This afternoon, Microsoft won the apparent battle for an equity stake in social networking applications provider Facebook, making a $240 million equity investment in the company. In exchange, Microsoft will become the exclusive third-party supplier of Facebook's advertising platform.

During a conference call Wednesday afternoon, Facebook Chief Revenue Officer Owen van Natta and Microsoft platforms division president Kevin Johnson revealed few specific details. In fact, they worked hard to draw a clear line around those items they would not reveal any details about. For instance, would the partnership enable new forms of Microsoft applications on the Facebook platform? Won't say. Will Facebook branded applications appear on Microsoft properties? Won't say.

Continue reading →

A patent application turned up by the Associated Press reveals that IBM has proposed an electronic trading system that would enable a new kind of derivatives market for intellectual property. In this market, traders would buy and sell "floating" rights to chunks of a company's IP portfolio, thus becoming not only the recipient of royalties from that portfolio, but the designated defender of those IP rights in court, for a limited period of time.

As traders in derivatives are already well aware, there are new and burgeoning options markets emerging not just for stocks and securities, but commodities and other tradable interests. The idea is to enable investors to buy the right to buy or sell a security or other interest at a specified price at some point in the future. A buyer might purchase the right to acquire a set amount of stock at a low price after its trading value has well surpassed that price, or a seller might purchase the right to dispose of stock after its value plummets below a set price - and for this, traders pay a premium.

Continue reading →

In a move to demonstrate its recent drive toward openness was not being done to appease the European Commission, Microsoft this afternoon announced it is adding the API for hypercalls - the ability for a host machine to communicate directly with a virtual machine - to the list of technologies covered by its Open Specification Promise.

The hypercall API will be one of the more intriguing additions to Windows Server 2008, which will be the vehicle in which the company's built-in virtualization technology, code-named Viridian, will premiere next year.

Continue reading →

The company that years ago set out to become a legitimate alternative to Intel, and blazed the trail that AMD eventually followed, today announced it is setting aside its patent infringement claim against Intel. The companies have reached an out-of-court settlement granting Intel perpetual license to Transmeta's CPU power management technology, in exchange for $150 million in cash up front and $100 million more over the next five years.

"This agreement insures there will be a complete peace between the companies," Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy told BetaNews this morning, "and presents the opportunity for the companies to work on future projects together."

Continue reading →

After having mounted what appeared to have been a serious legal challenge to the US Federal Communications Commission's right to impose rules for bidders in the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction without legislative authority, Verizon yesterday formally withdrew its FCC complaint from the D.C. District Court of Appeals, Dow Jones reported this morning.

Verizon had sought judicial review on the matter on the basis that the FCC exceeded its authority under current telecommunications law. The FCC has ordered that winners of spectrum in the so-called "C-block," which currently resides around UHF Channel 63, make services available to customers using that spectrum only if they can choose their own equipment. Verizon's lawyers challenged that argument on the grounds that any restrictions whatsoever could be construed as a violation of federal mandates for openness in the auction process.

Continue reading →

This afternoon, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office announced that Verizon Wireless had reached a settlement with the state, which had earlier accused it of wrongfully terminating about 13,000 accounts of customers of its "Unlimited" nationwide Internet service, for excessive usage.

A nine-month investigation by the A-G's office determined that Verizon Wireless had actually instituted a monthly usage cap for its "NationalAccess" and "BroadbandAccess" service tiers, without disclosing that cap to its customers.

Continue reading →

Up to now, most analysts have confronted the topic of the viability of the Windows platform on mobile devices from the user's perspective: What applications can she run? Will her documents be portable? Can her contacts and e-mail be synchronized effectively?

Beginning in the second quarter of next year, there will be one more connection to be drawn: Windows Mobile devices will become manageable through Windows Server-based networks using group policy tools.

Continue reading →

Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner. The F# language has received the company's official blessing.

"I am a big fan of technology transfer between a research organization and a product development organization so that we can 'productize' the great research ideas and deliver to customers in a timely manner," pronounced Microsoft corporate vice president for the Developer Division, S. Somasegar, in a blog post last Wednesday. "This is one of the best things that has happened at Microsoft ever since we created Microsoft Research over 15 years ago. Here is another great example of technology transfer at work."

Continue reading →

While Japanese consumers have associated the Hitachi name with personal computers since 1978, recently it was more for historical reasons than practical ones. The company barely shipped half a million units worldwide between March 2006 and March 2007, with only 130,000 of them ending up in homes, according to Asahi Shimbun. Today, Hitachi decided to close a chapter of its history, discontinuing production of its Prius PC line apparently effective immediately.

The exit may not make much of a ripple in the consumer PC business, but it could later have an impact in servers. Hitachi assembled its Prius line at its principal Toyokawa factory in Aichi prefecture. That's one of the crown jewels in Hitachi's manufacturing war chest, having been the place where it launched its 1997 entry into the server business, forging a pact with HP, Microsoft, and Intel that extends to this day.

Continue reading →

In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios.

On the surface, what Turbolinux gets out of this is the interoperability information it needs to develop a single-sign-on service, enabling users to authenticate themselves once and transfer that security authority between operating systems. That's how Microsoft is playing up the deal today, as it announces it will establish a permanent workshop at its Beijing office "to focus on testing and showcasing solutions for customers and partners," as last night's announcement put it.

Continue reading →

It ended up not being Adobe's problem to begin with anyway: a vulnerability that enabled JavaScript code within a specifically crafted URL to run unchecked, and launch any executable code. When Petko D. Petkov of GNUCitizen.org discovered the problem, it appeared to have been directly triggered by Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader.

As it turned out, Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7 have a little difficulty with parsing filenames that contain percent signs (%). A maliciously crafted URL that points to a PDF file can have XP launch executable code after it launches the reader for the PDF file. While it wasn't Acrobat or Reader that triggered the launch, a fix from Adobe issued today purports to thwart the launch, keeping the system secure.

Continue reading →

In response to a New York Times story this morning that cites unnamed officials at the Federal Trade Commission as having indicated its chairman has decided not to pursue a formal investigation of Intel's antitrust conduct with regard to AMD, Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy called the report "speculation."

"We regularly talk to the USFTC and share documents with the USFTC," Mulloy told BetaNews, "and have done so for years." Refusing to classify this sharing of documents as part of any FTC investigation, formal or informal, he added that the subject matter of documents being transferred between his company and the FTC include documents relevant to foreign antitrust investigations - such as the ongoing case in Korea - and the domestic antitrust case filed against it by AMD in Delaware court.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has agreed to make certain parts of its Windows source code available for distribution to developers under revised terms that European Commissioner for Competitiveness Neelie Kroes called "compatible with the open source business model."

"I told Microsoft that its royalty rates were too high for the patents they claim are applicable to the interoperability information," Comm. Kroes said in a morning press conference in Brussels. "I told Microsoft that it had to make interoperability information available to open source developers. Microsoft will now do so, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model."

Continue reading →

It was a quarter where AMD shipped more product than ever in its history, with 68% more mobile processors headed for trucking than at this time last year, and graphics processors adding substantially to that mix. It regained a full eight points of gross margin over the prior quarter, and reaped 22.9% greater revenue over the third quarter of 2006. And yet...

AMD still posted a loss last quarter, not as great as the prior quarter but a loss nonetheless: $386 million in red ink, on revenue of $1.63 billion. What's going on? Operating expenses are still extremely high.

Continue reading →

The parent companies of the four largest US broadcast networks plus cable content giant Viacom joined with MySpace, Microsoft, and online video providers Veoh and Dailymotion in signing a standards and practices document they hope will become the "Television Code" of online copyright protection.

The document calls upon all services for user-generated content (UGC) to implement appropriate mechanisms to identify and filter out unlicensed content from upload streams, by the end of this year - which is only ten weeks away.

Continue reading →