Even more fusion after the latest AMD reorganization
In the business press and in business marketing, the term "merger" is often used quite loosely, sometimes to mean the incorporation of another company as a division of the acquirer. When AMD acquired ATI in July 2006, the merger was touted as a pairing of equals, and the forging of a permanent fraternity between two giants in their respective fields. But almost immediately afterward, talk of ways to build processors that used AMD cores and ATI pipelines together led to discussion about truly fusing the two divisions' business units; and the first sign of the fallout from that discussion was former ATI CEO Dave Orton's departure from the AMD executive ranks in July 2007.
Almost precisely one year ago, the actual fusion of the two divisions began, with the creation of a Central Engineering group that would conduct research and development for all the company's processors. Freescale Semiconductor veteran Chekib Akrout was brought in to lead that department, but in a partnership arrangement with AMD veteran Jeff VerHeul. Yesterday afternoon, AMD announced the remainder of its fusion is complete: As AMD spokesperson Drew Prairie explained to Betanews this morning, there is now one marketing department and one product management department as well, while some of the functionality of Akrout's department is being shifted.
Muzu strives for fair music video compensation
Since launching in beta last July, Ireland-based music video site Muzu.tv has secured a decent amount of recognition for its monetization priorities. The site gives 50% of the net ad revenue generated by an artist's content back to the artist (or label) without any exclusivity contracts.
Banner ads and in-video advertisements are embedded in an artist's content in the Muzu player, which is itself embeddable in sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Anybody or any band can create a channel on Muzu dedicated to their personal music, and monetize their video content. While monetization has been somewhat problematic on YouTube, the option to make money there does exist.
EU Parliament approves law ensuring Internet access as a fundamental right
For years, the European Commission has been planning a comprehensive package of telecommunications reform, with the aim of creating a "bill of rights" spelling out what individual European citizens should have a right to do online, and what kind of business environment they should expect. For instance, consumers should have the right to change their carriers while keeping their old phone numbers, reads paragraph 1 of the Telecoms Reform bill; and in paragraph 3, when a member state imposes a measure that a telecom business believes threatens free competition, it may raise the issue before a higher, continental authority that may trump national lawmakers.
But it's paragraph 10 that's been the cause of considerable debate. After the EC submitted the reform bill to the European Parliament (the lower house of the EU's legislative branch) it amended that paragraph with stronger language about the rights of a European citizen to Internet access -- language that attempts to quite literally equate the right of access to the right of free speech.
Last November, the text of that amendment looked like this: "No restriction may be imposed on the fundamental rights and freedoms of end-users, without a prior ruling by the judicial authorities, notably in accordance with Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union on freedom of expression and information, save when public security is threatened where the ruling may be subsequent."
Is your privacy anyone's priority?
So I'm launching a security column on the anniversary of the Hindenberg disaster. Seems right.
Speaking of things that blow up and embarrass political figures: Did you enjoy the excitement recently when a Fordham law-school class tested Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's assertion that consumers don't really need more personal-privacy protections? If you missed it, Joel Reidenberg's class went online to see how much free, publicly available information it could turn up on the justice, who has stated previously that he doesn't see a need for greater legal protections for privacy.
Apple's FileMaker releases $4.99 mobile database to App Store
The new Bento for iPhone and iPod touch comes with about 30 pre-designed templates for on-the-go organization of car maintenance logs, expenses, recipes, and sundry other aspects of home and work life, said Ryan Rosenberg, FileMaker's VP of marketing and services, in a briefing for Betanews.
Most, but not all, of the templates and features in the new mobile database are the same as those included in the desktop edition of Bento, first released at Macworld 2008 and updated in October with spreadsheet-like functionality.
Google Chrome grows up, joining the realm of everyday exploitability
When the first public beta of Google Chrome arrived on the scene last September, it was given a rather rude welcome: It immediately faced the problem of averting a vulnerability. But this was only by virtue of the fact that it uses the open source WebKit rendering engine, whose exploitability had been discovered in Apple Safari just a few weeks earlier.
Now, however, Chrome is coming unto its own, but in a good way: Developers discovered some serious vulnerabilities in the browser apparently before malicious users did. In perhaps the most potentially serious dodged bullet, one of the Chromium project's lead contributors discovered a buffer overflow condition that occurs when a bitmap is copied between two locations in memory. The pointers to those locations may point to different-sized areas without any type or size checking, theoretically enabling unchecked code to be copied into protected memory and then potentially executed without privilege.
Kindle DX debuts, signs up for fall classes
Amazon officially debuted the Kindle DX today, following several days of leaked images and information that resulted in almost full disclosure.
The Kindle DX has a 9.7" e-ink display and offers 3.3 GB of storage versus the Kindle 2's 6" screen and 2 GB of storage. Rather than knock down the $359 price of the only three-month-old Kindle 2, the Kindle DX simply enters the market at $489 and creates a new size-based tier.
A year later, AT&T releases an account management app for iPhone
Nearly a year after the iTunes App Store launched, AT&T has finally made a wireless account manager available for the iPhone. This week, the mobile carrier debuted "myWireless Mobile," which lets iPhone users manage their wireless bills and plans, and track their voice, data and text message usage.
The app is free and is an extension of the Web-based "myWireless" account manager found on att.com. To access your records, you must first be registered myWireless user. Similar to T-Mobile's MyAccount, which was launched in the Android market in March for users of the popular G1 handset, myWireless allows management of not only a single handset, but also a whole family's set of phones.
First Windows 7 RC patch turns off 'hang time' correction in IE8
Perhaps Google Chrome's most innovative architectural feature is the way it relegates Web page tabs to individual processes, so that a crash takes down just the tab and not the whole browser. In addressing the need for a similar feature without overhauling their entire browser infrastructure, the engineers of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 added a simple timeout mechanism that gives users a way to close a tab that appears unresponsive.
As it turns out, there's quite a few legitimate reasons why a Web page might appear unresponsive although it's really doing its job. One of them concerns debugging with Visual Studio, as this user of StackOverflow.com discovered.
Android gets femtocell 'chameleon phone' app
Today, Intrinsyc Software announced an Android app called UX-Zone that detects when the user has entered a particular femtocell coverage area, and switches to a new home screen with appropriate apps for that area.
Femtocell is a relatively young technology, which acts as an indoor miniature cell tower, giving users additional wireless coverage with the help of their home or office broadband connection. With UX-Zone, a user's Android home screen automatically changes to "Home" and "Office" modes when femtocell presence is detected.
Function is the key: Why BlackBerry rules
From the workaday businessman to the President of the United States, for years, the American white-collar workforce has found itself choosing the Canadian BlackBerry. But after a recent period of aggressive marketing and promotion by Research in Motion which has coincided with a flare-up in consumer smartphone spending, the BlackBerry is also looking like the choice of the general populace.
As Verizon's exclusive entrant in the four-runner race of touchscreen smartphones, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm has proven to be a success among business and non-business users alike. RIM CEO Jim Balsillie has been widely quoted this week as saying, "That product was a huge success in terms of sales and adoption," adding that a next-generation device is on the Storm roadmap, off-handedly confirming rumors that began in April.
EA does Apple folk a Sim-ple kindness
Electronic Arts reported the results of its recently concluded fourth quarter on Tuesday as rumors fluttered concerning a possible buyout by Apple. EA also discussed the progress of its digital-delivery efforts, which company executives say are entering a new phase.
The Apple-buy rumor was going around this morning about Twitter as well, and didn't merit discussion on the hour-long earnings call. But there is good news for Mac and iPhone users, who for the first time will have versions of the newest edition of The Sims available to them on the first day of sale for the hotly anticipated title: The Sims 3 will launch on June 3, and the "Let There Be Sims" ad campaign should start flooding your consciousness in the next few days.
Top 10 Windows 7 Features #8: Automated third-party troubleshooting
Among the stronger and more flourishing cottage industries that have sprouted forth as a result of Microsoft Windows has been documenting all of its problems. One of the most successful of these efforts has been Annoyances.org, which sprouted forth from "Windows Annoyances" -- much of what Internet publishers have learned today about search engine optimization comes from revelations directly gleaned from the trailblazing work of Annoyances.org. Imagine, if you will, if the instructions that Annoyances.org painstakingly gives its readers for how to eradicate those little changes that Microsoft makes without your permission, were encoded not in English but instead in a language that Windows could actually execute on the user's behalf.
Windows 7 is actually making such an environment -- a system where, if you trust someone else other than Microsoft to make corrections to your system, you can accept that someone into your circle of trust and put him to work in Troubleshooting. Can't make that Wi-Fi connection? How do you test for the presence of other interfering signals? Streaming media suddenly get slow, or running in fits and starts? Maybe there's an excess of browser-related processes clogging up memory and resources. Did something you just install cause Flash not to work in your browser? Maybe you don't have time to check the 36 or so places in the Registry where that something altered your file associations.
Congress debates whether P2P users should be warned like cigarette smokers
Literally millions of unauthorized documents -- some of them personal, easily too many of them classified -- have made their way freely through P2P networks, many of them without any malicious user whatsoever even requesting or copying them. Sometimes, literally, they just show up. If the problem isn't P2P itself but the people using it, then shouldn't the users of P2P services be given warnings? That's the question being tackled by the US House of Representatives today.
H.R. 1319 or "The Informed P2P User Act" was heard today by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection. The bill seeks to curb the inadvertent disclosure of tax information, health records, and confidential or personal documents over peer-to-peer file sharing networks.
CBS focuses its online radio properties
It's like the golden age of radio for the Internet generation. The same company that in 1927 formed a nationwide network from 16 affiliate radio stations announced it has spun off the single largest online radio service to date. CBS has formed a new business unit called the CBS Interactive Music Group, which rounds up more than 100 sites and 400 stations and combines them with AOL Radio, Yahoo LaunchCast, and Last.fm under a single governing body.
CBS says that in March, CBS Radio had over 6.5 million listeners who streamed a combined 83 million hours worth of audio. Taken alone, it sounds like a massive number, but when compared to the consumption of audio through sites such as Pandora and Jango, the grandiosity promptly dissolves. According to siteanalytics.compete.com, cbsradio.com enjoyed only 97,150 unique visitors in March while radio.aol.com only had 41,108.
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