Arizona company Objecs announced today that it has developed "enhanced memorial products" that add Near Field Communications tags to cemetery markers, which allow text and photos to be "embedded" in a headstone and retrieved whenever a cell phone is touched against its surface.

It's the same inductive coupling technology used in wallet phones that allows complex information sharing at the expense of practically no electrical energy.

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With its latest announced systems on Monday, Lenovo is following up on a series of PCs unveiled just over a month ago that included AMD-powered Edge notebooks for SMBs. The global #3 PC maker's new entries include two ultraportable notebooks, a tablet PC, and two mobile workstations -- one of them outfitted with Lenovo's trademark secondary display -- and a low-cost server aimed at the smallest of businesses.

With these new products, Lenovo is adhering to a "protect and attack" strategy versus rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, said Mika Majapuro, a Lenovo product marketing manager, in a meeting with Betanews during a New York City press tour.

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Worldwide, Windows Mobile smartphone operating system market share declined in 2009 to 8.7 percent from 11.8 percent a year later. Windows Phone 7 Series couldn't come soon enough -- if holiday 2009 could even be enough to hold back Apple's iPhone OS and Google Android.

The smartphone data comes from Gartner, which measures actual sales to customers rather than to carriers or dealers. By that reckoning, Windows Mobile sales only declined by 1.47 million units to around 15 million units year over year. By comparison, iPhone OS sales more than doubled -- to nearly 25 million units -- with share rise to 14.4 percent from 8.2 percent year over year. Android made significant gains -- and at the expense of other Linux-based smartphone operating systems, too -- with share rising from 0.5 percent in 2008 to 3.9 percent in 2009 on 6.8 million units shipped. Android made its biggest gains of the year during fourth quarter.

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One of President Obama's first priorities upon taking office was a comprehensive review, then considered urgent, of federal policies for maintaining Internet security. The report on that review, released last May, recommended further empowering the role of what was then being called the "cybersecurity czar," including the delegation of authority to lead emergency responses in case of an attack on Internet resources that threatened the national security.

Inactivity in enacting those recommendations was blamed for the resignation of Mr. Obama's first czar, Melissa Hathaway, last August. In December, a former security advisor to Pres. George W. Bush, Howard Schmidt, was confirmed to fill Hathaway's post.

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After rolling out the first Linux edition of its desktop encryption security software last month -- together with new support for the latest versions of Windows and Mac -- PGP Corp. on Monday announced major server updates that will let PGP be managed alongside myriad other approaches to encryption.

Released on January 19, the new PGP Desktop 10.0 product brings new support for Windows 7, MacOS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and two flavors of Linux: Ubuntu and Red Hat. The software also works on Windows Vista, XP, and 2000, earlier editions of Mac OS, and Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones, said Karthik Krishnan, senior director of product management, in a briefing for Betanews.

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At the end of business last Friday, Google announced it had completed the transaction to acquire On2 Technologies, the maker of Web video encoding software and codecs, for a deal that was finally valued at $124.6 million. On2 was a small company that was, in recent quarters, losing small amounts of money. It was attempting to become lucrative at some point through the licensing of a new generation of its VPx codec platform, called VP8 announced way back in the fall of 2008. Customers were supposed to have included Move Networks and Skype.

It's the type of business model that only a small startup company could profit from to any significant degree; and it's the type of model that normally a huge company the size of Google would only purchase in order to shut down, perhaps to disable a competitor. But none of the usually suspected motives for a major player acquiring a minor provider make immediate sense when applied to Google and On2.

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It's one of the most predictable responses in all of tech: Every time there's a blowup over some online service's privacy or data security lapses, if you stick your head out the window and focus yourself just so, you can hear the rumble in the distance as naysayers happily share their told-you-so stories of woe.

Without your even asking, they'll go into excruciating detail over how cloud-based services aren't ready for prime time and probably never will be. They'll tell you how distrustful Web services vendors are, how they view our confidential data as means to a profitable end, and how only an idiot would move off of conventional network-controlled infrastructure and throw every shred of personally identifiable data into the nebulous clutches of an unseen service provider.

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The flu pretty much wiped out most of last week, which is just a blur to me. This morning, I started catching up on email and found a real frakker in my Windows Live Hotmail inbox. Someone wants to steal my Windows Live ID and password -- and probably yours, too. The message is dated Feb. 22, 2010.

The email caught my attention for several reasons: 1) Windows Live Hotmail didn't flag the message as junk or suspicious; 2) The apparent originating address -- "communications@microsoft.windowslive.com" -- seems legit enough; 3) Sender is "Windows Live Team"; 4) The email effectively uses threats and cajoling.

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Normally, Betanews doesn't like to do "inside baseball" stories, that deal with the individuals in the technology journalism business and all the insights as to "how the sausage is made." I'll try to make this one as painless as possible, but it needs to be done, because the individual involved had been cited by me in Betanews stories in the past.

Yesterday morning, ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Larry Dignan revealed the results of research showing that a blogger for IDG publications, and the CTO of a testing and research firm cited by that blogger, were actually the same person. Blogger Randall C. Kennedy, a trusted InfoWorld contributor up until yesterday, was Devil Mountain Software Chief Technology Officer "Craig Barth," the author of reports over the years claiming that Windows Vista performance was slower than Windows XP, and recently that Windows 7 performance was slower than Windows Vista.

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Wal-Mart is in the process of acquiring streaming video service Vudu, The New York Times reports today. An unnamed source said the two companies have begun telling Hollywood studios about the deal. No details have yet been disclosed to the public.

Vudu has had its own streaming HD video products available for a little more than two and a half years, and has gradually moved away from a hardware-centric service to something more akin to Netflix, where its platform is the core of the business.

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One of the more obvious, but little mentioned, facts about the upcoming Windows Web browser "choice screen," to be rolled out to European users via Windows Update March 1, is the absence of one very important choice: sticking with the old version of Microsoft Internet Explorer they may currently be using.

The "choice screen," as the European Commission now refers to it, will only be displayed for users who have IE7 or IE6 as their default Web browser. While they may choose Internet Explorer from this ballot, it explicitly offers version the latest version 8. The only upgrade procrastination option the ballot gives, based on snapshots of the first public beta, is a button in the lower left corner marked, "Select Later." The next time the user boots her computer, the choice screen reappears.

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs wants publishers to support iPad, but not with Adobe Flash. Jobs' anti-Flash campaign has grown bolder since the company announced iPad last month and during this week's Mobile World Congress, where Flash 10.1 inched a little close to widespread mobile device availability. What's Apple's problem with Flash? Simply put: Competition.

Apple wants to control the entire mobile applications stack. The App Store/iPhone/iPod touch platform, which will soon include iPad, is a closed stack that Apple tightly controls. For developers, it's Apple's way or no way. But Apple could conceivably lose control of the stack -- most importantly the applications and their user experience -- should Flash run free and unfettered on iPhone OS devices.

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This week, Dutch group Forthehack launched PleaseRobMe, a site meant to expose the danger of location-based social networks such as Foursquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, and Google Buzz. Basically, PleaseRobMe says that every time someone posts his location in a location-based social network, that person is publicly announcing that he is not home, which could be taken to mean, no one is home.

To illustrate the point, PleaseRobMe rephrases public Foursquare posts to say, "@Username left home and checked in X minutes ago..." and then presents that person's current map location in a Twitter alert.

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There will be no further legal action in a case whose outcome was already upheld in August 2008 by a US appeals court. As a result, legal precedent has now been made permanent for the right of open source software developers to seek monetary damages for infringement of their copyrights, even if their products were being distributed freely.

Settlement documents in the case of Jacobsen v. Katzer were filed early this morning in US District Court in Northern California, as Linux Foundation attorney Andrew Updegrove informed Betanews just hours later. A pending appeal of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling last August is now terminated. In the judgment that was being appealed, the Circuit panel ruled that the right to declare software free, could be given monetary value: "There are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties," that court ruled. "For example, program creators may generate market share for their programs by providing certain components free of charge. Similarly, a programmer or company may increase its national or international reputation by incubating open source projects. Improvement to a product can come rapidly and free of charge from an expert not even known to the copyright holder."

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In an early morning blog post Friday, Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner announced that final field testing of the company's Web browser ballot screen for European Windows customers (XP, Vista, and Windows 7) is under way now. The goal is to have a fully operational ballot screen by March 1 -- a week from Monday.

"External testing of the choice screen will begin next week in three countries: the United Kingdom, Belgium and France," Heiner reported. "Anyone in those countries who wishes to test it can download the browser choice screen software update from Windows Update. We plan to begin a phased roll-out of the update across Europe the week of March 1."

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