Scott M. Fulton, III

Universal's In-movie Shopping Tries to Tip the Scales for HD DVD

Today, Universal Studios Home Entertainment said it's adding an online shopping feature to one of its popular movie releases - the upcoming Evan Almighty featuring comic Steve Carell - enabling high-def viewers to pause the movie, order something featuring or from the show, and resume.

The capability for HD DVD movies to contain programs that take advantage of Internet-driven Web services was built into that format from the beginning, and a separate-yet-equal capability was built into Blu-ray. But only now have studios begun to try these online-oriented features, now that more second-generation consoles with Internet capability have been sold.

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Making Sense of Microsoft's Office Live Strategy

On Monday, Microsoft announced it's subdividing its online applications services even further, doling out new features such as storage space for individual Office users, while at the same time offering new e-mail and collaboration hosting features to small businesses. Today, it added some new personal attention services for the small business tier. Could this finally be the strategy that makes Microsoft's lagging online services segment start paying off?

In many of the classic Chuck Jones cartoons, the hero is being chased by one of his over-the-top villains. The action gets so fast that you only see a gust of wind and footprints the hero left behind. Then when he gets to some obstacle, like a boulder in the road or a sign pointing two directions, the footprints split into separate directions, leaving the pursuer comically perplexed.

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After Losing One Appeal, Can Vonage Catch a Break?

With potentially debilitating results hanging over it as a result of losses against both Verizon and Sprint Nextel in patent infringement suits, VoIP services provider Vonage faces the prospect of either or both judges imposing injunctions against the company continuing to provide service.

But a footnote toward the very end of last week's partial remand decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, first found by University of Missouri law professor Dennis Crouch, could be interpreted as a little nudge - a suggestion from one court to another that could yet give Vonage a way out of its terrible predicament.

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Supreme Court Declines to Hear DRAM Price Fixing Case

The US Supreme Court this morning decided to leave it to California courts to decide the fate of what might have been a precedent-setting civil suit against a handful of the world's leading memory manufacturers.

They had already pled guilty in federal proceedings and settled with the government, though Rambus believes it was the memory firm they were conspiring against. Today, in a move that could benefit Rambus in the end, the high court signaled its belief that such a claim is for a lower court to decide.

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Sony, Qimonda to Jointly Produce DRAM for Specific Products

The Qimonda division of Infineon, which currently produces DRAM in fabrication facilities in the US, Germany and soon China, announced today it will be partnering 50/50 with Sony in the creation of a DRAM production facility specially tailored to specific consumer devices.

Qreatic Design, as it will be known, will not only expand Qimonda's bold use of the letter "Q" but will give Sony a new option for developing conventional, random-access memory for its own devices.

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Yahoo Returns to its Roots with 'Search Assist'

Sensing a possible runaway victory by Google in the critical search category, both Microsoft and Yahoo are busy trying to improve the "search experience." The question Yahoo's been facing is how to help its users feel they've found what they're looking for, without kicking them out of Yahoo territory so fast they forget it was Yahoo that brought them there.

But Yahoo's latest enhancement, launched this morning, may be new to the search page but not all that new to the search experience: Its new "Search Assist" acts like an auto-complete feature, intercepting your text as you type and offering a handful of completed search queries.

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Innovative Buzzword Word Processor to Come Under Adobe's Wing

The producer of Buzzword -- possibly a game-changing word processor in the Web services field -- has been acquired by Adobe. In so doing, it rejoins the productivity applications market already in progress, and could very well blow that market wide open.

The Waltham, Massachusetts-based Virtual Ubiquity built Buzzword on Adobe's AIR platform, which uses a mix of AJAX, the Flash layout platform, and the Flex language originally developed for Flash by Macromedia, the standard's former parent. Now Adobe may be exercising its option to fully acquire the development firm reportedly founded using Adobe's seed money, with the aim of taking on Google Apps, Microsoft Office Live, and very likely Yahoo in the Web-driven applications space.

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EU Launches Qualcomm Investigation Without Objections Statement

While the European Commission is refraining for now from issuing a formal Statement of Objections to US-based networking technology provider Qualcomm, it did say this morning it will take action prompted by five of its competitors -- including long-time opponent Broadcom -- in investigating whether the firm applies unfair licensing terms to these and other companies.

"This initiation of proceedings does not imply that the Commission has proof of an infringement," reads an EC statement issued this morning. "It only signifies that the Commission will conduct an in-depth investigation of the case as a matter of priority."

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Microsoft Offers 'Office Live' Storage to Office Users

Twenty months after the company first brought forth its vision of Web-driven applications, Microsoft announced this morning a re-targeting of its Office Live approach, spinning off "Office Live Workspace" as a free service centered around individuals who already use Microsoft Office.

The new service opens up storage space for as many as "1,000+ documents" (the exact specifications have never been released) to users of the conventional Office suite. Meanwhile, the existing Office Live services become rebranded as "Office Live Small Business," with some upgrades to its options. Free users of the Basics tier will now have access to 500 MB of online storage, while $19.95 per month buys users a second half-gigabyte and professional Web site generation capabilities.

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Adobe Builds Support for its Media Player

Adobe this morning is building support for its multilingual AIR Web services platform (formerly code-named Apollo) by unveiling a new version of its service-driven Adobe Media Player (AMP) for deployment by some major players, including CBS, Yahoo, and PBS.

"We think that Adobe Media Player is the next generation of media player because it doesn't just play files, and it isn't just a closed, walled garden of content," remarked Deeje Cooley, AMP's product manager, in an interview with BetaNews. "We are really trying to embrace the ecosystem and the open standards that are emerging out on the Internet, such as RSS. By leveraging RSS, we're able to support a wide ranging and ever growing body of video podcast content, so anybody can publish a video podcast and will now be able to make that content available in Adobe Media Player."

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Microsoft and the EU's Experiment in Socialism

European lawmakers are now considering sweeping and unprecedented proposals for regulating Microsoft's future behavior that could have immediate ramifications on the global PC industry. One is the possibility of having PC makers stop installing any operating system on the machines they sell in Europe. How serious are these proposals, and does the EC have enough backbone to enforce them? BetaNews discussed the possibilities with industry analyst Carmi Levy.

It was a rare and captivating moment in history, to witness Microsoft - the modern symbol of American capitalistic prowess - literally speechless as an organization in the wake of the European Court of First Instance's decision on September 17. To this day, it isn't exactly clear what the company intends to do at this point - rather than deflect attention away from the topic - in response to the CFI's ruling that Microsoft abused its dominant position by producing a server operating system without fully publishing its interoperability protocols.

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Five More Months Tacked Onto XP Availability Roadmap

Apparently bending to pressure from partner OEMs who continue to report customers continuing to demand Windows XP, Microsoft decided this morning to extend the availability of the older operating system series to the retail channel and to partners from January to June 2008, as it maintains availability to system builders clear through to January 2009.

The move comes several months after Dell reported it would continue offering Windows XP as an option for its systems as long as it could. However, another possible contributing factor could be the company's plan for XP Service Pack 3. A check of the company's service pack roadmap today shows the company has only tentative faith in its ability to produce SP3 by as late as next June.

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Microsoft Offers Manual Fix to 'Stealth' Windows Update Bug

It turned out to be an insignificant problem after all, rather than something on the order of a rootkit: the discovery that Microsoft's Windows Update feature updates itself even when users turn off "automatic updates" - a fact that Microsoft had actually documented quite well, but which few had apparently read. But now, a claim that the self-updating update subsequently unregistered Microsoft's Windows Update drivers in XP-based systems forced its own drivers to become unregistered.

The claim comes from Windows Secrets writer Scott Dunn, who wrote the initial article about what he called a "stealth update." After using an XP install disk to roll the operating system back to a previous state, he discovered the system's capability to install updates retrieved from the Internet would fail.

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Yahoo to Stop Podcasts, Unlimited Music's Future in Doubt

In a banner along the top of its Web page, Yahoo notified users of its podcast service today that it will be shutting down that service on October 31. This as TechCrunch's Michael Arrington discovered the company has scheduled a priority meeting of its senior executives, including CEO Jerry Yang and President Susan Decker, for tomorrow morning.

This afternoon, Yahoo felt the need to prepare customers - and perhaps investors - for tomorrow's news, by giving it the best spin possible early on.

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Frontline Wireless Claims 700 MHz Auction 'in Jeopardy,' May Not Bid

The maverick network service provider run by former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale, and that was largely responsible for convincing the US Federal Communications Commission to impose new and innovative rules for bidders on certain blocks of the 700 MHz UHF spectrum, is now saying it may not be able to bid after all. In a formal complaint to the FCC filed Monday, lawyers for Frontline Wireless accused the FCC of "getting it wrong" by having set the asking price of the choicest blocks in the auction too high.

"The Commission established soaring objectives for the newly freed-up, prime 700 MHz spectrum," Frontline's attorneys wrote. "It properly understood that the availability of this spectrum has presented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address nation-critical communications issues, the resolution of which is long overdue and pressing. In its August 10, 2007 Order the Commission saw that these ambitious goals were realizable and envisioned largely appropriate paths to their attainment. But then, unaccountably, the Commission made implementation decisions in its Order that put these goals in jeopardy. On reconsideration the Commission should expeditiously bring the means, which the Order at times got very wrong, into alignment with its ends, which the Order largely got right."

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