MySpace News Service Appearing Imminent
Almost a year to the day following the acquisition by Fox Interactive Media of startup social news aggregation service Newroo, the company appears to be gearing up to integrate it with a certain service it acquired since that time. After a blog post last week in which celebrated former local TV news director Terry Heaton cited industry insiders as revealing FIM's intention to preparing to launch a MySpace news portal around Newroo technology in the second quarter, FIM officials this morning - very clearly and ostentatiously - declined comment.
This as the parent company's careers site today actively advertises for positions such as a software engineer for its Newroo Labs project, describing it in the same paragraph with MySpace as providing "social interaction and communication around user's personal interests relating to news."
EU Consumer Protection Targets iTunes
On the eve of the announcement of a new Europe-wide consumer protection program, whose stated aim is to ensure consumers' ability to return products purchased online for refunds if they're not satisfied - regardless of what country they were purchased from - the lead architect of that program, EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, hinted to the German newsweekly Focus that Apple's iTunes service could be directly impacted.
One possible cause for consumer dissatisfaction may be the realization that music tracks purchased from iTunes are not portable across all digital devices or CD players. Last January, officials in Norway (not an EU member) declared iTunes illegal in that country for a multitude of reasons, the alleged non-interoperability of the underlying system being just one of them.
E-mails for Intel CEO, Chairman Among Missing
During last Wednesday's hearing before the Special Master in the AMD v. Intel antitrust case, attorneys for Intel acknowledged that company CEO Paul Otellini, chairman Craig Barrett, and executive vice president for sales and marketing Sean Maloney, were among more than 300 company employees who apparently did not back up their e-mails and important documents personally.
The senior employees may have been under the impression that their IT departments were performing the backups; and indeed, those departments may have also thought backups were performed or under way.
OpenGL Comes Closer to Bringing 3D Games to Cell Phones
This week's Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco was mainly about the art of game design for consoles and PCs; but another very equally important development was going on there as well: The world's leading software designers (minus Microsoft) formally accepted and ratified a provision to the OpenGL graphics standard that will make it feasible for game designers to create shader components and game assets for handheld devices just as easily as they do for PlayStation 3.
Members of the Khronos Group formally ratified OpenGL ES 2.0 for embedded systems, which utilizes the same rendering principles as OpenGL for other platforms, though it's geared for communicating with new classes of handheld hardware that have frankly been ready to take rendering to a new level since 2004.
OneCare Deletes Users' Outlook Files
A rash of users of Microsoft's new Windows Live OneCare service, launched last January 30, have been reporting on Microsoft's support forums that virus scans performed by the service have resulted in the deletion of their OUTLOOK.PST files - the local, centralized repositories of e-mail, scheduling, and collaboration data used by Outlook.
"This new version of OneCare did the damage to my computer no virus had ever done before," wrote one user last January 25. Since that time, a volunteer Microsoft MVP was struggling to help users cope with not only their deletions, but suggestions and advice from phone-based Microsoft support personnel managed to exacerbate many users' problems, in some instances rendering their Outlook files non-recoverable.
AT&T-Yahoo Partnership Endangered?
With the brand-sharing alliance between Yahoo and AT&T - the successor of SBC, which first signed the deal with the then-search giant in 2001 - due to expire in just over a year, AT&T may be reconsidering whether, as it expands its broadband services nationwide this year, it needs or even wants the Yahoo name tagging along for the ride. This according to a story in this morning's Wall Street Journal.
The story cites an unnamed source as revealing that AT&T is reconsidering whether it should be the one paying the search giant, instead of the other way around. Yahoo currently receives as much as a quarter billion dollars of revenue annually, the WSJ states, from a licensing deal that has AT&T pre-installing Yahoo-branded software onto the systems of customers of its DSL and other broadband services.
Last-minute DST Patches Create Headaches for Exchange Admins
While Microsoft began releasing software patches that take account of the new, earlier shifts to Daylight Savings Time months ago, panic calls from admins everywhere suggest that businesses may be waiting until the last minute to install them.
As a result, an Info-Tech Research Group bulletin this morning describes, Microsoft's technical support personnel only just this week discovered that its various patches for Windows, Exchange Server, Outlook, and other tools should be installed in a precise order, otherwise they may not actually be patching networks.
Microsoft Gambles One EU Customer Will Make its Case
It has been "Issues Week" all week for Microsoft, and Thursday, the company took on the dreaded interoperability issue. But its choice of message was called into question a bit yesterday after Microsoft boasted of having signed up its first official customer for its communications and interoperability IP licenses: Quest Software, the manufacturer of the Toad data modeling system.
Microsoft was ordered by the European Commission - the legislative arm of the EU government - to provide software libraries and instructions that can make other software, including other operating systems, fully interoperate with Windows. Microsoft has been licensing some portions of its Windows source code that enable interoperability since January 2006, though it has struggled in recent months to come up with fees for new, key portions that are acceptable to the EC.
Dissecting the Proposed Internet Radio Royalty Fees
On Tuesday, BetaNews reported on the acceptance by the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) of a proposal put forth by a consortium of recording industry representatives, whereby Internet streaming radio sites would be responsible for royalties for the music they play, the total of which would substantially exceed their annual revenue, probably forcing many to shut down.
Our story generated a lot of buzz in the streaming radio community, which prompted prominent members of that industry to share with us some more up-to-date statistics. With these facts in hand, BetaNews is able to make more accurate projections about what major and minor streaming radio providers - including terrestrial radio stations with Internet services - are likely to pay in royalty fees.
Fox Interactive Hints of MySpace Expansion to Battle YouTube
In carefully calculated statements made yesterday at a financial analysts' retreat yesterday in Palm Beach, Florida, new Fox Interactive Media president Peter Levinsohn was quoted by Variety as saying the on-again/off-again talks between his parent company, News Corp., and representatives of other major media companies to collectively build an online video sharing destination, are on again. He later hinted that MySpace -- the jewel in the FIM crown -- would be the platform on which that destination would be built.
"We're in very active negotiations with all of the media companies to create the most robust video offering from professional content on the Web," Variety quotes Levinsohn as saying, in a response that may have arisen to a simple inquiry about FIM's efforts to protect its content online.
Intel Ordered to Explain Missing Evidence
The Special Master presiding over the discovery of evidence in AMD's antitrust trial against Intel, Vincent Poppiti, today gave Intel five weeks -- until April 10 -- to present a full written account of the custodial process, and the likely failing of that process, under which the company admits potential evidence in that trial was lost.
At that time, Intel must come up with what's being called a "plan of remediation," under which some of that lost data may be recovered, or at least data will be protected against future loss.
Toward HTML 6.0: W3C to Pursue Next Web Language
With a mandate to consider the proper direction for the evolution of the lingua franca of the World-Wide Web, the W3 Consortium this morning officially re-launched the HTML Working Group. Its mission will be to deliver an updated HTML, for use by both stand-alone and XML parsers, by the last day of 2010.
When the new Working Group was announced last October, Web creator Tim Berners-Lee wrote for his personal blog, "It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain."
Amid Microsoft's Protest, Google Book Search Enlists German Library
In the wake of fallout over a Microsoft attorney's public comments yesterday before the Association of American Publishers, chastising arch-rival Google for an effort he said would undermine the rights of copyright holders worldwide, the Bavarian State Library has signed a pact with Google Book Search that will enable the search provider to index and publish online a major portion of its holdings.
But in an indication of how libraries may continue to treat Google with caution, the Library stated it would only allow Google Book Search to index works whose terms of copyright had expired. Still, the pact is likely to enrich Google's online repertoire with a huge collection of not only German-language works, but also Spanish, Italian, French, Latin, and English texts, including rarely seen works that explore the history of Eastern Europe.
Record Industry Proposes Huge Streaming Royalty Fees
If a new online radio webcasting royalty rate, proposed last week by the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) of the US Library of Congress, is ratified and put into effect, BetaNews estimates that online webcasting leader AOL Radio may receive a bill for copyright holders' royalties retroactive to 2006 amounting to $23.7 million, payable to a collective representing the US recording industry. And assuming the service doesn't become more popular, it could find itself paying as much as $56.3 million in copyright royalties in 2010.
This while the world's three major copyright holders' groups - ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC - collectively charge terrestrial broadcast radio stations $972 per year per station, for the rights to broadcast exactly the same music to an equivalent or larger audience.
HP Pulls Away from Dell in iSuppli Q4 2006 Rankings
Dell's global market share in PCs was expected to have slipped last year, but the question on the mind of new CEO Michael Dell was, how badly? Today, the first preliminary numbers from electronics research firm iSuppli are in, and though it's bad news, it might not be devastating: Dell lost 1.6% in global PC market share between 2005 and 2006, and its PC shipments declined 8.6% for the year. Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, gained 2.7% of market share for the year, and shipped more than 20% more PCs than Dell during the fourth quarter.
While Dell will be happy to claim the #1 position worldwide for last year, by virtue of its relatively stronger performance during the first half, few are under the illusion that this title reflects the current state of affairs.
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