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels at a facility in the prefecture and its monthly production capacity of 8.55 million units is projected to more than double with the new factory, the daily said.

Apple will invest in the factory, the Nikkei said.

Toshiba's shares gained 0.5 percent to 442 yen in early trade in Tokyo, outperforming the benchmark Nikkei average, which dipped 0.1 percent.

(Reporting by NR Sethuraman in Bangalore and Tim Kelly in Tokyo;

Editing by S. John Tilak and Michael Watson)

Google acquires mobile payments company Zetawire (Digital Trends)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 05:18 PM PST

Laura Khalil Laura Khalil – Mon Dec 13, 8:18 pm ET

Terms of the deal, along with when the acquisition plans began are unknown, however, the acquisition was concluded in August. This coincides with the acquisition of both social apps company Slide and social currency company Jambool.

This information was revealed by tech analyst firm 451 Group, which saw the disclosure in a notice from Zetawire's law firm, Fenwick and West, which mentioned the acquisition.

Zetawire was in the early stages of development, but 451 Group has uncovered that the startup was granted a patent for "mobile banking, advertising, identity management, credit card and mobile coupon transaction processing". That’s the secret sauce needed for turning a smart phone into a credit card, so there doesn’t seem to be much question as to why Google would want to purchase that technology.

Google has been hard at work in the area of NFC (near-field communications). These are the same chips you’ll find inside your credit card. The latest Android, the Nexus S, is the first phone to include an NFC chip, and that is what is required to go forward with mobile payments.

There are a great many possibilities available combining Zetawire’s technology with Google. It’s entirely possible that Google may be planning to use Zetawire and NFC to track clicking on a mobile ad to payment, giving retailers greater insight into where and how their customers buy.

The NFC war is officially on and phone carriers are scrambling to get NFC chips installed on their new phones. It’s reported that Apple will include an NFC chip in the upcoming iPhone.

2010's Top Twitter Trends: Surprisingly Sporty (Time.com)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 08:25 PM PST

Online vendor of 25-cent Beatles songs loses case (Reuters)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 08:48 PM PST

By Eriq Gardner Eriq Gardner – 16 mins ago

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) – A federal judge has ruled on summary judgment that BlueBeat.com is liable for violating copyrights in thousands of songs. In making the decision, the judge had swatted away one of the stranger defenses to infringement of sound recordings.

Last year, BlueBeat made headlines for selling tracks for 25 cents and streaming songs for free. Most notably, the company was one of the only venues at the time that offered for sale digital tracks from The Beatles -- and the only U.S.-based company that claimed to do so legally.

Record labels put BlueBeat's legal theories to the test in a lawsuit filed in November 2009.

Hank Risan, CEO of BlueBeat, said in an interview that the company made single copies of each sound recording, then analyzed them and destroyed the copies before creating a new simulation based on parametrics of sound.

According to BlueBeat, the scheme was protected by a section in the copyright law that doesn't extend rights of copyright owners to "the making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording."

It was dubbed the "psycho-acoustic simulation" defense.

The labels responded that the language of the law only pertained to their rights -- that it didn't permit companies to re-record recordings in an attempt to get around copyright liability.

In a decision on Thursday, Judge Josephine Staton Tucker agrees: "BlueBeat fails to provide any evidence ... showing how or why its purported 'simulations' are anything but illicit copies of the Copyrighted Recordings," she says.

The judge says that BlueBeat didn't provide evidence that it had obtained a valid re-recording license, that copies were used solely by BlueBeat, and that copies were destroyed.

Instead, Judge Tucker rules that "Risan's obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling,' i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation."

Having rejected BlueBeat's arguments that its "simulations" are original, independent works -- and also rejecting a defense that record labels don't have standing to bring claims for pre-1972 recordings -- the judge grants the record companies' motion for partial summary judgment.

Notwithstanding an appeal, the case now moves into determining what damages BlueBeat must pay to the record companies.

The World's Facebook Relationships Visualized [PIC] (Mashable)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 02:12 PM PST

Ben Parr Ben Parr – Mon Dec 13, 5:12 pm ET

Click the image for the full-sized version

This is what the world looks like, according to the Facebook social graph.

Facebook Intern Paul Butler was interested in the locations of friendships, so he decided to create a visualization of Facebook connections around the globe. How local are our friends? Where are the highest concentration of friendships? How do political and geological boundaries affect them?

Butler started by using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city.

That was the easy part. Creating the right effect to show connecting relationships between thousands of cities proved to be a challenge. Butler wrote a fascinating Facebook note explaining some of the challenges he faced creating his visualization:

"I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn't handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world."

With a few more tweaks, he eventually came up with the amazing visualization you see here. At first glance, it provides some expected data -- the U.S. has the highest concentration of Facebook friendships, and Africa has the lowest concentration. While most of Russia and Antarctica are nowhere to be found, the rest of the world is easily identifiable.

What do you think of the visualization? Does anything about it surprise you? Let us know in the comments.

Android dominates BlackBerry on Verizon (Appolicious)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 10:51 AM PST

Senators press China on piracy, counterfeiting (Reuters)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 12:40 PM PST

– Mon Dec 13, 3:40 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Two senators, armed with a new report on piracy and counterfeiting in China, urged Beijing on Monday to step up efforts to protect American movies, software and other goods from illegal copying.

"China continually fails to protect and enforce American intellectual property rights and discriminates against American businesses," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said in a statement accompanying the U.S. International Trade Commission study.

Baucus and Senator Charles Grassley, who requested the report earlier this year, timed its release to coincide with high-level U.S.-China talks taking place in Washington.

"Small steps and empty promises won't cut it when American jobs are on the line. This week's U.S.-China trade talks are the perfect opportunity for China to make serious commitments to address these issues. It is time for action," Baucus said.

Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan is leading a delegation of nearly 100 officials in the U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade meeting, led on the U.S. side by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

The report is the first of two the ITC is doing for the Senate Finance Committee.

In the second one, due in May, the ITC will try for the first time to estimate the damage done to the U.S. economy by Chinese piracy and counterfeiting.

It will also try to quantify the impact of China's "indigenous innovation" policies, a set of regulations designed to promote innovation within China and to reduce the country's dependence on foreign technology and companies.

Those policies could require foreign companies to transfer ownership and development of intellectual property to China in order to participate in that country's huge government procurement market, the ITC said.

"China has committed to protect U.S. intellectual property. But this report shows that China isn't living up to its commitments. It's a serious problem," Grassley said.

The ITC report found serious problems with the enforcement of intellectual property rights laws throughout China.

The low number of criminal prosecutions and relatively small damage awards in civil cases contributes to widespread piracy of software, music and movies, both over the Internet or in physical form such as CDs and DVDs, the ITC report said.

"Similarly, trademarks for goods and service of all kinds are routinely counterfeited; from luxury goods to high-volume commodities, few products are immune from illegal imitation in China. The patents and trade secrets of U.S. firms are also infringed in China," the report said.

U.S. companies see China's indigenous innovation policies "as potentially reducing business opportunities in China's fast-growing economy," it said.

The polices, in the works since last year, are often embedded in government procurement, technical standards, anti-monopoly, and tax regulations or laws.

"The indigenous innovation 'web of policies' is expected to make it difficult for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field in China," the report said.

(Editing by Doina Chiacu)

Seagate Offers 2.5-Inch 1TB Drive For Data Centers (NewsFactor)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 02:04 PM PST

Mark Long, newsfactor.com Mark Long, newsfactor.com – Mon Dec 13, 5:04 pm ET

Seagate has rolled out the storage industry's first one-terabyte hard disk drive in the 2.5-inch form factor. Squarely aimed at enterprise data centers and cloud data-storage applications, the Constellation 2 consumes just 6.4 watts of power on average when deployed in directed attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), and storage area network (SAN) environments, Seagate said.

Available with standard capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB, the Constellation 2 is also being offered with 6Gb/s serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) or 6Gb/s serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface options, noted Seagate Vice President Carla Kennedy. "With its class-leading reliability, record-breaking capacity, and improvements made along its entire range of features, the Constellation 2 drive is a perfect solution for dense server and storage systems," Kennedy said.

Delivering More Options

IDC projects that hard-disk drive shipments for enterprise applications will increase from 40.5 million units last year to 52.6 million in 2014. What's more, the research firm expects the HDD industry to ship more petabytes for enterprise applications in the next two years than it did in the preceding 20 years.

"We're definitely seeing intensive cost-cutting measures among end users striving to bring more efficiency to current solutions," said IDC Research Manager John Rydning.

With Constellation 2, Seagate's goal is to fulfill the needs of data-center managers looking for more efficient storage technologies that meet their capacity growth requirements, Rydning noted. "Reaching the 1TB capacity in a small-form-factor design gives IT managers more options to meet capacity requirements with efficient storage platforms," he said. "IDC expects the use of capacity-optimized drives like Seagate's 1TB Constellation 2 to increase by more than 50 percent from 2010 to 2014."

Among other things, the 2.5-inch drive's small form factor will help enterprises maximize their data-center footprints by supporting densities of up to 76TB per square foot, noted Seagate Senior Product Manager Barbara Craig. And since the drive consumes less than 6.5 watts on average, IT department can save up to 72 percent over what a 3.5-inch drive typically consumes.

Saving Power

Seagate's Constellation 2 is on the leading edge of the industry's transition from 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch drives, which IDC expects to be complete by 2012. "Available in the channel now, it's the only drive on the market that can service your high-capacity needs in an efficient, low-power 2.5-inch form factor with the high 1TB capacity point," Craig wrote in a blog.

The Constellation 2 enhances data integrity by harnessing the power of T10 Protection Information -- a new SCSI-based end-to-end data-protection specification that enables each element in the data's path to inspect the data and verify that no corruption has occurred. Moreover, device reliability has been boosted to a mean time between failures of 1.4 million hours, Craig noted.

Enterprises today are very concerned about the potential loss of proprietary corporate data as well as customer records that include sensitive personal information such as credit-card numbers. Seagate offers a self-encrypting drive (SED) option for the Constellation 2 that will automatically lock the drive and secure the data the moment it is removed from a system. Additionally, SED reduces the cost of disposing or reusing any drive by enabling IT workers to cryptographically erase the device in less than a second.

Dell is slated to begin shipping systems featuring Seagate's Constellation 2 drives later this month, noted Lewie Newcomb, Dell's executive director of storage core technologies. "The Dell PowerVault storage enclosures and PowerEdge servers are being enabled for even more powerful storage alternatives," Newcomb said.

Email, birthdays of McDonald's customers hacked (Reuters)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 03:23 PM PST

– Mon Dec 13, 6:23 pm ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – McDonald's Corp said on Monday hackers gained access to a database containing information such as the email addresses and birth dates of people who voluntarily signed up for its websites and promotions.

The world's biggest hamburger chain said the security breach did not include any Social Security numbers, credit card accounts or sensitive financial information.

The hacked data was on computer systems operated by an email database management firm hired by McDonald's long-time business partner Arc Worldwide, the marketing services arm of advertising firm Leo Burnett, McDonald's spokeswoman Danya Proud said in a statement.

"The incident has resulted in an investigation by law enforcement authorities. Arc and McDonald's are cooperating with the appropriate authorities," Proud said.

"We are also working with Arc and their database management firm to understand how the security was bypassed," she said.

McDonald's declined to give the name of the email database management firm or the number of customers affected by the breach.

On Friday, drugstore chain Walgreen Co disclosed a database with its customers' email addresses was breached.

McDonald's shares closed down 45 cents, or 0.6 percent, at $77.11 on the New York Stock Exchange.

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein; editing by Andre Grenon)

Mozilla's Plan to Reinvent the Browser [VIDEO] (Mashable)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 06:13 AM PST

Ben Parr Ben Parr – Mon Dec 13, 9:13 am ET

What is Mozilla's plan for making the web more open? The chairperson of the non-profit foundation behind the Firefox browser has the answer, starting with a reinvention of the browser itself.

Last week in a Q&A at the LeWeb conference in Paris, Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation and the former CEO of Mozilla Corporation addressed the rapidly changing web and the new competitive landscape for its Firefox web browser.

Baker made clear that Mozilla is focusing on a lot of new innovations, especially around its upcoming Firefox 4 browser. "On the innovation side, the area where I think you will see Mozilla look different from everyone else is that the focus of our innovation is much more integrative across the web," Baker told interviewer Robert Scoble on stage. "We're not trying to integrate our browser with our business stack or our services; we're trying to build an innovative way for people to manage their experience across multiple websites."

The Mozilla chairperson also revealed that she thinks "browser" is the wrong word for the windows we use to access the web. "The way we think about it is much too concrete. We don't browse anymore for sure." She believes that the key to the browser is how we customize our experience on the web and she says that personalization will be a major trend for the web browser in the future.

Baker also addressed Facebook on multiple occasions. She says that Facebook creates a risk of being "locked in with identity." She believes that, no matter how much the social network focuses on privacy, it will never be enough because identity should never be tied to one platform. "I don't want it to own me," Baker stated.

Baker addressed many more subjects in her 20 minute Q&A. Check out the video below for more:

Google Helpers: 9 Downloads to Tweak Chrome, Gmail, and More (PC World)

Posted: 13 Dec 2010 06:15 PM PST

Preston Gralla Preston Gralla – 2 hrs 50 mins ago

Like everyone else on the Internet, you likely use one or more of Google's many services, from search to Gmail to Google Calendar to Google Docs. And like plenty of other people, you probably have wished that these services could do even more, or that you could make them run exactly the way you wanted.

Your wish is our command. We've rounded up some great downloads that give you power over Google. You'll be able to tweak Gmail in different ways, get Outlook and various Google services to work well together, manage your Netflix queue from inside Google Chrome, and plenty more. And all except CompanionLink are free.

(For links to all of these downloads in one convenient place, see our "Google Helpers" collection.)

Use Thumbnails in Google Searches

Google may be a superb search tool, but it fails to give you one important feature: the ability to see thumbnails of all your search results at a glance, so that you can quickly decide which are most relevant. With SearchPreview for Google, you can do just that. Install this free Chrome extension, and whenever you do a search, you'll see thumbnails of every search result.

Note that SearchPreview works well with Google's built-in preview, which lets you hover your mouse over the search icon to the right of a search result to see a thumbnail of the page. But Google's built-in tool doesn't show you all thumbnails at once, as SearchPreview does.

Manage Your Netflix Queue Inside Chrome

Netflix Queue Chrome extension. Right from your Chrome toolbar, you can add DVDs to your queue, reorder your queue, see what DVDs you have at home--in fact, just about anything you can do from inside Netflix.

Extend Android

Your smartphone these days is an an extension of your computer. But what happens when you find a Website or page on your PC that you'd like to visit on your phone later? Ordinarily you have to go through the laborious process of copying the location to an e-mail message, sending that message to yourself, opening it on your phone, and then visiting the site on your phone's browser.

Instead, use the free Chrome to Phone Chrome extension. When you're in Chrome on your PC and you find a site worth visiting on your phone, just unleash the extension; it will send the URL to your Android browser. You'll need Android version 2.2 or better on your phone, and you'll have to install the Chrome to Phone app on it as well.

Marry Google to Microsoft Outlook

Google and Microsoft may be at war, but that doesn't mean you have to be a victim. Outlook does not naturally get along with Google services such as Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and Google Docs. But downloads can induce them to work together.

Harmon.ie for Google Docs is a handy tool. It's a sidebar that lives right within Outlook and lists all of your documents in Google Docs; you can get edit access to them merely by clicking. You can also upload documents to Google Docs via Outlook, search for Google documents from inside Outlook, and more.

CompanionLink ($40; free trial) for help. Run the software, and it automatically synchronizes the two so that you can use your combined calendar from either Outlook or Google. In addition, it synchronizes your Gmail contacts with your Outlook contacts.

Ensure Your Privacy

Google's Internet reach is extraordinary. That worries some people, who believe that the company is capable of gathering too much information about users. You might not realize that you don't need to visit a Google site in order for information about you to be sent to Google--visit a site that uses a Google service, such as Google Analytics or Google AdSense, and your information transmits then, as well.

Google Alarm Firefox add-on can help anyone who wants to avoid sites that might be sending information about them to Google. Whenever a site sends your information, an alarm sounds. You'll also see which Google services the site uses, as well as an aggregate of the number and percentage of the sites you've visited that send information about you to Google. The tool won't block information from transmitting, but it can warn you away from such data-gathering sites.

Improve Gmail

Like Gmail, but wish it were better? First, grab the free Firefox add-on Better Gmail 2. It brings plenty of features that Gmail lacks, adding icons that show what kinds of attachments you have, listing labels in a folderlike hierarchy, hiding Gmail's chat box, playing a sound when you get mail, and more. It's free, and it works without a hitch.

Spiffy. This lightweight app sits in the system tray, checks up to five Gmail accounts, and notifies you when messages come.

Finally, if you often search through Gmail, you'll want to get the no-cost CloudMagic extension for Chrome and Firefox. It does the seemingly impossible: It searches through your mail faster than Google's built-in Gmail search tool. It displays your results literally as you type.
at 9:26 PM

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