Topic: General

Posted by : Jay Greene on Sunday, April 02, 2006 - 11:15 AM

The delay of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Vista operating system until next year makes the software giant look like a dinosaur stuck in the tar, but that's not the whole picture. Its efforts to match the Googles of the world with fast online innovations seem to be paying off. In the five months since Microsoft (MSFT) announced its Windows Live strategy, it has released no fewer than 20 new services that are attracting millions of consumers. "They now gain some of that agility that Google (GOOG) has enjoyed," says analyst Van Baker of researcher Gartner Inc.
What exactly is Live? It's a set of technologies designed to blend the programs people run on their computers, such as Windows or e-mail, with the things they do out on the Web. Live.com, for instance, is a next-gen Web portal loaded with services such as Windows Live Expo, where people can search classified ads on the Web and compare notes on bargains with people on their instant messenger buddy lists. Live "makes it feel like the Web isn't a place where you go to. It's linked [to desktop computing].... And it's very personal," says Microsoft Vice-President Blake Irving. That combination of PC and Web services is already drawing regulatory scrutiny. European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes wrote to Microsoft Mar. 29, expressing concerns that Vista could limit consumer choice by giving Microsoft's own programs advantages over the alternatives. The letter raises the specter of an EU investigation prior to Vista's launch in Europe. Microsoft's reply: Consumers will continue to be able to choose whatever programs they like.AD CRAZY.

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, March 12, 2006 - 10:03 PM

Skype wants to send a new message: it's not just for consumers anymore. The provider of cheap PC-to-PC communications for 75 million consumers worldwide is angling in earnest for business customers, too.The company is unveiling Skype for Business, aimed at small companies with fewer than 10 employees, on Mar. 9. Skype for Business will include a new Web site, Skype.biz, as well as a host of features and hardware. While Skype has introduced features appealing to business users one by one for the past six months, the new announcement marks the beginning of a concerted effort.

Posted by : Anonymous on Wednesday, March 08, 2006 - 01:11 AM

Google accidentally disclosed its plans for an online data storage service called 'G-Drive'. According to a report from Reuters, Google executives accidentally published a slideshow from a presentation which detailed the offering.Although the presentation was quickly deleted from the Google website, bloggers had enough time to discover the presentation and distribute much of its contents. The service will be used 'to house all user files...and make it accessible from anywhere', the presentation notes said.
The presentation also indicated that Google was not close to releasing the service, as it was running into broadband barriers to deal with large volumes of data. Google has given no comment on the potential G-Drive service. The company said that the information was published by mistake and that Google has nothing to announce at this time.

Posted by : Mark on Saturday, March 04, 2006 - 10:40 PM

Google is breaking down the barrier between e-mail and instant messaging, combining its Gmail and Google Talk services to create a central messaging hub, an industry first.
People who use the Gmail service will be able to send and receive instant messages directly from their e-mail mailboxes, without having to start a separate application or open a separate browser window. The Mountain View company is rolling out the new feature in stages, starting Monday evening.
The service takes advantage of Google's relatively new online instant messaging service, Google Talk.
Both Google Talk and Gmail lag their competitors in market share, and analysts said the pairing is probably intended to drive people to each product.
Gmail, for example, was used by 4.5 percent of active Internet users during December, compared with 33 percent for leader Yahoo Mail, Nielsen//NetRatings reported. Google Talk reached less than 1 percent of Internet users, compared with AOL's Instant Messenger, which reached 33 percent. There has been speculation, however, that Google and AOL, who are business partners, will eventually allow their services to work together.
"It's not surprising they would do this," said Sara Radicati, president and CEO of the Radicati Group, which studies the e-mail and instant messaging industries. "Gmail has been a late-comer, and adding IM capabilities is very sexy."

Posted by : trraju on Wednesday, March 01, 2006 - 10:26 PM

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc.'s stocks declined sharply Tuesday morning after Chief Financial Officer George Reyes told investors that growth at the online search leader was slowing.
The Mountain View, California-based company's stock was down as more than 10 percent, or nearly $41, in morning trading after Reyes told investors at a Merrill Lynch conference that the company would have to find new ways to boost revenues.

Posted by : trraju on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 05:02 PM

Dell has discontinued its line of hard drive-based mp3 players and instead will focus on its DJ Ditty Flash-based music players, a company spokesperson has confirmed to vnunet.com.
"We are streamlining our product portfolio," said Liem Nguyen, a spokesman for Dell's consumer business.How to know if my system communicate with ITS ? (Groups)
Dell has been selling its Pocket DJ hard drive-based music players with capacities of 5, 20 and 30Gb. The devices were first introduced in 2003. Late last year the company introduced its line DJ Ditty Flash-based portable music players in the US which feature 512Mb of memory and is sold for $99. The hard drive-based music player business is dominated by Apple's iPod and Dell had only a limited market share. But Nguyen said that the decision to discontinue the Pocket DJ is unrelated to Apple's stranglehold.
"It wasn't really about competing against any competitor," he said. He said that instead the decision was driven by customer demand.
The market for Flash-based media players offers more space to compete than the hard drive space because Apple's iPod nano and mini have less share in the segment. Flash memory also offers more flexibility in the design of the player and allows for more rugged devices.Dell plans to keep selling hard drive-based players from Creative on its website.

Posted by : trraju on Wednesday, February 08, 2006 - 05:02 PM

Google has equipped its Gmail online email client with support for the Google Talk instant messaging service.The development allows users to use IM directly from the Gmail.com webpage, without having to download any client software.
The new feature will automatically be added to Gmail over the next couple of weeks, with existing accounts upgraded in phases. The user will be presented with a new box labelled 'Quick Contacts' that lists frequently accessed contacts.The service requires a browser window pointed at the Gmail service to be open at all times. It currently supports Internet Explorer and Firefox and requires the English Gmail user interface.
It also offers to log all IM conversations on the website and Google Talk application, and to search for conversations in the same way as for email messages.
Jon Perlow, a software engineer who worked on the project, claimed on Google's blog that this search facility will be a welcome addition.
"My own chats contained a lot of important information that was always getting lost," he explained. "I found myself cutting, pasting and emailing important chats to myself so I could find them later."

Posted by : Philip Thornton on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - 10:55 PM

The rivalry between Google, the internet upstart, and Microsoft, the computer titan, moved to a new level at the weekend as the search engine unveiled a package of services that could break Microsoft's stranglehold.
It launched Google Pack, an alliance of companies that will offer a package of personal computer programmes that will be free for internet surfers to download.
It also announced plans to enable consumers to buy downloads of television programmes such as popular entertainment shows and professional basketball games under a Google Video Store brand.
Both initiatives will be seen as a direct challenge to Microsoft's dominance of the home-computing market and its plans to make inroads into the market for television and video content over the internet, rather than merely over cable and satellite.
Larry Page, Google's co-founder, used the closing address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, seen as the trend-setting event for the coming year, to unveil his plans. His speech was even more closely watched than usual after Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, disparaged reports of new Google products saying: 'I hear they are coming out with a robot that will cook hamburgers too.'
Google Pack will include Google's desktop search feature, the Firefox browser, anti-virus software from Norton, a media platform from Realplayer and Adobe Acrobat's document reader.
Josh Bernoff, a media and internet analyst at Forrester, a technology research company, said: 'This is a direct action to challenge Microsoft. Google is saying, 'We can manage the browser and other elements of the computer-desktop experience better than you'.'

Posted by : Anonymous on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - 10:45 PM

At the Oracle Open World Conference in Mumbai, Oracle President Charles Phillips announced today that the database software company is ramping up the expansion of its operations in India. Among its plans are an expansion from 6 to 15 cities, an increase in staff from 8,600 to 10,000 and increased investment in e-governance.
Over the next eight months, Oracle plans to increase its presence into nine non-metro cities: Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Coimbatore, Indore, Jaipur, Kochi, Lucknow, Pune and Vishakhapatnam. With the new locations, Oracle will hire some 1,400 new employees. With increased presence in these areas, Oracle hopes to add to its business partners in the country.
Oracle is also currently working with 28 Indian state governments to develop, test and deploy e-government projects in the country. The software company said it is currently engaged in more than a hundred Indian government projects.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, January 05, 2006 - 07:03 PM

Cleveland Entrepreneur Tony Colan and partner Ed Harrison announced today the purchase of www.blogster.com for $100,000, confirming the value of a good domain name. Their programmers rewrote the entire software for blogster.com and went live on T...

http://www.w3reports.com/index.php?itemid=1170

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 09:59 AM

OYONNAX, France - Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Friday that the government is thinking about asking Hewlett-Packard to repay aid, after the U.S. computer and printer maker announced plans to cut 5,900 jobs in Europe. "We must reflect," Villepin said. "When there is public aid, it is normal that there is a minimum of return, of recognition." But the prime minister also said France's aim is not "to put up barriers that block foreign investors" and that he hoped for "constructive" talks with Hewlett-Packard.

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 09:59 AM

BANGALORE, India - Under pressure from business leaders, authorities in Bangalore, India's technology hub, on Thursday detailed new plans to spend billions of rupees (millions of dollars) to improve the city's potholed roads and sporadic electricity supply. Word of planned upgrades to Bangalore's sagging infrastructure first came last week after some members of the city's $6 billion software outsourcing industry and its main trade body, the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce, threatened to boycott the government-sponsored annual technology convention in November if the improvements were not made.

Posted by : trraju on Sunday, September 18, 2005 - 02:49 AM

The original Palm Pilot was the iPod of its time: a must-have pocket-size gadget that defined techno-chic in the mid-1990s. The Palm conferred more than membership in club digerati. It connoted professional success, signaling that you're one person who is simply too busy to keep all those appointments and contacts in your head and way too hip to write them on dead trees. And so it was a bit sad when PalmSource, the Sunnyvale company that makes the Palm software, announced last Friday that it was selling itself off to a Japanese outfit for a relatively paltry $324.3 million. Just to compare Apple to operating systems, Steve Jobs' company sold $1.1 billion worth of iPods in just three months earlier this year. The fire-sale of PalmSource left us wondering: Where did all the Zen go?

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 01:21 AM

After 11 blistering months as a public company, during which its stock climbed 269%, to $313 per share, Google (GOOG) finally failed to live up to investors' sky-high expectations. The search leader on July 21 unveiled second-quarter net profits of $343 million -- a 334% jump over last year's quarter, but slightly below analyst estimates. Investors trimmed Google's shares by 5%, to $299, in after-hours trading. Google's numbers cap a disappointing week for Internet search players. Yahoo! (YHOO) on July 19 undershot second-quarter sales estimates (see BW Online, 7/20/05, "A Big Boo For Yahoo"), causing its shares to fall by 13% over the next two days. Google had blown past profit estimates by an average of 28% in its first three quarters as a public company, making its second-quarter shortfall all the more surprising. Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali, for instance, had expected Google to beat profit estimates by 5% to 10%.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 11:59 PM

NEW YORK - Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.
Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 11:59 PM

NEW YORK - Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.
Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, July 04, 2005 - 06:17 AM

A Fremont man has been arrested in a nationwide FBI sting that penetrated the secretive world of "warez" that the agency describes as a national conspiracy to pirate movies, video games and expensive computer software. The larger investigation -- including possible additional arrests -- is scheduled to be announced today by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and until then FBI officials said they could not discuss the case. But Wednesday, a search warrant affidavit that outlines the investigation was unsealed in San Francisco.

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 02:40 AM

Desktop Linux software company Userful has introduced its Desktop Multiplier, a software product designed to lower computing costs in call centres.
Desktop Multiplier is claimed to turn one computer into ten, enabling the user to deploy or expand a call centre by plugging in ten ordinary monitors and keyboards into the single central computer box, using extra video cards.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, March 05, 2005 - 03:40 AM

The creator of the Napster file sharing system, Shawn Fanning, has reportedly signed a deal with record label Sony BMG for the use of his Snocap music tracking system. The new system is a copyright management and filtering system that allows users to legally trade music over peer-to-peer networks. Universal has already signed up for the system and EMI is also in talks with Fanning. Snocap will allow songs to be identified as they are swapped online, which then allows record companies to charge for them.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, January 13, 2005 - 06:41 PM

Research in Motion (RIM) has unveiled the latest in its range of slimmer BlackBerry devices which mirror the form factor of mobile phones. The company said it will continue to build its traditional 'slab' style devices, but will experiment with other designs. The 7100x has Bluetooth built in as standard, and comes with a hands-free headset and integrated speakerphone for conference calls.