Microsoft: Lots to turn off in Windows 7

Microsoft will expand the list of "features" that can be disabled when the Windows 7 Release Candidate becomes available, including the ability to turn off Internet Explorer 8.
The next version of Windows is giving Microsoft Corp. watchers a peek at how the software maker plans to keep European antitrust regulators from marring a crucial software launch.

Windows 7, the successor to the much-maligned Vista, isn't expected to reach consumers until next year, but more than a million people are already testing early versions. A pair of bloggers tinkering with settings stumbled upon one they hadn't seen before: The ability to "turn off" Microsoft's own Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft lost a long-running battle with EU antitrust regulators in 2007 over the way it bundled media player software into the Windows operating system. The dust had barely settled when a similar claim was filed, this time over Internet Explorer's place inside Windows. Opera Software ASA, a Norwegian competitor, claimed the practice gives Microsoft's browser an unfair advantage.

In a preliminary decision in January, the EU agreed. Since then, makers of the open-source browser Firefox and Google Inc., which entered the browser market six months ago, have offered to provide more evidence that Microsoft is stifling competition.

In the media player dispute, the EU heavily fined Microsoft and forced it to sell a version of Windows without the offending program installed. This time, Microsoft appears to be offering the check-box solution as a way to head off a similar ending.

The company declined to comment Friday on the connection between the check boxes and the EU's preliminary decision. But in a recent quarterly filing, it said the European Commission may order PC makers to install multiple browsers on new PCs and force Microsoft to disable parts of its own Internet Explorer if people chose a competing browser.

The check boxes, which were described on Microsoft enthusiast blogs http://www.aeroxp.org and http://www.chris123nt.com, also give Windows 7 users a way to disable the media player and hard-drive search programs, among other components, both of which have drawn scrutiny from regulators.

After Windows Vista landed with a thud, Microsoft needs a hit, said Michael Cherry, an analyst for the research group Directions on Microsoft. Beyond appeasing the EU, he said he didn't see much use for the Internet Explorer check box.

Internet pioneer Yahoo! is open to selling its Web search business

Internet company's chief financial says any deal needs to be done for the right reasons.

Internet pioneer Yahoo! is open to selling its Web search business or entering into a partnership with another company, but doing a deal would be hard.
Microsoft has expressed interest in Yahoo!’s search business and made a bid for the Sunnyvale, California-based firm last year but Jorgensen did not mention the US sofware giant as a potential partner.
He stressed the difficulties of doing a deal.
“What people don’t quite appreciate is the complexity of the business, and how these businesses are intertwined,” he said. “For example at a data center, we don’t parse between search or non-search.
“It’s extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organisation and split it in two pieces,” Jorgensen said. “It doesn’t say we couldn’t do it, we certainly could, but we want to do it for the right reasons and the right economics.”
Yahoo! rejected a takeover bid by Microsoft last year but Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has said the software giant remains interested in a search partnership with Yahoo!
Speculation of such a deal has been revived with the departure of Yahoo! chief executive Jerry Yang, who opposed the Microsoft bid, and his replacement by new CEO Carol Bartz.
Hilary Schneider, another Yahoo! executive, said that with Bartz’ arrival “it’s really clear there’s a new sheriff in town, and it’s a sheriff with a consumer outlook.”
Google is the overwhelming market leader for Internet search with a market share of more than 63% in January according to research firm comScore, followed by Yahoo! with 21% and Microsoft with 8.5%


The search business is deeply intertwined with Yahoo's other online products and properties, and so any deal, whether a partnership or a sale, would be done for the right reasons and the right economics.

"It's extremely difficult to draw a line down the middle of the organization and split it into two pieces," Jorgensen told the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference.

He did not mention specifically Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Fortune 500), which has repeatedly said it was interested in doing a search deal with Yahoo to compete against market leader Google Inc. (GOOG, Fortune 500)

The comments come as Yahoo is rumored to be on the brink of undertaking a major corporate reorganization under Chief Executive Carol Bartz, who took the reins in January.

Yahoo rebuffed a $47.5 billion acquisition bid from Microsoft last year, and saw a deal to form a search advertising partnership with Google fall apart amid antitrust concerns.

Bartz has said she did not join the company to sell it, nor did she have a preconceived notion of doing a search deal, but that "everything is on the table."

Yahoo's stock (YHOO, Fortune 500) was up 2% or 27 cents, at $12.75 in after-market trade, after closing down 27 cents in the Nasdaq session.

Offline web applications allow people to store data on their own computer

Working offline can come with an unexpected risk
A security expert has sounded a warning on features that allow offline access to websites. so that they can use services like web-based e-mail when not online.
Be cautious when you get an email that says "there's a problem with your password, click on this link and we'll fix it"
But sites with poor security that use the feature put their visitors at risk of being robbed of their data.

Michael Sutton disclosed the threat at the Black Hat security conference in Washington, DC.

Offline web applications are taking off because of services such as Gears, developed by Google, and HTML 5, a new HTML specification that is still in draft form.

It was introduced to many web users in January, when Gmail introduced a Gears-powered offline mode. Offline Gmail lets users read and write e-mail when they're not connected to the internet.

Mr Sutton stressed that Gmail, Gears and HTML 5 are considered secure, but websites that implement offline features without proper security could put users at risk.

"You can take this great, cool secure technology, but if you implement it on an insecure website, you're exposing it. And then all that security is for naught."

Mr Sutton found that websites which suffer from a well-known security vulnerability known as cross-site scripting are at risk.

A hacker could direct a victim to a vulnerable website and then cause the user's own browser to grab data from their offline database.
Unlike phishing, the whole attack could take place on a reputable site, which makes it harder to detect.

As a proof of concept, Mr Sutton was able to swipe information from the offline version of a time-tracking website called Paymo. Mr Sutton alerted Paymo and it fixed the vulnerability immediately.

Web developers must ensure that their sites are secure before implementing offline applications, said Mr Sutton.

"Gears is fantastic and Google has done a great job of making it a secure technology. But if you slap that technology into an already vulnerable site, you're leaving your customers at risk," he explained.

Security expert Craig Balding agreed that it was up to developers to secure their sites, as the line between desktop applications and web applications becomes more blurred.

"Every website wants to keep up in terms of features, but when developers turn to technologies like this they need to understand the pros and cons," he told BBC News.

US Broadband Infrastructure Investments necessitate Transparency

broadband infrastructure investments planned as part of the economic stimulus package need transparency if they're to be effective

The key public policy problem with broadband is that citizen-consumers and policy-makers still lack basic information.

Government investment in broadband networks has emerged as one of the more contentious parts of the economic stimulus legislation slated for a Senate vote Tuesday. Already, at least $2 billion of a planned $9 billion for broadband has apparently been cut from the latest bill, as legislators and interest groups squabble over who should control Internet communications funding, and under what rules.

What should be less controversial is that intelligent spending decisions about funding for high-speed Internet connections can't be made without excellent and transparent data about our broadband infrastructure.

The key public policy problem with broadband is that citizen-consumers and policy-makers still lack basic information. The Bush administration set a goal of achieving universal broadband by the end of 2007, then declared "mission accomplished" without providing much evidence to substantiate its claim. And under former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, the agency refused to release what data it did have about competitors in the broadband marketplace.
President Obama's commitment to "change" has included a more hands-on approach to promoting broadband. Throughout the presidential campaign, and repeatedly since the election, Obama has emphasized the importance of "expanding broadband lines across America." With input from his telecommunications advisors, the House stimulus bill included $6 billion for broadband. Early versions of the Senate measure raised the total to $9 billion.
Statistics?
Equally important is Obama's commitment to empirically-driven policymaking. In January, Obama became only the second president—after William Howard Taft in 1909—to invoke "statistics" in an inaugural address, when he spoke of "the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics."

The US spends more than $8 billion a year on statistics. Much of that goes to fund the Census Bureau and data collection about agricultural and labor markets, such as the monthly unemployment report, which on Friday brought the grim news that the economy had shed 598,000 jobs in January. Last week, when the Agriculture Department released its own census, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack reminded reporters: "Numbers and data are very important. They direct policy; they shape policy. They can tell us what we are doing right. They call tell us what we are doing wrong."
Yet almost none of this $8 billion in statistical spending goes to compiling information about broadband, the infrastructure of the knowledge-based economy. And the data that has been collected has been made to mislead.
The FCC—the official record-keeper on private-sector telecommunications—for years claimed that there was adequate competition in broadband because the median ZIP code was served by eight separate providers. The Government Accountability Office's assessment of the same data found a median of two providers per ZIP code. Worse, the FCC refuses to release the information that it has about competition.
A variety of organizations—including my own free web service, BroadbandCensus.com—have stepped in to do our best at collecting, compiling and releasing public broadband information. We believe that if you want to build a road, you need a map that tells you where existing roads lie before you begin taking construction bids, let alone start pouring concrete. Where will our nation's new broadband highways, by-ways and access points be built? Who's going to let the contracts? Who will own this infrastructure?
These questions can't be answered without detailed broadband data. To that end, I've supported a proposed "State Broadband Planning and Assessment Act," which could be introduced as an amendment to the fiscal stimulus measure. The goal of this effort, as of BroadbandCensus.com, is to unleash the Internet as means of sharing information about the Internet itself.
For two-and-a-half years, I've been trying to get access to basic broadband data for the public, including citizen-consumers, businesses, and local policy-makers. I've been seeking to identify which carriers offer service in a particular ZIP code, as well as smaller units, like census blocks. In September 2006, when I headed a project at the Center for Public Integrity that investigated the telecommunications industry, we filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FCC to force them to release basic broadband data about carriers by ZIP code.
The project obtained and displayed similar location information about broadcasters and cable operators from the FCC's cumbersome web site. But our attempts to get broadband data were thwarted by the FCC and by industry. AT&T, Verizon Communications, and the lobbying organizations representing the Bell companies, the cable companies, the cell phone carriers, and wireless broadband providers all asked the FCC to deny information to the public. Even though every consumer who buys broadband knows the name of the company that provides them with service, the telecoms argued that compiling this information into a single location would reveal "proprietary" data. The FCC agreed.

The FCC did not want disclosure, and neither did the telecom incumbents and their lobbyists. They did not want successful broadband competition.

In its legal briefings, the FCC argued that releasing the data would lead to competition in communications—which was why it couldn't release the data! "Disclosure could allow competitors to free ride on the efforts of the first new entrant to identify areas where competition is more likely to be successful," the agency told the federal district court in Washington.

The once-vaunted virtue of competition in federal telecommunications policy—the underpinning of the 1996 Telecom Act—had taken a back seat to the privilege of supposedly proprietary information. The FCC did not want disclosure, and neither did the telecom incumbents and their lobbyists. They did not want successful broadband competition.
Congress was critical of the FCC's meager broadband statistics. In October it passed the Broadband Data Improvement Act to prod the agency to collect broadband data at a level more granular than the ZIP-code. The FCC began doing just that in June, as the bill was working its way through Congress.
But under pressure from telecom lobbyists, Congress dropped a core provision from the House version of the bill: the requirement that a separate agency, the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, take responsibility for conducting a national broadband census and producing a public map with the names of individual carriers and where they offered service.
The House version of the stimulus bill reintroduces the NTIA broadband map. But it takes out any mention of publicly releasing individual carrier names. Worse, the Broadband Data Improvement Act enshrined the business model favored by the carriers: providing information to an entity like Connected Nation, which agrees to excise the names of broadband providers from the maps they produce.
The House stimulus bill allocated $40 million to this business model. Last week's version of the Senate stimulus bill upped the total to $350 million.
President Obama has the opportunity to make broadband a priority in his administration by ensuring that the NTIA creates a public map of our national broadband providers and infrastructure. Map in hand, the Obama administration's broadband policy should be guided by three important principles:
1) Use the Internet to empower citizens and consumers.
With the FCC keeping broadband data out of the hands of the public, I started BroadbandCensus.com to publish the same information that any consumer can know: the name of their Internet service provider and type of broadband connection, how much they are charged for service, and the Internet speeds they are promised and actually delivered. The government of Ireland publishes exactly the same information on its communications ministry web page.
Some broadband data efforts focus on the needs of telecommunications carriers and their unionized employees. Based in Kentucky, Connected Nation has been promoting their state-wide maps of broadband availability as a means for providers to sell more service. The Communications Workers of America's Speed Matters campaign has collected random speed tests from Internet users to provide a snapshot about download and upload speeds. Both of these initiatives are good, so far as they go.
But to rigorously understand the condition of broadband, we can't rely only on the information provided by the carriers. It needs to be verified by Internet users. To truly unlock the power of Internet-enabled "crowdsourcing," an effective broadband strategy must focus on citizens. Empower them by releasing basic information and letting citizen-consumers add to the mash-up. It's about making citizens contributors as well as constituents.
2) Ensure that infrastructure investment is made on the basis of cost-benefit data.
In 1790, the United States was the first country to institute a periodic national census. What started as a questionnaire seeking only demographic information had broadened by 1840 to information about employment in mining, agriculture, manufacturing, and the "learned professions and engineers." Such information has enabled our government, our universities and our business sector to rely on good-quality statistical information.
We're going to need that kind of data, and a lot more of it, to make sound investment decisions about broadband. Because of our nation's agricultural origins, our statistical agencies provide far more data about crop production than they do about broadband availability, speeds, or prices. In the absence of good data, the temptation is to make public infrastructure investment decisions based on political pressure or lawmaker influence, rather than upon solid cost-benefit analyses.
3) Use the transparency of the Internet to regulate incumbents through public disclosure.
The regulatory philosophies of the New Deal—maximum and minimum wages and prices, hands-on federal regulation—have faded and are not likely to be revived even in the current crisis. Yet one Depression-era innovation of Franklin D. Roosevelt remains as valid as ever: the disclosure-based regime of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The SEC is vigilant in requiring punctilious compliance with requirements that public companies disclose details of their operations. By and large, the SEC doesn't require substantive actions so much as it requires procedural compliance and full disclosure. Open information flows mean that poor corporate decisions are punished in the marketplace.
Equally important is that role that independent efforts, like those of BroadbandCensus.com and others, can play in collecting and aggregating public broadband data about speeds, prices, and reliability.
For more than a year, BroadbandCensus.com has provided a platform allowing Internet users to compare their actual broadband speeds against what they are promised by their carriers. We use the open-source Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) of Internet2. All speed test data is publicly displayed under a Creative Commons license. This approach to public monitoring Internet traffic has recently been followed by Google and the New America Foundation and their "Measurement Lab" initiative, which also uses NDT.
Ultimately, broadband carriers that offer good speeds and good service will see the value in an objective and transparent broadband census. Fortunately, consumers don't need to wait on the carriers to begin collecting and publishing broadband of their own.
Neither should the government. No matter how much Congress decides to allocate to stimulate broadband, it should insist that information about speeds, prices, technologies, and specific locations of high-speed Internet availability are publicly available to all.

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Guiding principles for U.S. broadband infrastructure economic stimulus

As Congressional leaders and the incoming administration of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama mull economic stimulus legislation including a portion of which is expected to be devoted to telecommunications infrastructure to boost broadband Internet access, I offer these guiding principles:
1. The focus should be on the so-called "last mile" or local access network portion of the system. There's a broad consensus that the lack of adequate broadband access in the United States is due to technological shortcomings on this segment of the telecommunications infrastructure, its weakest link. The overall goal should be full build out of this currently incomplete but vital infrastructure to serve all residents and businesses.

where your kid is just now Do you know it?Check Google's maps

A screen grab showing Google's upgraded mapping system is seen in this photo provided by Google Inc. The new software to be released Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009, will enable people to use mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends

Recorded on Google Street View

When you follow the street view scene (intermittently unavailable due to high demand) down Five Points Road, in Rush NY, you first see that the deer runs out in front of the vehicle, it gets hit, and then it can be viewed on the side of the road prior to the car pulling over, and then, you see no more footage on Five Points Road.The sequence has been captured also on Gizmodo. I warn anyone visiting that site that it's not the most pleasant as the dear is seen injured lying on the ground.Maybe the photographer felt bad, and couldn’t take any more photos for the day. One would think he would have held out on turning these in too.

With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.
The new software to be released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.
The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.
"This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun," said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.
It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.
Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users' movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google's computers, Lee said.
The software plots a user's location — marked by a personal picture on Google's map — by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people's travels in the United States and 26 other countries.
It's left up to each user to decide who can monitor their location.
The social mapping approach is similar to a service already offered by Loopt Inc., a 3-year-old company located near Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Loopt's service already is compatible with more than 100 types of mobile phones.
To start out, Google Latitude will work on Research In Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry and devices running on Symbian software or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. It will also operate on some T-1 Mobile phones running on Google's Android software and eventually will work on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iTouch.
To widen the software's appeal, Google is offering a version that can be installed on personal computers as well.
The PC access is designed for people who don't have a mobile phone but still may want to keep tabs on their children or someone else special, Lee said. People using the PC version can also be watched if they are connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi.
Google can plot a person's location within a few yards if it's using GPS or might be off by several miles if it's relying on transmission from cell phone towers. People who don't want to be precise about their whereabouts can choose to display just the city instead of a specific neighborhood.
There are no current plans to sell any advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing opportunities. Google has been investing heavily in the mobile market during the past two years in an attempt to make its services more useful to people when they're away from their office or home computers.

Google's new online tools that will diagnose your network connection & performance.l

Google and a group of partners have released a set of tools designed to help broadband customers and researchers measure performance of Internet connections.
The set of tools, at MeasurementLab.net, includes a network diagnostic tool, a network path diagnostic tool and a tool to measure whether the user's broadband provider is slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P-to-P) traffic. Coming soon to the M-Lab applications is a tool to determine whether a broadband provider is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic, and a tool to determine whether a provider is degrading certain users or applications.

Think your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is messing with your connection performance? Now you can find out, with Google's new online tools that will diagnose your network connection.
Here's a quick walkthrough on how to make the best of them.
Google's broadband test tools are located at Measurementlab.net. On that page, you'll see an first icon that says "Users: Test Your Internet Connection". Click that, and then you'll be taken to a page where there are three tests available, and two more listed as coming soon. However, out of the three available tests, only one of them is fully automated and easy to use.
Glasnost , second on the list, will check whether your ISP is slowing down (like Comcast) or blocking Peer2Peer (P2P) downloads from software such as BitTorrent. P2P apps are commonly used for downloading illegal software and media content like movies and music, but also are used for legal purposes as well, such as distributing large software packages to many users at once.
To use the measurement tool, you will be redirected to the Glasnost site. You'll need the latest version of Java installed, and you should stop any large downloads that you may have running before you begin the test. If you're on a Mac, a popup message will prompt you to trust the site's Java applet.
When you're ready to start, you can choose whether you want to run a full test (approximately 7 minutes long) or a simple test (4 minutes long). When I tried to test my connection, Glasnost's measurement servers were overloaded and an alternative server was offered, but that was overloaded as well. After a short while I was able to run the test.
In the tests of my connection (my provider is Vodafone At Home, in the UK) all results indicated that BitTorrent traffic is not blocked or throttled. But I'm looking forward to hearing from you in the comments how your ISP performed in Glasnost's diagnostics. Meanwhile, make sure you keep an eye on the other tests that will be available soon from Measurementlab.net.

Hidalgo County, Texas is considering $500,000 project that would blanket the city with a wireless Internet system

Pharr is considering a $500,000 project that would blanket the city with a wireless Internet system geared toward serving city workers and emergency responders.
Negotiations are still in extremely preliminary stages — and both the city and contractor say a timetable isn't set — but leaders have expressed intrigue at the prospect of a system that can seemingly meet their wildest high-tech fantasies.
"The possibilities for the future are really interesting," Pharr City Manager Fred Sandoval said.
Bobby Vassallo, a wireless Internet consultant, has met with the City Commission twice over the last six weeks to help pitch the concept of a wireless Internet "clothesline" that could help the city handle everything from police video surveillance to wireless water meter-reading.
Behind the pitch is Brownsville businessman Oscar Garza, who leads the corporation Valley Wireless Internet Holdings.
Sandoval emphasized that the city hasn't made any decisions yet.
"It's a very interesting concept," he said. "We definitely want to be at the forefront."
REGION-WIDE
Pharr isn't alone in its consideration of wireless systems.
While wireless Internet is already the standard in some large cities, the technology now seems to be taking root in the Rio Grande Valley.
Cities across the region are pursuing high-tech, wireless Internet options that have the potential to promote efficiency in virtually all municipal departments by keeping workers in the field connected to City Hall.
Using wireless "mesh" systems, cities can provide Internet access over a large area to their employees through a series of nodes attached to structures like water towers or streetlights.
That means building inspectors could send reports back to City Hall from a work site, traffic citations could appear in court computers almost instantly, and police could set up surveillance cameras without fear of their cables being cut.
McAllen is already moving forward with plans to install up to 120 surveillance cameras throughout the city, which will be connected wirelessly to a fiber-optic cable running through the city.
The cameras would be served by a downtown wireless network, which could also provide support to other city workers in the area.
Last summer, a pilot program provided wireless to city workers in Bill Schupp Park. McAllen is currently soliciting proposals from vendors and is scheduled to meet with them today.
The focus of McAllen's project would be city usage, but eventually it could be opened up to residents, said Belinda Mercado, McAllen's information technology director.
Meanwhile, Hidalgo leaders are examining the possibility of creating a citywide blanket of wireless Internet similar to the one Pharr is examining. The system would provide access to emergency responders and residents on two separate networks, explained Rick Mendoza, Hidalgo's information technology director.
He said the talks are in preliminary stages and price estimates aren't available. But the city would like to offer Internet service to residents at no cost.
"We want to offer Internet service to members of our community who don't have the means of getting either DSL or cable," Mendoza said.
He added that a citywide wireless network would help Hidalgo compete with neighboring cities.
Edinburg leaders have also discussed the possibility of creating some sort of wireless system that would include various hot spots throughout the city, though they are only in discussions and the city hasn't started talks with any specific vendors.
Brownsville officials, meanwhile, expect their $6.6 million wireless project to be operational within four months, Mayor Pat Ahumada said.
The city is erecting signal towers, which will provide wireless access to city employees, utility workers and emergency responders, though it remains to be seen how much access the general public will have.
COST
The systems don't come cheap, however.
The network being pitched to Pharr could cost as much as $500,000 for the initial infrastructure, $25,000 a month to operate and even more for cameras, wireless water meters and other high-tech equipment needed to actually take advantage of the system.
At a time when cities across the region are struggling financially, at least some have questioned whether the cost of such an ambitious undertaking can be justified.
Pharr is just starting to climb out from under its financial woes after it wiped out its reserves last year.
"I believe the No. 1 question we should be asking, besides ‘Can we afford this?' is ‘Do we need it?'" said Pharr Finance Director Juan Guerra at a city workshop earlier this month. "From what I'm hearing ... I'm not sure if we do."
TIMING
Interestingly, the Valley's pursuit of wireless comes as cities elsewhere are struggling with their Wi-Fi projects.
Internet service provider Earthlink, which has partnered with Philadelphia, Houston and other large cities on wireless programs, announced layoffs within its municipal division in November. The company told shareholders it no longer makes sense for Earthlink to invest in municipal wireless.
As a result, some community wireless projects have been put on hiatus.
Earlier in the decade, companies like Earthlink offered to provide wireless systems at virtually no cost to cities. In exchange, the networks were privately owned, and the companies could charge subscription fees to consumers or hit them with advertising.
That model is changing, as it has become apparent that broadband access is becoming more readily available and affordable to consumers.
Today, cities are designing the systems for themselves to meet their own needs, such as giving support to emergency workers or keeping public works employees connected while in the field.
Those purpose-driven networks — as opposed to ones that are simply designed to give residents Internet access — are the ones that are now poised to succeed, writes Governing magazine's Christopher Swope, an expert on municipal wireless systems.
Vassallo, the wireless Internet consultant, emphasized to Pharr leaders that the city could create some public hot spots, but providing all-encompassing Internet service to residents isn't worth the cost or stress to the city.
Regardless of how, exactly, Pharr and other cities' projects takes shape, advocates say it's high time the Valley embraces wireless.

Google Beats Estimates, Profit Takes a strike

Just 13 Months Ago, Google's Stock Hit an All-Time High of $747; Today $314.

Internet giant earns $5.10 a share, topping estimates, despite a dreary economy. Net income drops 68% on charges.

Internet advertising behemoth Google continued to show strong sales and profit against a thorny economic backdrop.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company reported an 18% jump in fourth-quarter revenue to $5.7 billion for the period ended Dec. 31. That's up from $4.83 billion in the year-earlier quarter.
Excluding commissions paid to advertising partners, Google posted sales of $4.22 billion, better than the $4.12 billion in sales expected by analysts polled by Thomson Reuters.
Google reported fourth-quarter net income of $382 million, down 68% from $1.2 billion a year ago. However, excluding certain charges, such as the cost of employee stock options, the company earned $5.10 a share, much better than consensus estimates of $4.95 per share.
"We had tight control over costs" in the quarter, said Google chief executive Eric Schmidt in a conference call with analysts.

"We don't know how long this period will last," Schmidt said, but he added that Google remained focused on long-term growth.
Schmidt pointed to the scaling back of non-profitable Google projects such as Google Video, Google Notebook, and status update service Jaiku. He also mentioned a quarterly decline in costs paid to advertising partners.
"Google continues to take market share, and they continue to have any number of levers to pull on both the revenue and the cost side that makes them very formidable in any economic environment," said Derek Brown, analyst with brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald.
Over the last quarter of 2008, Google said it spent about $368 million on capital expenses - mostly on data centers, servers and networking equipment.
As of Dec. 31, Google said it employed 20,222 full-time workers, slightly up from the 20,123 it employed at the end of September.
In order to retain employees, Google also announced that it would be starting a stock option exchange program from the end of January through early March.

more...

Google joined Apple and IBM as one of the few tech companies to report good news in its most recent earnings report. The search giant beat analysts' estimates today, though it reported a sharp drop in net income for the fourth quarter to $382 million, or $1.21 a share, well below the $1.2 billion, or $3.79 a share from a year ago.
Revenue for the fourth quarter rose 18 percent from the same period last year to $5.70 billion and three percent from the previous quarter. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) also suffered significant non-cash-impairment charges of $1.09 billion related primarily to its investments and AOL and Clearwire, a wireless broadband service that has partnered with Intel to build WiMax services across the country.
"The results were better than I expected," IDC analyst Karsten Weide told InternetNews.com. "Google is doing great because about half of the online ad spend in the U.S. is search and they have about half that market. They are leveraging the biggest market out there."
On a conference call with financial analysts, Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted "strong search query growth year on year." He also credited "tight control over costs that may have eluded us in the past, but I think we've got the formula down now."

Schmidt acknowledged AOL and Clearwire were "significant writedowns," but thinks there's a longer term payoff to come. "Both deals made sense for us and continue to fit with our business philosophy."
While neither Schmidt or other Google executives on the call got very specific about new initiatives or product plans, he did say the company is looking at new ways to recognize the contextual meaning of a search phrase, which it would be rolling into its market leading search engine.
The past year saw Google branch out significantly beyond its original model of text-only results. In 2008 Google tripled the number of non-text only results, which includes video, images, blogs and books, said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president or product management.
He also said Google's $125 million settlement in October with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers promises to make content from millions of out-of-print books accessible online and even create a new market for the sale of those books.

Analyst Weide said Google still faces challenges growing the display side of its ad business. He said Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) is the online display ad leader with about a 16 percent share in a very fragmented market. "Search advertising isn't always going to be the biggest segment. It probably will still be in five years, but not always and right now Google is essentially a one-trick pony," he said.
Weide also said YouTube's been "a sinkhole" for Google, which bought the video site for over $1.65 billion in 2006. "User generated content can work as an advertising source, but it's going to take a while," said Weide. "I think Google is going to have to acquire long form, professional content because big name advertisers want premium content not grainy, amateur video."
Rosenberg said Google continues to experiment with different ad approaches for YouTube. "It's hard to match the right format with the right content," he said. "We have to come up with a standard format to make it easier."
New employee stock options
Google also announced a new stock options plan, beginning January 29, that's designed to help retain employees. Schmidt said about 85 percent of its 20,000 employees had stock options "under water," or priced higher than the current trading price of stock.
Under the voluntary plan, employees can exchange all or a portion of their existing stock options for the same number of new options. Google said it expects the new options to have an exercise price equal to the closing price per share on March 2, 2009. Stock options with exercise prices above the March 2 closing price would be eligible for exchange, though Google said details of how the plan will work could change.
In after hours trading Thursday, Google shares were down $8.18 to $298.32.

Year 2020- Internet and interactivity-Pew

By the year 2020, marketing and manipulation will have merged on the Internet, encouraging consumers to trade privacy for discounts. Copyright will be "dead duck," virtual reality sanctuaries will provide an escape from cyberspace, and viciousness will prevail over civility.
These are some of the predictions offered by "experts" in "Future of the Internet III," a study released on Monday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

By 2020, the mobile phone will be the primary connection tool to the Internet and it will be so integrated into our daily lives that it will be difficult to imagine what life was like without one, according to new research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In addition, respondents thought Sixty percent of the experts interviewed disagreed that content control through copyright-protection technology would dominate the Internet of 2012.
But the majority view appears to discount the popularity of the locked-down iPhone eco-system. Given the extent to which Apple's competitors in the mobile arena have committed to copying the iTunes App Store model, it wouldn't be surprising if mobile customers traded freedom for the promise of phone security. That might keep copyright alive until nano-assemblers make it feasible to copy objects on an atomic level

The Pew report expects continued blurring between work life and home life and between physical and virtual reality. Respondents were divided, 56% of whom think that future is okay, with the rest expressing some reservations about the potential added stress of being at work all the time.
The study includes a number of quotations from those who submitted their thoughts on what's to come. Their observations make other dystopian visions of the future, as seen in the 1982 film Blade Runner, look almost rosy.
"We will enter a time of mutually assured humiliation; we all live in glass houses," said Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
"Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues," said Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and director of computer services at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. "Software will be unable to stop deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will continue to happen."
"By 2020, the Internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable," said writer and blogger Nicholas Carr. "Most people will have happily traded their privacy -- consciously or unconsciously

Recall your email

24hoursnews :IBM has released the latest versions of its enterprise collaboration software, Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Domino 8. Lotus Notes 8 brings together e-mail, calendar, instant messaging, office productivity tools and custom applications.

It includes productivity tools enabling users to create open standards-based versions of spreadsheets, word processing documents and presentations, in addition to supporting many file formats from traditional stand-alone applications. It also supports multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows for clients and Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, AIX and IBM System i for servers

How often you've wished you could recall an email which you regret having sent, or which could embarrass you.

Fret not, help is here. IBM's latest offerings in the collaboration platform, Lotus Notes 8 and Domino 8 come with a recall feature that allows you to call back an email that has been sent. Developed over the last 2 years, version 8 is based on the feedback of 25,000 businesses around the world.

According to the company, this release is one of the best in terms of collaboration features. It also has significant inputs from IBM's India labs. More importantly, this version can be accessed on the Blackberry platform too. The software will offer features like email, collaboration, calendar, instant messaging and other office productivity tools and custom applications.

It is for the first time that a software is based on the open-source eclipse platform, a departure from the fact that otherwise IBM has in the past used its proprietary technology.

Sandesh Bhat, director (design and technology innovation), IBM, said: "The whole idea behind this was to offer users the best in the Web2.0 capabilities. This is also our endeavour to develop the desktop of the future.

Lotus Notes 8 is much more than an email service, unlike competitive offerings. Lotus Notes 8 integrates work by building in instant messaging and presence awareness, office tools to create and edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets and infusing a business' custom applications, including help desk, CRM, sales force, discussion forums, blogs and more.

This is all possible as Lotus Notes 8 is built on the programming model of Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1, which is based on eclipse.org open standards. Lotus Expeditor 6.1.1 enables the construction and deployment of enterprise mash-ups, also known as composite applications. Lotus Notes 8 and Domino 8 support a variety of platforms, including Linux and Windows for clients and Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, AIX and IBM System for servers.

The office collaboration market is estimated to be in millions. Frost and Sullivan in one of its reports mentioned that IBM with a 44.5 per cent market share is a market leader in India.

Technorati : Recall, email

Tata Tele launches Web browser Moblie

Tata Teleservices has launched a Web browser mobile phone 'Samsung Explore' that is customised to access the Internet.

At Rs 5,499, the phone has other features such as 0.3-mega pixel digital camera, FM radio, MP3 player, mobile tracker, SOS alert and provision to insert external memory cards.

Starter kits and SIM cards would be additionally charged. Tariff plans for Internet access include Rs 10 a day, Rs 30 for 7 days and Rs 99 for a month - all offering unlimited access at speeds of about 156 kbps, Mr Srinivas Rao Sarapalli, Chief Operating Officer, Tamil Nadu Circle, Tata Teleservices, said at a press conference.

Both pre-paid and post-paid consumers can use this phone. The company currently has over 1.9 crore subscribers, about 60 per cent of who access the Internet via mobile phones.

The company expects to sell about 4,000 'Samsung Explore' handsets this month, Mr Sarapalli said.

Subscriber base

Tata Teleservices has about 9 lakh subscribers in Chennai and Tamil Nadu telecom circles and is investing about Rs 400 crore this year to expand network in the State.

It expects to add about 60 lakh subscribers pan India and is investing about Rs 4,000 crore in network expansion and other activities.

More

Tata Teleservices, in association with Samsung Telecommunications, unveiled a web browser fully optimised for mobile Internet here on Thursday.

The web browser is being introduced on the Samsung 'Explore' handset.

"This innovation opens up the Internet to those without access to a personal computer," said Pankaj Sethi, President (Value Added Services), Tata Teleservices. The access speed will be between 40 to 80 kbps, enabling viewers to open any web page in 20-30 seconds, he added. The browser, which is expected to be three to four times faster than GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), will enable the user to browse all websites, search and email. It will, however, not be possible to show videos in the current devices. The browser is based on the QSC6020 product from the Qualcomm single chip family. The Samsung 'Explore' handset, which also has a camera, FM radio and MP3 player, is priced at Rs. 5,499. Mobile Internet will come at prices ranging from Rs. 10 a day to Rs. 99 a month with unlimited access.

Chennai Correspondent writes:

According to Srinivas Rao Sarapilli, Chief Operating Officer, (Tamil Nadu Circle), Tata Teleservices, the web browser, powered by Novarra Inc., can be downloaded on a handset enabled with Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW).

Mr. Sarapilli said Tata Indicom aimed at expanding its subscriber base in Tamil Nadu from nine lakh to a million users by the year-end. Its country-wide user base is estimated to be around 19 million, which the company wants to expand to 25 million in the next few months.

Technorati : Tata Tele