Goldman: iPhone Will Make Apple grow 20%

OK, so maybe we were wrong and the Jerkoff (gasp) was right...

A survey on handset branding conducted in the U.S., U.K., China and India before Apple Inc. (AAPL) unveiled its plans for the iPhone demonstrates several positives for the company, Goldman Sachs analyst David Bailey said in a research note.

One of the most interesting pieces of information is that Apple ranked as the fourth most popular multimedia handset brand in the U.S., despite the lack of any iPhone announcement at the time.

The number of potential iPhone buyers is equivalent to 75% of current iPod owners, while just less than half of these possible purchasers have never owned an iPod, the survey showed

In the U.S., 71% of survey respondents indicated that they were interested in a mobile phone from Apple.

The buying intentions survey adds to the confidence Mr. Bailey has in his iPhone sales forecast of 4 million units for the 2007 calendar year and another 10.5 million in 2008.

As a result, Apple's growth could climb by 20%, he said, adding that the iPhone represents the next big growth phase for the company.

http://ce.seekingalpha.com/article/28330

Feds get hacker for insider trading

A firm that allegedly hacked into corporate servers to access news releases early has been sued by US market regulators.

Blue Bottle used the illegal tactic to gain an unfair advantage in market trades that have made it $2.7m in profits, the Securities and Exchange Commission claims. A lawsuit filed by the SEC on Monday alleges Blue Bottle used this illicitly-gained information to guide its trades in securities for 12 US firms including Real Networks and Symantec. Matthew Charles Stokes, 30, the firm's sole owner, and Blue Bottle are named as joint defendants to the lawsuit.

"The defendants did incur losses in some instances where they traded just before news releases," the SEC said in its complaint, Reuters reports. "But the profits are significantly greater than the losses."

Bloomberg adds that Blue Bottle allegedly made $1m by selling Symantec stock short the day before the security firm made a profit warning. The charges against Blue Bottle are largely based on circumstantial evidence. Based on the diverse set of firms Blue Bottle traded in, the timing of the trades and the profit they generated, the SEC alleges the Hong Kong registered accountancy firm must have had access to non-public data.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/27/sec_insider_trading_hack_lawsuit/

Digital 'Fair Use' Bill Introduced In Congress

Today, Reps. Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) introduced what they call the "Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship" (or FAIR USE) Act they say will make it easier for digital media consumers to use the content they buy.

The lawmakers seek to amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which content-makers, such as movie studios and record labels, fought to pass to protect their wares from getting stolen and pirated.

But that law goes too far, the lawmakers say.

"The Digital Millennium Copyright Act dramatically tilted the copyright balance toward complete copyright protection at the expense of the public's right to fair use," Boucher said in a statement. "Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market."

The legislation is being backed by the Consumer Electronics Association, the trade group of electronics-makers, among others.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2007/02/digital_fair_use_bill_introduc.html

Can Google turn Microsoft into toast?

Google is now head-to-head with Microsoft in the Office Apps market, as you may have guessed from the recent Google Apps announcement. What you get from Google is word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, chat, web page creation, and email.

There are two price points:

1. It's free. Just log on to Google and register. But prepare to be advertised at and you'll get less storage space (what Google gives you is still all you're ever likely to need if you archive your email every year or two).

2. Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year and you can use your own branding and domain name on email, etc.

So will it actually take market share from Microsoft? I think the answer is "yes". Here are the five reasons why

1. Google has the brand to make it possible. Free open source office components have been available for many years, via Open Office (and other products). They work very well. However, they never dented Microsoft's monopoly. They may have taken a small sliver of the market, but not yet a significant slice. The problem (I believe) was branding rather than product quality. If I was forced to decide, I'd personally go for Open Office rather than Google Apps, but most organisations wouldn't because "Who's behind Open Office?". This comes down to branding. Google has a powerful brand. It was sufficient to convince Proctor and Gamble and General Electric to set up trials.

2. Google Apps is not great software, but it is good enough. Actually, the word processor is really good for collaborating on documents because its versioning works well and it's easy to understand. The email is good too. But there's no PowerPoint equivalent yet and the spreadsheet is weak. But who cares? Microsoft Office is ridiculously over-featured and for 50 per cent of users (if not 80 per cent) Google Apps will be good enough.

3. Office software costs a small fortune over time. First, you have to upgrade regularly (or eventually) which never costs nothing. Second, sometimes staff need to be trained in the new versions (or just to be effective users) and third, possibly most importantly, there's administration. When you add it up, you quickly realise that if an organisation ditches Microsoft Office for just some of its users, it will probably save more than $50 per Office user per year. The Google offering is a no-brainer, wherever Google Apps fits the need.

4. Google isn't done yet. Think of this as release 1.0 of a server-based office applications suite and you get the picture. Google is going to build on this. As companies sign up, Google will have users to support and the users will bitch about the stuff that's inconvenient and it will all improve in time. Google will gradually move up the food chain to try to satisfy the more sophisticated users.

5. Now think Web 2.0. The Google Apps software has all its interfaces exposed so that other software can link to it. Not more than two days after Google announced Google Apps, Avaya leapt straight in, announcing that it was going to integrate its considerable suite of communications software with Google Apps - its eyes firmly focused on the SMB market. Salesforce.com will also integrate with Google Apps and probably most SaaS (Software as a Service) vendors will follow suit. So without even launching a channels program, Google is acquiring pretty powerful partners.

So what does it all mean? Well, the last point is the one that really threatens Microsoft. If Google Apps becomes the de facto integrated Office Suite, Microsoft Office is toast.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/27/google_apps_challenge/

Everything you wanted to know about backdating (and were afraid to ask)

Here's the main reason no one understands backdating: because no one understands how stock options grants are priced. And, to make things worse, even fewer people understand how stock option pricing affects overall executive compensation. (Yes, we realize we just wrote fewer than "no one" but that's about right.) Add backdating shenanigans to that and you've got a perfect recipe for absolute misunderstanding.

After our item on backdating this morning we received several inquiries about why we were suddenly backsliding on backdating. Were we finally admitting that the prosecutors, regulators and business press was getting the story right? Of course not.

But to understand why we're not saying that you have to understand stock options pricing. And, despite our earlier statement that "no one understands" it, we suspect that maybe you do. People paid to understand somewhat complex financial accounting are, after all, more than a bit over-represented in our readership. But in case you slept through your financial accounting class or landed your job because your uncle runs a big hedge fund client of the bank, we're going to do some 'spaining after the jump.

How Options Really Work. When a company grants a stock option to an executive, that option is assigned an exercise price and a term. The exercise price the price it will cost you to buy the stock when the term is over. The term is just the length of time you have to wait until your right to buy the stock kicks in.

Now the exercise price is typically the price of the stock at the close of the date on which the option is granted. So if your company's stock closes at $100 dollars on the day of the grant, that's going to be your exercise price when the term expires. If the stock is worth more when your term is up, you have the opportunity to buy the stock from the company at a price that is lower than the market price. So if the stock goes up, say, 25% over that waiting period, you can buy shares worth $125 on the open market for $100. You can then sell the shares and pocket the $25 you made or hold the stock and hope it goes up further.

How Options Are Priced. So much for the a quick primer on how options work. The next question is how a company accounts for how much an options grant is worth. Financial types make is sound endlessly complicated but it's really not. The accepted accounting standard is basically a variation on something they call the "Black-Scholes Options Pricing Model" because this sounds like something Sauron would use on the peoples of Middle Earth and keeps anyone from figuring out how it works.

We'll call it the "How Much Is It Worth Model" or "How Much?" for short. According to the "How Much" model, to figure out what an option is worth today you take the exercise price and you do some subtracting to discount for the fact that the option can't be exercised for a few years. You are basically trying to answer the question "how much would a reasonable person be willing to pay today for the right to buy the stock at the exercise price three years from now?" The answer is always going to be less than the actual exercise price because, let's face it, a lot can happen over three years.

More particularly, the "How Much" model looks at a few specific things that could happen. First, you could take the money you would spend on the option and invest it in a risk free bond that paid, say, 5% a year over the same period covered by the option term. So you subtract the amount the you might have made by doing this from the value of the option. Second, you make an adjustment for the stock's volatility. Here you are subtracting for the risk that the stock might go down and adding back for the chance that the stock might go up. The way you attach a number to this to look at how much the stock has gone up and down in the past.

You can also then make a few fine-tuning adjustments to account for things like dividends that get paid out. But that's basically it. Take the exercise price, less the risk-free rate of return, throw in some volatility numbers and the dividends due to be paid out, and you've got the official, business school, accountant, SEC approved price of the option.

If the options are large enough or being paid to top executives, the company writes down the price according to the "How Much" model on a form provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission and gives it to the government to publish on the SEC's website and keep on file.

So Does The SEC Filing Tell Us How Much An Executive Is Making? Not really. It tells us how much the executive might make if all those numbers we discussed earlier work out the way they are supposed to. But stock prices of individual companies have a way of not always obeying the rules set out for them by accountants. So a stock option priced at a certain amount and disclosed by the SEC might end up being worth far more to an executive if his company out-performs expectations. And it might be worth far less if it underperforms.

In one sense, this is great news. It means that executives have incentives to make their companies do better than expected. After all, they want to see those options be worth as much as possible when their term expires.

But in another sense, it's very confusing. Because a company that discloses it paid an executive $500,000 in cash and options worth $500,000 according to the "How Much" model, never has to go back and correct the numbers. The options are priced when they are dated, and future increases or decreases in the stock price don't change that number. So the officially disclosed numbers have only a theoretical, best-guess, most-likely, pretty-much-ish relationship to what executives may actually make from their options.

What's a Backdated Option? A backdated option is an option granted on one day but made to look like it was granted an earlier day. That's it.

Does Backdating An Option Affect the Value of The Option? It might. Remember that according to the "How Much" model, the starting place for figuring out the value of an option is the stock price at the grant date. If the stock price is lower on the phony, backdated "grant date" than the actual grant date, the backdated option will look like it is worth less than it would if it were priced on the actual date.

This means that when a company hands in its filing to the SEC, it will look like it granted options that were worth less than they would have if they used the real date. So shareholders and other people who are worried the executives are getting paid too much won't have as much to complain about.

But don't get too worked up yet. There are two things to keep in mind. First, the difference between the value of an option dated on the actual date and a backdated option isn't as necessarily the same as the difference between the stock price at the phony date and the real date. Remember all that adding and subtracting we did to get the "How Much" value? Well, it still applies.

Here's how a smarty-pants named Helen Shaw put it in CFO.com (you can tell she's a smarty-pants by the way she throws around those evil sounding words like "Black-Scholes"):

Generally, people assume that there is a linear relationship between an option’s strike price and its value, observes Todd. However, “an option 10 percent in-the-money is not worth 10 percent more than an at-the-money option,” she explained.

Consider that a $10-in-the-money backdated option has an exercise price of $90. Without backdating, let's say, it would have been set at $100. Under the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, assuming a risk-free rate of a 5 percent return, the backdated option has a theoretical value only $1.80 higher than the non-backdated option. The backdated option with a 119-month term would be worth $68.88, while the regular option with a 120-month term would be worth $67.08.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/8069348/c_8435337

Appocolypse Now: What if Apple Lost the Jerkoff?

Will there be life after the Jerk shoots his final load? While the prevailing opinion on Wall Street seems to be that Jobs is staying put as CEO of Apple despite a lingering stock-options probe, the snowballing prosecutions for corporate backdating prompt the question of how the company would fare if the King of Pocket Pool were no longer in charge.

Apple has said that Jobs knew of backdated option grants but "was unaware of the accounting implications," and an internal investigation cleared him of misconduct.

Still, according to media reports, he's been questioned by authorities at the SEC and the investigation by federal authorities is ongoing. With such questions still swirling, some wonder about the possible downside of leaning so heavily on one person to drive the company's success -- and what the Jerk-friendly board is doing to prepare for the possibility of losing its star pitchman.

At other companies in which options were manipulated, boards of directors haven't wasted time in showing chief executives the door. But Jobs is a whole different animal.

"Jobs is Apple's No. 1 asset," says Jim Post, professor of management at Boston University. "A great deal of [Apple's] market valuation is tied up with Jobs' presence and his role." If Jobs were to be charged with securities fraud, Post predicts the stock would take a 25% hit. Apple shares closed Thursday trading at $89.51, gaining 31 cents. The stock has remained somewhat range-bound in the past three months.

Well-run company boards should be thinking about and planning for succession all the time -- and it's doubly important for a company that's heavily associated with one person, some say.
Microsoft for example, has appeared to handle losing the Great God Gates without taking a dramatic hit to its shares or to the perception of its future prospects. Although investors feel that it's like Gates is in the next room, changing into a pair of fresh Depends.

Apple observers say that while there is a perception that the company would fall apart without Jobs, it's unlikely.

Investors would have an initial emotional reaction if Jobs were to leave, but "stocks ultimately move around their fundamental value," Chirag Vasavada, an investment analyst with T. Rowe Price says. "If Jobs leaves, it's not necessary that Apple falls apart. The perception might be that."

Still, it seems prudent to some investors that the company consider not putting all its chips on the Jerk.

"We'd like to see more visible leaders within Apple," says Jim Grossman, an equity analyst with Thrivent Asset Management, which holds Apple shares. "Their secrecy makes people think that Jobs is the only brilliant guy [at Apple] ," Grossman says. "There are a lot of smart people working there. It's not just him."

http://www.thestreet.com/newsanalysis/techstockupdate/10340187.html

'I'm sorry, I can't hire you Dave...' Google's job robot weeds out puny earthlings

The Church of Our Lady of the Perpetual Algorithm, Google, is employing a robot to select the faithful. According to the New York Times, an algorithm scans job applications and ranks candidates on a score from 0 to 100. From next month, it will be used to screen all applications.

The Times quotes Google's "Vice President of People Operations" (as opposed to Machine Operations) , who explains - "With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates."

That's one way of putting it. Because the demand for jobs at Google outstrips the supply of vacancies, it's more accurate to say that the robot is simply accelerating the rejection process.

Google is famous for its faith in reductionist, functional solutions. It even likes to suggest that such algorithms emerge spontaneously, full of natural goodness - and without apparent intervention by imperfect humans. Answering accusations of bias in Google News, the manager responsible for the service is on the record as explaining -

"The truth is, Google News doesn't have a point of view...It's a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can't be systematically biased in any direction."

However, as we discovered when we interviewed the creator of an "Artificial Intelligence Chat-bot", programmers who develop algorithms tend to encode their own shortcomings into the systems they create. And the Times confirms that the job-bot's selection criteria is based on surveys from existing staff. One of the indicators is ominously called "organizational citizenship". Square pegs in these round holes? Fahgeddaboudit!

In Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, the company's monoculture is enforced by obedience to the cult of personality - top down. By contrast, Google appears to be developing its monoculture from the bottom-up. But it's still a monoculture - and one only likely to be reinforced by algorithmic rejection of "unsuitable" candidates.

Next on the to do list: how can an algorithmically-minded corporation avoid missing problems that can't be solved algorithmically? Pray to Our Lady to intercede for them, what else?

Go figure: Kiwis flock to AdultSheepFinder.com

New Zealanders are flocking to an exciting new online initiative aimed at connecting farm fauna fanciers with their perfect date. The ovine-lovers resource is evidently a big hit down there in NZ, with around 100 per cent of the current worldwide membership of 20,333 coming from the set of Lord of the Rings.

The site boasts:

With AdultSheepFinder you can meet someone in your area at the touch of a button!

Find the right sheep for you from our extensive database and try to arrange with

their owners for an encounter!

Just to rub it in, the wags behind this bit of NZ-baiting offer only "New Zealand" in the drop-down list of countries in their "Search Our Members" facility, and further advise: "If you would like to know more about Sheepsters we can recommend the following literature- Lonely Planet - New Zealand Edition.

Enraged New Zealanders can spare themselves a whois search on the domain, since the perpetrators of AdultSheepFinder.com are keeping their heads well down.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/21/shep_fanciers_website/

Feud-O-Matic: Google goes after Microsoft’s fattest franchise

Google, the internet search maven, unveiled a package of communications and productivity software aimed at businesses, which overwhelmingly rely on Microsoft products for those functions.

The package, called Google Apps, combines two sets of previously available software bundles. One included programs for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and Web page creation; the other, called Docs and Spreadsheets, included programs to read and edit documents created with Microsoft Word and Excel, the mainstays of Microsoft Office, an $11 billion annual franchise.

Unlike Microsoft’s products, which reside on PCs and corporate networks, Google’s will be delivered as services accessible over the Internet, with Google storing the data. That will allow businesses to offload some of the cost of managing computers and productivity software.
For corporate technology staffs, “we think that will be a very refreshing change,” said Dave Girouard, Google’s vice president and general manager for enterprise.

The e-mail and messaging package, which is based on products like Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, has been available in a free trial since August and is supported by advertising. It has been used by thousands of businesses, educational institutions and other organizations, Google said.

Google will continue to provide the extended bundle of software free to businesses and educational institutions. But it will also offer businesses additional e-mail storage and customer support for an annual fee of $50 a user.

By comparison, businesses pay on average about $225 a person annually for Office and Exchange, the Microsoft server software typically used for corporate e-mail systems, in addition to the costs of in-house management, customer support and hardware, according to the market research firm Gartner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/22/technology/22google.html?ex=1329800400&en=bf509fe772d5ed27&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Why Is Ballmer trying to sell Vista down the river?

Has he decided to lay off the bong, changed his meds or what?

It might look like it from reactions such as the Mini-Microsoft blog, which complained in its headline: "Stop Him Before He Speaks Again!" What Ballmer was actually trying to do was lower the financial expectations of some Wall Street analysts, who were being "overly aggressive" about Vista's impact on Microsoft's profits. "We're driving it hard, but I think some people have gotten a little overexcited," he said.

Ballmer was speaking to a group of financial analysts in a hotel in New York, but an undeniable side-effect was that Microsoft's shares took a beating, falling by 2.4% in a day. That was never going to please the folks back home in Redmond, especially employees with stock options.

Expectations have been buoyed by market research group Current Analysis, which reported that PC sales by US retailers for the week ending February 3 were 67% up on last year, and 173% higher than the previous week. Also, Current Analysis reckoned that Windows Vista Home Premium had 70% of sales, compared with 22% for Vista Home Basic. (On notebook PCs, it was 76% to 59%.)

Since it is a very long time since Windows XP appeared (2001), and since the wait for Vista probably depressed PC sales before and after Christmas, this isn't exactly earth-shattering news.

Ballmer pointed out that if analysts were bullish about Microsoft then they should also be bullish about PC manufacturers, because almost all copies of Vista are sold pre-installed. "So, either you have to increase your forecast for the total PC market, and then Vista will do just fine, or those two things are out of whack," said Ballmer.

True, but Microsoft can make more money out of Vista in two ways, without PC sales increasing. That happens if users buy more expensive versions of Vista, and if they buy Vista instead of pirating a copy. The former looks a good bet: Microsoft seems to have made Home Basic unattractive enough for people to pay the much higher price for Home Premium. The latter remains an unknown. But Vista's version of Windows Genuine Advantage piracy-checking and the lack of security updates may prove unpleasant enough to prompt more people to pay up.

Reducing expectations is also good for Ballmer, in the sense that it gives him easier numbers to beat. Analysts and share buyers hate you if you promise an 80% rise in profits and only deliver 75%. They love you if you promise 5% and deliver 10%.

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,2017954,00.html

Microsoft bitch-slapped with $1.5bn award

OK, maybe M'soft doesn't actually deserve this, but when you're the 800 pound gorilla in the room, when the shit starts flying, you're hit with it. Besides, it's hard to feel sorry for the likes of Bill.

Microsoft has been hit with a $1.52bn patent infringement award, one of the biggest on record, in a case that it warned would have sweeping implications for many technology companies involved in digital music.

The award was won on Thursday by Alcatel-Lucent after a jury in a US district court in San Diego agreed with its claim that the software giant had infringed two of its patents. The dispute surrounded Microsoft’s use of MP3 technology, a format for encoding and compressing digital music so that it can be transmitted over the internet.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, rejected the verdict as “completely unsupported by the law or the facts”, and predicted the ruling would have implications for “hundreds of other companies who have licensed MP3 technology”.

An Alcatel-Lucent spokesperson said there were no other lawsuits outstanding over the technology.

The large size of the award highlights the scale of the risk to Microsoft as it faces a series of other wide-ranging legal disputes with Alcatel-Lucent over some of the fundamental technology used in PCs and related devices.

Thursday’s verdict, stemming from the use of audio coding technology in PCs, was the first of five due to be heard by the San Diego court in the coming months. The others relate to speech coding technology in Windows; user interface patents; technology in the Xbox games console; and video coding in other Microsoft software.

Given Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop computing market, the potential losses are considerable. Thursday’s award was calculated based on the number of Windows operating systems sold since May 2003, multiplied by the average selling price of a range of PCs.

Microsoft argued that it had licensed the necessary technology to use the MP3 format in its software from Fraunhofer Society, a German research concern. It paid just $16m for the privilege, but Mr Burt claimed it was “the industry-recognised rightful licensor”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2d77afb8-c2d0-11db-9e1c-000b5df10621.html

Apple and Cisco pucker up and kiss

We'd give almost anything to see these guys walking down the street, gazing into each other's eyes, holding hands.

Apple and Cisco will have products on the market called "iPhone" at the same time, without suing each other. Instead, they are going to work towards interoperability in other areas to prove they are now best friends.

The announcement came last night in a joint statement, with Cisco giving up its claim that having two products with the same name would cause "confusion, mistake and deception among consumers".

Actually the use of the same name is only a problemo if the products are ever likely to complete, and this was the point of contention between the two companies. Cisco's iPhone is a VoIP product which works over Wi-Fi, while Apple's device is (apparently) a "revolutionary way to manage your life" - or, more accurately, a mobile phone. Apple had dismissed Cisco's claim as "silly" on the grounds that the devices would never compete. Cisco held the opposite view.

But now it seems Cisco has dropped its claim in exchange for promises of working with Apple towards interoperability in other areas, the details of which have not been made public.

Both companies have their eyes firmly fixed on getting their crap out of the spare room and into the living room, so they should have plenty to talk about.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/22/iphone_to_be_shared/

Tech IPOs: They're b-a-a-a-a-ck!

What’s that loud popping sound? An invading force from Green Peace? Remnants of the Big Bang? Why it’s champagne corks popping again in Silicon Valley! Tech startups are coming back to Wall Street

For the first six years of the century, the dream of building a technology company and taking it public was out of reach for all but a few lucky entrepreneurs. Getting bought by a company with deep pockets (like Google or eBay) became the norm - and with the exception of a few standouts (like YouTube or Skype).

Get ready for a tidal shift. Judging by the number of companies that have already filed or indicated that they might, 2007 is shaping up to be the biggest year for initial public offerings in the tech world since the end of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

"We're seeing strong interest from institutional growth funds looking to invest in new companies, and venture capitalists looking to bring their companies public," says Michael Moe, CEO of Think-Equity Partners, a San Francisco investment bank. "You're finally going to see some interesting, classic growth companies come out." In short, Moe adds, "it's fun again."

The 1990s-style fun began in the last six months of 2006, when Nasdaq rose almost 20 percent and filings by private tech companies to begin the IPO process were up 31 percent compared with the same period a year before. And no wonder: Tech IPOs in 2006 returned a healthy average of 37 percent over their offer prices, according to Renaissance Capital.

There was no single equivalent of Netscape, whose blowout 1995 IPO sparked the dotcom boom, but two tech IPOs were ranked among the best performers of the year: Networking equipment company Riverbed Technology (Charts) saw its value more than triple in the two months after its November offering. And the stock of storage firm Isilon Systems (Charts) shot up 77 percent on its first day of trading in mid-December, the best opening-day performance for a tech stock in six years.

It's about time. After the dotcom bubble burst, wary investors were unkind to all technology companies, especially startups. To reap returns from investments made in 1999 and 2000 or simply to break even - VCs were forced to look for merger and acquisition offers. Wily entrepreneurs learned to build companies fast and flip them fast. Now, with new funds to invest, everyone can afford to be more patient.

Of course, plenty of companies have been patient already. The bulk of IPOs likely to hit in the coming months are retreads, launches that were planned in previous years but pulled back because the market seemed unreceptive. They include wireless equipment company Aruba Networks, Wi-Max networking company Clearwire, software security company Sourcefire, and local cellular carrier MetroPCS.

"The VCs have been in the trenches with these companies for the past few years, waiting for the right time to go out," says David Menlow, president of independent research firm IPOFinancial.com. "Now we're seeing them prep a lot more deals to come to the public market."

To be sure, smooth sailing on Nasdaq is never guaranteed. For every successful IPO like Riverbed or Isilon, there is a Vonage: One of the most anticipated IPOs of 2006, the Internet phone company saw its value drop 60 percent between its May debut and January, battered by mounting losses and increased competition.

Call it a warning shot across Silicon Valley's bow: There will be no irrational exuberance this time around.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/03/01/8401021/

How Jerkoff Jobs played hardball with the iPhone

We hate to give the Jerk credit, even when he seems to deserve it, but when the lowlife scores…he scores. Of course if once the iPhone goes into production and then lays there like a lox, we’ll be back and it won’t be pretty.

During a visit to Las Vegas last December for a rodeo event, Cingular Wireless chief executive Stan Sigman received a welcome guest: Steve Jobs. The chief stopped by Sigman's Four Seasons hotel suite to show off the iPhone, a sleek cellphone designed to surf the Web and double as an iPod music player.

The phone had been in development by Apple and Cingular for two years and was weeks away from being revealed to the world. And yet this was the first time Sigman got to see it. For three hours, Jobs played with the device, with its touch-screen that allows users to view contacts, dial numbers and flip through photos with the swipe of a finger. Sigman looked on in awe, according to a person familiar with the meeting.

Behind the scenes in the making of the iPhone, Apple bucked the rules of the cellphone industry by wresting control away from the normally powerful wireless carriers. These service providers usually hold enormous sway over how phones are developed and marketed -- controlling every detail from processing power to the various features that come with the phone.

Not so with Apple and Cingular. Only three executives at the carrier, which is now the wireless unit of AT&T Inc., got to see the iPhone before it was announced. Cingular agreed to leave its brand off the body of the phone. Upsetting some Cingular insiders, it also abandoned its usual insistence that phone makers carry its software for Web surfing, ringtones and other services. The deal also calls for Cingular to share with Apple a portion of the monthly revenues from subscribers, a person familiar with the matter says.

In another break with standard practice, the iPhone will have an exclusive retail network: The partners are making it available only through Cingular and Apple stores, as well as both companies' Web sites.

Jobs once referred to telecom operators as "orifices" that other companies, including phone makers, must go through to reach consumers. While meeting with Cingular and other wireless operators he often reminded them of his view, dismissing them as commodities and telling them that they would never understand the Web and entertainment industry the way Apple did, a person familiar with the talks says.

http://www.moneyweb.co.za/mw/view/mw/en/page94?oid=71939&sn=Detail

Microsoft and Ma Bell Duke It Out in the Supreme Court

Corp. giants Microsoft and AT&T are getting set to duke it out before the U.S. Supreme Court next Wednesday (Feb. 21) in a case that will decide whether a company can be liable for infringement on a domestic patent abroad. Legal experts say the outcome could have widespread implications on both the software industry and the manner in which patent holders can protect their intellectual property.

The financial fall-out of a decision against Microsoft could cost the software industry billions of dollars, making Microsoft v. AT&T one of the major business cases on the high court's docket this term.

"The case is clearly of huge importance in terms of monetary value," said Richard Samp, chief counsel at Washington Legal Foundation.

The issue at hand is whether Microsoft violated AT&T's domestic patent on sophisticated speech decoding technology by sending the software overseas to be replicated and installed in its Windows operating system.

Microsoft v. AT&T revolves around the interpretation of a section of the Patent Act which involves the export of components of patented inventions from the U.S. Under section 271 (f) of this act, a person that supplies a component of a patented invention overseas is liable for infringement.

Sounds cut and dry. But here's where it gets tricky: Microsoft and a vast number of its supporters, including Intel , Yahoo! and Amazon.com , contend that software is not a physical component, but intangible information.

Going a step further, Microsoft argues that the software wasn't technically supplied from the United States because overseas manufacturers of its computers made copies of the software from a master disk and installed those copies into the operating system.

Since the copies, and not the original software, were in the computers built abroad, Microsoft says it can't be considered a supplier.

But AT&T argues that Microsoft's logic is simply a way to circumvent patent law and infringe upon the company's patent. The company successfully convinced the trial courts and the federal circuit that software is an important component of its speech decoding technology because the invention wouldn't work without it.

Now the issue lies with the U.S. Supreme Court justices, with the exception of Chief Justice John Roberts, who recused himself because he owns shares of Microsoft. Experts are divided about who will prevail in the case since they say both sides have strong arguments.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/16/news/companies/scotus_microsoft/index.htm?postversion=2007021613

From the Give us a break Dept. Man fired for visiting adult chat room at work sues IBM for $5 million

You’ve gotta be kidding! A man who was fired by IBM for visiting an adult chat room at work is suing the company for $5 million, claiming he is an Internet addict who deserves treatment and sympathy rather than dismissal.

James Pacenza, 58, of Montgomery, says he visits chat rooms to treat traumatic stress incurred in 1969 when he saw his best friend killed during an Army patrol in Vietnam.

In papers filed in federal court in White Plains, Pacenza said the stress caused him to become "a sex addict, and with the development of the Internet, an Internet addict." He claimed protection under the American with Disabilities Act.

His lawyer, Michael Diederich, says Pacenza never visited pornographic sites at work, violated no written IBM rule and did not surf the Internet any more or any differently than other employees. He also says age discrimination contributed to IBM's actions. Pacenza, 55 at the time, had been with the company for 19 years and says he could have retired in a year.

IBM Corp. has asked Judge Stephen Robinson for a summary judgment, saying its policy against surfing sexual websites is clear. It also claims Pacenza was told he could lose his job after an incident four months earlier, which Pacenza denies.

"Plaintiff was discharged by IBM because he visited an Internet chat room for a sexual experience during work after he had been previously warned," the company said.

IBM also said sexual behavior disorders are specifically excluded from the ADA and denied any age discrimination.

If it goes to trial, the case could affect how employers regulate Internet use that is not work-related, or how Internet overuse is categorized medically. Stanford University issued a nationwide study last year that found that up to 14% of computer users reported neglecting work, school, families, food and sleep to use the Internet.

The study's director, Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, said then that he was most concerned about the numbers of people who hid their non-essential Internet use or used the Internet to escape a negative mood, much in the same way that alcoholics might.

Until he was fired, Pacenza was making $65,000 a year operating a machine at a plant in East Fishkill that makes computer chips.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-02-18-internet-addict_x.htm?csp=34

Feds may finger Broadcom, Apple ex-execs

Federal prosecutors are strongly considering criminal charges against former executives of Broadcom, Apple, and KLA-Tencor, related to the backdating of stock options, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the situation.

Prosecutors are also nearing charges against a former official of computer-security company McAfee, the paper said, citing people familiar with the situation.

In addition, a former executive of Engineered Support Systems, a defense contractor now owned by DRS Technologies, has been told of a likely charge, the paper said, citing a person close to the matter.

More than 170 companies have been investigated by U.S. authorities or have conducted internal inquiries into possible manipulation of option grant dates. Some companies are accused of backdating grant dates to days when the share price was lower, giving the recipient the opportunity for extra profit.

On Thursday, the ex-general counsel at Monster Worldwide pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud in relation to the backdating of stock options, a day after the former chief executive of video game publisher Take-Two Interactive Software pleaded guilty to options-related charges.

Federal charges have also been brought against former executives at Brocade Communications Systems and Comverse Technology, stemming from the stock options backdating scandal.

Officials at Apple, KLA-Tencor, McAfee and DRS could not be reached.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-11153_22-6160001.html

Are digital music sales playing a swan song?

ITunes, Rhapsody, Zune Store, Napster - you name it. Are they all commercial flops?

The hype has people believing otherwise. Bloggers, tech writers and your friends who know more about computers than you do shout that iTunes is the best thing to happen to music since the microphone. Or maybe psychedelic drugs.

But it's just not true. Nearly six years after the introduction of iTunes and the iPod, online music has failed to interest the vast majority of the world's music consumers. Which is no doubt why Jerkoff Jobs recently called for an end to copy-protection software on digital songs. Something has to change, or iTunes and its ilk will never break into the mass market.Jobs admitted that iTunes' penetration has been weak. In his discussed-to-death essay, "Thoughts On Music" - posted a couple of weeks ago on Apple's Web site - Jobs noted that only about 3 percent of songs on a typical iPod are bought on iTunes. The rest are either ripped from CDs and transferred into iPods, or illegitimately downloaded for free off file-sharing sites such as Kazaa or eDonkey.

The reality for iTunes might not even be that good. In a report released in December, Forrester Research said it did a strenuous, independent analysis of iTunes purchases. It found that just 3.2 percent of all "online households" - homes that have computers and Internet connections, a subset of all homes - made an iTunes purchase over a one-year period.

About 10 percent of buyers purchased just one track during the entire year. About one-quarter of buyers spent $5 or less for the year. Most iTunes users, Forrester says, own fewer than two CDs' worth of iTunes music. Really, it's as if tens of millions of people each had a big honkin' refrigerator, and put a quart of milk in it a few times a year.

Worse for Apple, Forrester found that the number of monthly transactions per iTunes household was declining in 2006. "It is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music," the report says.

Apple rebutted Forrester's report, saying that iTunes sales continue to grow. But Apple did not offer specific numbers to counter Forrester's. Jobs' music manifesto certainly confirmed that consumers - people who already bought iPods, for Pete's sake - are simply not buying many iTunes songs.

It's not just an iTunes problem. In January, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry - the global bureaucracy guarding music copyrights - said that online music sales in 2006 "nearly doubled." Which sounds amazing. Until you get to the part where the IFPI says that sales had tripled in 2005. So the growth rate had slowed.

"Downloads, as a business model for digital music, has failed," Dave Goldberg, VP of Yahoo Music, told a crowd at Digital Music Forum West late last year. "When you look at people who are buying downloads, it is older people who have money and time, and people who are doing it through gift cards."

How about subscription services, like Rhapsody and Napster? Not much joy there, either. Rhapsody reportedly has about 1 million subscribers. The rest, all together, have about another million. That's an audience share that approaches the 0.7 rating Animal Planet got when it aired "Puppy Bowl III" before the Super Bowl.

It's certainly not that people don't want to buy stuff on the Internet. Amazon.com's sales soared in 2006. Blue Nile is thriving selling diamond jewelry, and eBay sells millions of cars. Getting people to buy songs ought to be a snap.

But for the majority of people, downloading songs is too hard and too frustrating. Some of that problem is the digital rights management (DRM) software that limits where and how songs can be played. It makes iTunes songs playable only on iPods, Rhapsody subscription songs playable only on certain devices, and so on.

http://indystar.gns.gannett.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070215/TECH01/701260346/1001/TECH

Microsoft and Iowa kiss and make up

With this hanging over his head, no wonder Gates the Great hasn't been able to get a good night's sleep. And best of all, Microsoft won't have to fork over any moolah - just last year's software, bugs included free!

Microsoft has settled a lawsuit alleging it exploited its dominant position to overcharge Iowa state consumers $453m in the last 12 years. In a standard settlement deal, local schools are set to benefit with Microsoft providing funds to low-income institutions for the purchase PCs and software - probably Windows. Litigants in Iowa had claimed $329m in damages.

Details will not be disclosed until April, the date for preliminary court approval.

The seven-year class action was brought in 2000 by an Iowa businessman who claimed Microsoft's status as a monopoly supplier enabled it to over-charge for Window and Office applications between May 18, 1994, and June 20, 2006. It was claimed Microsoft inflated the price of Windows by an average of $42.49 and Word by $10.55.

Class action cases against Microsoft are fairly common, but this particular suit gained wider notoriety than most for two reasons. First, among the 25 million internal Microsoft documents that were submitted, was former Windows chief Jim Allchin's infamous 2004 email containing the immortal concession to the superiority of Apple's desktop product and relative weakness of Windows. "I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft," he said.

Next, litigants claimed that Microsoft was in breach of its 2002 anti-trust settlement with the US government, by using 500 un-documented APIs to ensure Microsoft's applications worked better with Windows than applications of rivals.

But that's all behind them now. "The settlement will provide tremendous benefits for many people throughout the state of Iowa," class co-counsel Rick Hagstrom said in an agreed statement with Microsoft. "We are pleased with the results of this litigation and we are pleased that the process worked so well." Yeah, we’ll bet Gates is so happy, he’s pinching himself.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/microsoft_iowa_settlement/

Kansas: Darwin 10, Creationists 3

The devil made them do it. School authorities in the American heartland state of Kansas have delivered a rebuff to subscribers to the notion of intelligent design by voting to banish language challenging evolution from new science guidelines.

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines.

The decision is the latest in a string of defeats for proponents of creationism, and its modern variant, intelligent design. It reverses the decision taken by the same authorities two years ago to include language undermining Darwinism - on the insistence of conservative parents and activists in the intelligent design movement.

In redrafting guidelines for science teaching, the board removed language suggesting that key concepts such as a common origin for all life on Earth and for species change were seen as controversial by the scientific community.

The board also rewrote the definition of science, limiting it to the search for rational explanations of what occurs in the universe. The move, though limited in its scope, was seen as significant because it rejected a key argument of subscribers to intelligent design: that providing children with arguments for and against evolution merely amounts to fair play.

But Kansas remains a conservative state and many people harbour misgivings about teaching evolution to school children. The school board received a petition with nearly 4,000 signatures opposing Tuesday's decisions.

Overcoming such misgivings will be difficult, said Jack Krebs, a former math teacher who is president of Kansas Citizens for Science.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2013263,00.html

Microsoft's fat patch: Does this mean 40 lean days ahead?

Holy crap! A long time ago an ex-roommate warned us about Microsoft’s serious patch addiction, but this beats everything. Well almost. Microsoft pushed patches for 12 vulnerabilities out of the door yesterday, six of them classed as critical and six of them important.

While it is not unprecedented for the vendor to issue a dozen patches, this is on the high side. But at least the vendor can console itself that it did not have to issue any patches for its flagship OS Vista, which only hit consumers at the end of last month. Still, it’s early.

As it was, the critical patches spanned a broad range of Microsoft technology, with vulnerabilities in HTLM Help, Data Access Components, Word, and Office, and, our favourite, in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine. A cumulative security patch for Internet Explorer rounded out the critical vulns, all of which could allow remote code execution.

The Important vulnerabilities patched spanned Interactive Training, the Windows Shell, Windows Image Acquisition , Microsoft OLE dialog, Microsoft MFC and Rich Edit. But, heaven forfend, it wasn’t all remote execution – Shell and Image Acquisition bugs allowed elevation of privilege

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/02/14/ms_patch_feb/

What Windows 7? Microsoft tries to stuff the Windows 7 genie back in the bottle

A few days after a Windows Core operating System Division exec said to expect the next version of Windows to ship in two years, Microsoft is attempting to distance itself from his pronouncement.

“The launch of Windows Vista was an incredibly exciting moment for our customers and partners around the world, and the company is focused on the value Windows Vista will bring to people today. We are not giving official guidance to the public yet about the next version of Windows, other than that we’re working on it. When we are ready, we will provide updates,” read the statement, attributed to Kevin Kutz, Director, Windows Client.

Does that mean Corporate VP Ben Fathi, the Microsoft exec who floated the 2009 date for the next release of Windows that shall not be named (but is Windows 7) was wrong? Microsoft isn't going that far. What is the company trying to say? "We don't want to be held accountable to a ship-date target."

While not talking about the next version of Windows until officials are good and ready is a nice theory, it's a bad practice. Sure, Microsoft would be foolish to disclose at this point a full feature list for an operating system that is only in the very earliest phases of development.

But customers want and need to know roughly what's coming when in order to plan their corporate and consumer PC purchases. There's a big difference between 2009 (the supposed current target for Windows 7) and 2011 (the possible target given Microsoft Chairman Bill's two-to-four year time window for the next version of Windows).

Get real. The Windows 7 genie is out of the bottle. Stuffing it back in will only create more customer confusion.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=258

Belgium shafts Google: And they have to be told twice

Lube up. If this doesn’t come as close to the Zipless F*ck then nothing does. Copiepresse, the French and German language news agency in Belgium, has for the second time won the support of the Belgian courts in its battle to stop Google including snippets of its articles on the Google News search pages.

In September last year, the court handed down an injunction against the search firm using Copiepresse's material. Google asked the court to reconsider its judgement, a fine legal point that is not quite the same as an appeal, and this week the injunction was upheld.

There is some good news in there for Google, though. It had been facing a fine of €1m per day for continuing to display the disputed material, plus an additional daily €500k,000 if it had failed to make the judgement public. This week, the court cut the potential fine for publishing the material to a much less staggering €25,000 per day.

Copiepresse, which manages copyrights for various newspapers, argued that the publications it represents only make news stories freely available for a limited time. Extracts of the copyrighted works were still available through Google's site once this limited period was over, it argued.

The firm said it was happy to discuss terms with Google, so that the search engine could continue listing its stories, for a fee.

Last October, Microsoft opted to settle out of court and agreed to remove links to Copiepresse's news rather than fight it out in court and risk setting a legal precedent.

A spokesman for Google told us that the company was now planning to appeal, but refused to speculate about the likely outcome of the case.

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/13/google_copiepresse/

Is the Jerkoff serious about DRM free music? Do you believe in fairies?

As the argument rages between the Jerkoff and the four major record companies about removing digital rights management (DRM) restrictions from music, some stuff has been factored out of the arrangement. Or are we the only ones to notice….

Fact number one is that the iPod was launched in 2001, two years before the April 2003 launch of iTunes in the US and later launch elsewhere. Prior to the launch of iTunes, sales of the iPod were not exactly shooting through the stratosphere as they are now. Apple was a late comer to a very crowded market.

Pundits and Jobs who point to the fact that only 2 billion songs have been downloaded to iPods - an average of about 20 per iPod sold - ignore the fact that every single one of those songs were destined for just one brand of device - an iPod.

Fact number two is that Jobs, now the champion of DRM-free music, has until recently been a very vocal opponent of European efforts to force Apple to make iTunes downloads interoperable with other players and iPods interoperable with downloads from other online stores. He claimed it would encourage piracy.

If the Jerkoff really does believe in DRM free music and is totally opposed to the pro-DRM stance of the record companies then why not, as an interim step immediately license FairPlay to other music player manufacturers? Why not make iPods compatible with PlaysForSure and Zune DRM? The same questions could be asked of Gates and Microsoft, who have so craftily copied the Apple model with the Zune player.

Can we talk? We mean, can we talk? The current situation is that if you happen to be an iTunes user, you're going to also be an iPod owner. And if you're an iPod owner, you're most likely going to be an iTunes user. Does anyone seriously believe that Steve Jobs wants to change that?

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/9487/1023/

Unlimited mobile music for $3.99 a week Et tu, Apple?

In what may prove to be the most far-reaching digital music launch since iTunes, Omnifone today took the wraps off its MusicStation service.

The service gives mobile phone users access to the big four labels' music catalogs on-demand for £1.99 (€2.99) a week, using a player that runs on mid-range feature phones and GPRS or EDGE networks, as well as high-end 3G phones - which Omnifone reckons gives it access to 70 per cent of the world's phone users. Indie content will follow, it's expected, as the indies are in the process of setting up their one-stop licensing arm Merlin, announced earlier this month.

As well as signing up the major four labels - UMG, Sony-BMG, Warner Music and EMI - Omnifone has inked deals with 23 network operators across the globe for MusicStation. The first of these rollouts - Telenor in Scandinavia and Vodafone's Vodacom in South Africa - are confirmed for launch in Q2, with many of the others following in Q3.

In addition to the mobile-only service, a PC and Mac version of the MusicStation client will be available as part of a premium service costing £2.99 (€3.99) a week. With each plan, there will be no data charges.

Users will be able to receive share playlists, create personalized charts, and receive information about artists, concerts and promotions in the MusicStation player.

Omnifone, then offers a full-on challenge not only to Apple's iTunes, but quite probably to MySpace too.

"Selling music is a legacy business," CEO Rob Lewis told us. Lewis believes per-unit pricing is dead and the winners will be companies who offer the best subscription services.

He also believes MusicStation's willingness to partner with carriers casts the Apple's iPhone announce in a new light. Cingular agreed to Apple's terms and disabled over-the-air music downloads to the iPhone - granting Apple exclusivity over acquiring content for the device, which must either be ripped from a CD or else be purchased through Apple's own iTunes store. Verizon had balked at similar terms.

"iPhone is not good for operators," Lewis said. "MusicStation is an all you can eat iTunes you can access from the bus, or anywhere."

Partnering with the operators also gives Omnifone a global roll-out that PC-based companies can only envy, another contrast with Apple's country-by-country exclusive world tour. Apple launched the US version of the iTunes store in spring 2003, with the UK following in summer of 2004, and Japan more than two years after the original launch. Lewis notes that in each market, 50 per cent of the catalog is local, something ignored by rivals.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/12/omnifone_launch/

iPod tweaks not even The Jerk and his band of merry men have thought of…

We don’t know how they do it, but those Brits are always a step or two ahead of us. Check out ibuzz.co.uk. Dance to the music, it takes two to tango… or whatever.

New Search Refinements and a Chance to Shmear Google all over the Map

Remember PARC, the place that invented the mouse and the desktop icon? Well, early in the decade, a struggling Xerox Corporation was trying to sell off a stake in its Palo Alto Research Center, which it could no longer afford to support. But with the technology bubble bursting, the price that investors were willing to pay for a piece of PARC, as the center is known, kept going down.

So in 2002, Xerox switched to Plan B: it spun off the center into an independent subsidiary and sought to prove that it could sustain itself by licensing technology and forming partnerships with outside companies.

Today, PARC is announcing a deal that underscores that strategy. It is licensing a broad portfolio of patents and technology to a well-financed start-up with an ambitious and potentially lucrative goal: to build a search engine that could some day rival Google.

The start-up, Powerset, is licensing PARC’s “natural language” technology — the art of making computers understand and process languages like English or French. Powerset hopes the technology will be the basis of a new search engine that allows users to type queries in plain English, rather than using keywords.

In the fall, Powerset raised $12.5 million in its first round of financing from venture-capital firms and individual investors. The challenges facing it are immense, and the odds of success are long. But the PARC technology, which is a result of 30 years of research, is certain to lend it an aura of credibility.

PARC’s natural-language technology is among the “most comprehensive in existence,” said Fernando Pereira, an expert in natural language and the chairman of the department of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania. But by itself, it will not guarantee Powerset’s success, Mr. Pereira said.

“The question of whether this technology is adequate to any application, whether search or anything else, is an empirical question that has to be tested,” Mr. Pereira added.

As part of the deal, a leading natural-language researcher at PARC, Ronald M. Kaplan, will join Powerset’s staff of about 40 as chief technology and scientific officer. PARC will also receive an equity stake in Powerset and earn royalties from the company. Additionally, Powerset will sponsor a handful of researchers at PARC.

The specific financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed. But Mark Bernstein, president and center director of PARC, said: “It’s one of the biggest deals that we have done, and we hope that it grows into the biggest in terms of the length of the relationship and the amount of value we can create together. It represents a commitment of some of the intellectual crown jewels that PARC has created.”

As part of the business model forged when it was spun off, PARC has struck various business relationships with outside firms and organizations.

About half of its research is still sponsored by Xerox, Mr. Bernstein said. But the lab is also conducting paid research for Fujitsu, Dai Nippon Printing and others. Some of its researchers work on federally financed projects, and the lab is working with ipValue, a intellectual-property licensing firm, to commercialize some of its research.

PARC has also formed a partnership with the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego to develop a system that uses laser printing technology to detect cancer cells.

And in the deal that most closely mirrors the alliance with Powerset, PARC has helped incubate SolFocus, a start-up that is developing solar power technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/technology/09license.html?ex=1328677200&en=86eecf5c76d7eef3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Anna Nicole Mourning Madness: 'R.I.P. you sweet angel of my heart'

Was there no end to her talents? The tragic news that the world is this morning poorer to the tune of one pair of 38DD breasts has moved netizens to honour Anna Nicole Smith in time-honoured web tradition.

RIP Anna Nicole SmithFirst up, try "The official Anna Nicole Smith dies website", which tearfully declares: "May angels guide u on ur path to heaven to see ur son and that old dude u killed."

This heartfelt sentiment has, naturally, already provoked a flurry of comments, including "She was the greatest living human of all time. R.I.P. you sweet angel of my heart", "Taken from us before she was poor enough to do hardcore :( RIP", xxx and "But how much of her will actually be able to organic enough to decompose?"

Bless. The Photoshop crowd, meanwhile, wasted no time in mobilising its silicone implant filter, as the photo shown above demonstrates, while net wags got busy with defacing the Anna Nicole Wikipedia entry, which is now locked down against further fiddling.

And in case you were wondering whether the period of international mourning for Ms Smith will affect the relentless march of capitalism, fear not. Down at eBay, you can snap up a pair of Anna Nicole Smith autographed red panties or, touchingly, a memorial Anna Nicole Smith fridge magnet which is "great for car, tool box, refrigerator, any smooth steel surface".

Yes, hard as it is, life must go on. We'll leave the final word on tragic Anna Nicole Smith to one fan who was moved to post: "Sweet noble Anna, the 39 short years you spent with us seemed like 3,900. Which, coincidentally, was your cholesterol level."

http://www.theregister.com/2007/02/09/rip_anna_nicole_smith/

Cybercrime? Fahgeddaboudid!

Police too snowed under to cope

I would imagine that some reading this would be old enough to remember the hard hitting TV series The Sweeney. Each episode was action packed with crashing and banging as the heroes went from "manor to manor" "spinning drums" and "executing Ws" after showing "their briefs"*.

This program was supposed to represent policing as it was in the 1970s and early '80s in all its gory detail as the cops were kept busy sorting out armed robberies.

Moving forward to 2007 and no one in their right mind would bother with an armed robbery these days.

Why? It's not worth the risk. Many robberies see those making off with only a few hundred pounds as modern day security systems cloak the villains in smoke and/or dye while capturing high definition video for later analysis. Of course, there are still armed robberies, but these are mostly carried out by witless wonders that need some cash for their latest hit rather than your more sophisticated crook.

So where are these sophisticates now hanging out? Well, I would suggest at a PC near you right now. And no, I don't mean police constable as we don't have many of these anymore, as they seem to have been replaced on the streets by their yellow jacketed support officer colleagues in an attempt to make the public feel safe.

The problem is that the police just can't cope with computer crime. The volume of e-crime (as it is now officially called) has quite frankly left those agencies responsible for maintaining law and order high and dry.

According to a report by the Metropolitan Police, we all spent £7.5bn over Christmas online in 2006 - up by 50 per cent on the previous year. With this level of money flowing through consumers' computers bad people are attracted like bees around honey.

People that I speak to that have suffered from e-crime are pulling their hair out at the reporting process. OK, the credit card companies do what they can in most instances, as do the banks, but what about an investigation into the crime?

Forget it, resources are too stretched and your crime is not that important.

And, to be honest, you can't blame the police. Faced with the levels of real in-your-face violent crime there needs to be priorities. This will only get worse as the public sector faces a huge squeeze on finances over the next few years. One home county police force needs to save £18m over the next four years, against a backdrop of overstretch and enormous demands on limited resources.

As an aside I remember that in the late 80s and early 90s cheque fraud was the in thing. The smart villains used to play the system, by using cheques for less than the value required on a cheque guarantee card and making multiple transactions in a day with a variety of cheque books. The end result was the villain getting your money as the value fell below that which figured on the radar of the bank's security people.

Small cheque fraud was rife, and was one of the easiest crimes to commit.

I would suggest that e-crime is not quite that easy, but any extra technical difficulties are easily offset with the sheer volume of users that can be targeted in one go. So what if your scam takes a week to create, when you get it out to thousands of users you will get some hits. It's back to the good old risk/reward calculation that we are familiar with in business.

At the end of the day e-crime is a low risk, high reward activity that has got the authorities on the hop.

Where does the problem lie? Quite frankly this is a government funding issue that needs to be resolved.

Even Microsoft has been having a pop at the failure of government to take positive action, although I must admit to feeling uncomfortable when Microsoft speaks of computer security, in much the same way as when you hear a convert evangelising others to their new found religion.

Maybe the problem would not have been so bad if Microsoft had gotten their act together a few years sooner.

In reality, we know nothing much is going to get done. Overstretched resources will remain overstretched for years. The onus must come back to the user and a huge education campaign, alongside innovation, and discipline from the industry. Meanwhile, the bad guys will continue to get richer.

A little glossary for us Non-Brits:

* "manor to manor" = place to place

"spinning drums" = conducting search warrants

"executing Ws" = executing search warrants

"showing their briefs" = showing their warrant cards

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/07/untouchable_cybercriminals/

NASA's new image problem: the astronaut and the diaper: a sordid tale

This is clearly a case of attempted murder, but why is Love-sick Lisa getting off with pat on the hand and a tiny $25,000 bail? Because NASA is terrified their precious image may get scuffed up and dented. So the whole deal is being down-played, like some kind of errant adventure and the press is being spoon fed bits of odd and amusing news. Well....not everyone is laughing .

What do NASA astronauts do between missions? Until this week, I might have guessed modestly: training, book work, perhaps some checkers. Seedy love triangles and diaper-clad interstate crime sprees were fairly near the bottom of the list.

No more.
On Monday, astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak was arrested at the Orlando airport and charged with attempted kidnapping. Supposedly Nowak, who is married with three children, was enmeshed in a romantic struggle with space shuttle pilot William Oefelein and another NASA employee. Nowak apparently sought to confront this third party, Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman, to discuss their competing relationships with the pilot. She accomplished this by driving 900 miles from Houston to Orlando — wearing a diaper so as to avoid rest stops — before donning a wig and trench coat to assault Ms. Shipman with pepper spray in a parking lot. That move earned her the kidnapping arrest, although when police found the air pistol, buck knife, latex gloves, rubber tubing and garbage bags Nowak had brought along, the charge was upped to attempted murder in the first degree. That’s no laughing matter.

The diaper, though, is.

In all my years of film-going, story-reading and news-scouring, I’ve never before come across an outlaw so intent on the swift commission of crime as to actually don a diaper. Astronauts are taught by NASA to put mission first, ahead of personal concerns or a swollen bladder. Armed with this training, Lisa Nowak has rocketed around the planet, spacewalked for hours, and now soiled herself on Interstate 10.

It turns out that astronauts regularly wear diapers during three phases of spaceflight: liftoff, re-entry and spacewalks. Called Maximum Absorption Garments (MAG), these high-tech potty-pants are special: They are larger than normal adult diapers and, according to NASA, considerably more advanced.

Disposable diapers represent a $22 billion industry worldwide; for decades, manufacturers have touted their latest commercial diaper as revolutionary in both absorbance and comfort. Is it possible that NASA quietly trumped them all, and for years has been quite literally sitting on the future of incontinence protection? What is this space-age wicking material for galaxy-sized messes? A million full-bellied toddlers need to know.

Despite some hearty Google searching, I could find no solid technical information on the NASA diaper. Sure, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute raves that the MAG “is the finest and most absorbent diaper ever made,” but that’s standard bluster. Nowhere could I find key information such as the intended age range or price per nappy, nor did I determine whether babies wearing NASA brand spontaneously sob. More damning still, there was no mention of the volume of blue liquid a single MAG can absorb — the globally accepted standard for assessing diapers, as any television viewer knows.

It’s easy to claim that a product is “more advanced” — but respect in the diaper business is earned, not given. The MAG may be a legendary space garment, but for all we know it could perform on par with a Kleenex thong, or a wad of rock moss stuffed into some jockey shorts. For anyone to take the MAG seriously, NASA needs to pony up some real info, and fast.

If you think waterproof undies are only for old folks, babies and space travel, prepare for a change. Advanced technology from space missions has a way of filtering down to society at large. Like powdered ice cream or the waterproof space pen, adult diaper use may soon go mainstream.

Consider the benefits. Wearing a diaper by choice lends immediate urgency to any endeavor, signaling those around you that you are most certainly in a hurry. Organize your CD collection in traditional underwear and you risk being disturbed or called away; but organize those same CDs wearing a diaper and you’re sure to be left in peace. Tired of co-workers interrupting you as you type that report? Try a diaper, and savor the silence. The willingness to eschew bathroom breaks is a powerful statement, adding a certain gravitas to your day. Plus, in winter, your pants are self-heating.

We know Capt. Nowak meant business: In her cross-country drive to confront her rival, she used space-tested waste-management techniques to beat the clock. One does wonder whether she wore the familiar NASA-issue MAG or chose the more affordable and accessible Depend(R) brand Belted Shields. After all, once she surpassed that psychological hurdle and was willing to soil her knickers en route to a felony kidnapping, the least she could do was spare taxpayers the bill.

This story is already fueling countless droll headlines across the country. Understandably so: It’s not every day that the Orange Suits get busted playing Dangerous Liaisons at Johnson Space Center or a wayward rocket-jockey spends the night in the graybar hotel. This was one small drive for her man … one giant stretch of hard time.

Seriously though, a love-struck astronaut did just drive 900 miles in a diaper. You know what they say: If you want to be a comedian these days, just tell people what really happened.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/19803

New York may ban iPods!

Holy crap!! New Yorkers who blithely cross the street listening to an iPod or talking on a cell phone could soon face a $100 fine.

New York State Sen. Carl Kruger says three pedestrians in his Brooklyn district have been killed since September upon stepping into traffic while distracted by an electronic device. In one case bystanders screamed "watch out" to no avail.

Kruger says he will introduce legislation on Wednesday to ban the use of gadgets such as Blackberry devices and video games while crossing the street.

"Government has an obligation to protect its citizenry," Kruger said in a telephone interview from Albany, the state capital. "This electronic gadgetry is reaching the point where it's becoming not only endemic but it's creating an atmosphere where we have a major public safety crisis at hand."

Tech-consuming New Yorkers trudge to work on sidewalks and subways like an army of drones, appearing to talk to themselves on wireless devices or swaying to seemingly silent tunes.

"I'm not trying to intrude on that," Kruger said. "But what's happening is when they're tuning into their iPod or Blackberry or cell phone or video game, they're walking into speeding buses and moving automobiles. It's becoming a nationwide problem."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/07/AR2007020700947.html

IPods Will Be the New CDs

Big changes are afoot for the iPod in the wake of the Beatles settlement -- the iPod is about to become the new CD. On Monday, Apple Inc. and the Beatles' Apple Corps announced that a 15-year legal spat over the "Apple" trademark had been settled in Steve Jobs' favor. But the biggest news wasn't mentioned at all in the joint press release: The new contract clears the way for Jobs to sell iPods loaded with music. We sure wish we'd seen this one coming...

So who cares, you ask. Well, the iPod could become the new CD, especially if Apple starts offering cheap shuffle iPods pre-loaded with hot new albums or artists' catalogs. Imagine a whole range of inexpensive, special-edition iPods branded with popular bands containing a new album, or their whole catalogs.

Flash-memory drives are now so cheap, software companies are starting to use them to ship software. H&R Block, for example, is selling the latest version of its tax-preparation software on a flash drive for $40 -- the same price as the CD version. How much would it cost Apple to add a few music chips and some cheap earbuds?

Apple was prevented from doing this until now by the 15-year-old contract between Apple Corps, the Beatles' music company, and Apple Computer. This contract precluded Jobs' Apple from acting as a music company and from selling CDs or "physical media delivering prerecorded content ... (such as a compact disc of the Rolling Stones' music)."

Apple has been selling music as downloads for years, of course, but thanks to this clause, the company couldn't sell an iPod with music already loaded onto it.

That's why the U2 special-edition iPod ships with a voucher for downloading the band's catalog online. The Beatles contract prevents Apple from pre-loading the U2 iPod with U2's music.
That is undoubtedly going to change. Apple will soon offer a range of iPods pre-loaded with tunes.

First off will likely be the widely rumored Beatles special-edition Yellow Submarine iPod, tipped to be released in just over a week on Valentine's Day. Beatles fans are hoping that the Fab Four's entire catalog, currently being remastered, will be available in uncompressed format. What better way to deliver it than preloaded onto an iPod, instead of forcing fans to download gigabytes of data from iTunes?

Apple will also start loading sample tunes onto all new iPods, just like Microsoft's Zune currently does. This will be extra cash for Apple, and possibly quite lucrative -- the labels will pay to play. Getting a band's new single loaded onto a hot-selling iPod could prove so desirable that a new type of payola could be a-borning

Think of it: there’ll be all kinds of new limited-edition iPods, branded by artist, band or genre. Boxed sets are a natural: the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers iPod, the Motown iPod, the British Invasion iPod.

But most exciting, there may be a whole range of dirt-cheap iPod shuffles branded by artist, containing their new albums or portions of their catalogs. The biggest risk for Apple is excess inventory. What if the new Kevin Federline special edition bombs? But that's easily solved: Make the skin a peel-off and overdub leftovers when the next hot band comes along.

These cheapo album iPods could be sold at bus stations and airports: instant music, no computer required. Bands could sell pre-loaded iPods at concerts, maybe containing the concert they just played. There could be Broadway show iPods, movie soundtrack iPods and iPods burned at retail stores with custom play lists. It's going to be the biggest change to the iPod since the iTunes online store debuted in 2002.

http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,72656-0.html?tw=rss.index