Latest Technology News

On the Sprint Nextel earnings call Monday, CEO Dan Hesse said that attractive handset offerings are a hugely important factor in getting ordinary customers to stick with his company. A survey out late last week from IDC gives a clearer picture of what that means for the providers themselves. Hint: Think smartphones, try not to think about the economy, and don't expect leadership from the bigs.

According to Ryan Reith, a senior research analyst with IDC's Mobile Phone Tracker, smartphone sales may account for fully half of all handset sales for the biggest mobile providers such as Sprint Nextel. Smartphone sales climbed 4% year-to-year even while overall handset sales dropped a nasty 15.8%.

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They're clotting: Sprint Nextel's Q1 '09 earnings report reported a loss per share of 21 cents in its latest report released Monday, but the long struggle back from consumer service perdition seems to be paying off as subscriber losses diminished remarkably for the Kansas-based mobile provider.

The company reports a net loss of $594 million, which compares year-over-year to a loss of $505 million. It's got a cash balance of $4.5 billion and total liquidity of $5.9 billion -- not bad, points out CEO Dan Hesse, considering the economy, especially since the company just paid off all its 2009 debt maturities. Sprint generated $796 million in free cash flow during the quarter.

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In the boldest statement yet from European government leaders on the need for globalization of Internet authority, Commissioner Viviane Reding called specifically upon President Obama to allow the US' oversight of the world's domain name authority to lapse after this September, but then to allow the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to become a fully privatized entity. Such an entity, the Commissioner said, would be answerable mainly to the global community of users, represented -- as she foresees it -- by an international tribunal.

"To continue reaping the benefits of the online world, the Internet must evolve on a solid and democratic base," stated Comm. Reding in her weekly address (PDF of full transcript available here). "ICANN is a private not-for profit corporation established in California. Since it was created more than 10 years ago, ICANN has been working under an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. At the moment, the US government is the only body exercising some oversight over ICANN. I believe that the US, so far, done this in a reasonable manner. However, I also believe that the Clinton administration's decision to progressively privatize the internet's domain name and addressing system is the right one. In the long run, it is not defendable that the government department of only one country has oversight of an Internet function which is used by hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world."

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The mobile enterprise sector has got its newest supergroup. Today, HP and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion announced their alliance and that their first collaborative efforts are ready to be shown to the public: HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, and HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

CloudPrint is a product of HP Labs, which, in short, is a cloud-based print server. It allows Internet-connected mobile devices to print e-mail attachments, Web pages, photos, and documents, and has been in various stages of development since 2007. Through its partnership with RIM, HP will make the service available to BlackBerry Internet Service subscribers and BlackBerry Enterprise Server customers.

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NPD's smartphone market research ranked Research in Motion's BlackBerry Curve (8300 series) as the best-selling smartphone for the first quarter of 2009. The device outsold Apple's iPhone 3G, thanks in part to its equal availability on all four major United States carriers and aggressive promotion from the Canadian smartphone company.

RIM has also been careful to offer exclusive devices to each carrier, such as the Verizon-exclusive BlackBerry Storm, which was also the third place best seller in the first quarter of the year, according to NPD. T-Mobile's exclusive BlackBerry, the Curve 8900, will be showing up on AT&T over the summer, the phone company said this weekend.

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American television programming is controlled by approximately ten major companies (give or take a few depending on the interpretation of "major") which include: Time Warner, News Corp., GE, CBS, Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst, NBC Universal, Scripps, and Liberty Media. These companies are as deeply intertwined as their histories are long.

John Malone's Liberty Media is responsible for the networks under the Starz Entertainment and QVC brands, and has a controlling stake in the United States' largest satellite television provider DirecTV. Liberty Media holds a 48% stake in the US' largest satellite television provider, which it obtained through a stock swap with News Corp, in which Liberty sold back its shares of News Corp. in exchange for News Corp.'s shares of The DirecTV Group.

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Since Microsoft's acquisition of SoftGrid application virtualization two years ago, the company's engineers have known that this technology could present an attractive and even preferable shortcut to the perennial problem of downward compatibility. If you set aside the problem of affordability for a moment, the other key reason businesses remain hesitant to adopt Windows Vista at present is because of the uncertainty that existing business applications will be seamlessly portable into the new environment.

This is much more of a problem for businesses than consumers, although a lot of the excitement around what Microsoft's calling "XP mode" in Windows 7 (whose first and probably only Release Candidate should be available to the general public tomorrow) came from everyday users who perceived the company's move as a nod toward the efficiencies of the past, as opposed to the planned obsolescence of the future. The fact is, businesses continue to invest in software up front with the expectation that it will pay off in the long term, depreciating it like an asset rather than supporting and nurturing it like a resource. And it is for those businesses that Microsoft must ensure that it facilitates and ensures the same general infrastructure over time.

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The multiplatform video downloader-and-viewer combo formerly known as Democracy Player is taking a cue from Sally Struthers and offering you, the Windows or Mac or Linux viewer at home, the opportunity to adopt a line of code in their software. "If enough of our users adopt lines of Miro code," says co-founder Nicholas Reville, "we can create an organization that is funded from the bottom-up and not dependent on the top-down."

Miro's parent organization, the Participatory Culture Foundation, has received grants for its work over the years from the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Application Foundation (Mitch Kapor's project), the Knight foundation, and similar celebrants of open source and open democracy. Times being what they are, the funding's not what it once was, and so in the wake of its recent Miro 2.0 release (which, according to Reville, tripled the product's user base) the PCF is thinking creatively about funding its creativity.

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Thanks to the slow-moving United States legal process and the glut of copyright litigation, the names of P2P services often live on long after their actual services die in popularity. Limewire is one of those, thanks to the high profile cases it found itself wrapped up in.

One of those cases was a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing in 2007 that focused on security holes opened by LimeWire, and showed that over 200 classified government documents were available for download via the service. General Wesley Clark said, "It's just totally unacceptable. The American people would be outraged if they were aware of what's inadvertently shared by government agencies on P2P networks."

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One year ago, Sprint affiliate iPCS sued Sprint over its WiMAX venture with Clearwire, claiming that Sprint violated exclusivity agreements and willfully withheld the 4G technology from affiliates like iPCS.

The Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois denied Sprint's motion to dismiss the claims by iPCS, which seek to block Sprint from "obtaining directly or indirectly the benefits of advanced technology without providing that technology and sharing its benefits with its affiliates."

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In a demo at this week's EcoFocus press event
in New York City, Jordan Smith, product marketing manager for Xandros, showed how his new downloadable Presto dual-boot software allows fast power-up to either Windows or Linux.

If you choose Linux at boot time, you get access in something like five to 20 seconds to a Xandros desktop Linux environment that includes Skype, FireFox, the the Pidgin "universal chat client," Thunar file manager, Windows List, and Xandros' online Presto Application Store. Here you'll find the latest Sun Java 6 runtime, Adobe Reader, Picasa photo management software, the Last.fm audio player, games, and lots of other additional software.

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To ensure Verizon's merger with Alltel was a pro-competitive move, the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Justice required that Verizon divest from 105 mobile markets where Verizon and Alltel services overlapped. The merger will make Verizon the largest mobile carrier in the United States, and this mandate constitutes the biggest divestiture Verizon Wireless has had to execute in its nine years of existence.

Because the action is so large and complex, (each marketing area has approximately 200 pages worth of assets to auction off) Verizon has filed for an extension with the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, asking for another 60 days to complete the divestitures.

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At Pepcom's EcoFocus press event this week, HP launched new notebooks featuring HP Smart AC Adapters for automatically making power adjustments when needed. Available preloaded with a choice of Microsoft Windows or Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11, the five new HP ProBook models also come with HP Mobile Broadband, a system combining an HP m2400 module with built-in Qualcomm Gobi technology to support wireless connectivity to multiple broadband networks and operators.

Priced starting at about $529, the ProBooks come in 14-, 15.6-, and 17.-3-inch widescreen flavors. All five ProBooks are also outfitted with a new keyboard design, in which the keys are raised in an attempt to prevent dust and dirt from settling underneath. The notebooks offer a mercury-free design and high-definition backlit displays. A compatible USB 2.0 docking station is slated to ship in June, Betanews was told.

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Beginning now, Betanews is going to get a lot more intimate with technology than you've seen us before, particularly with Microsoft Windows 7 now that it's becoming a reality. Next Tuesday, the first and probably only Release Candidate of the operating system will become available for free download.

It's probably not so much a testing exercise as a colossal promotional giveaway, a way to get Windows 7 out in the field very fast...and use that leverage to push Vista out of the way of history. So much of what you'll see in the Release Candidate in terms of underlying technology is finalized; any tweaks that will be done between now and the general release date (which PC manufacturer Acer blabbed last night will be October 23) will likely be in the looks department.

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Having a copyright law that was drafted before the Internet Age has proven too problematic for New Zealand, and after trying a number of incremental updates, the government is considering a total rewrite.

Prime Minister John Key took office in November, and his center-right National Party ended a nine-year Labor Party incumbency. Controversy arose shortly thereafter as The Copyright (New Technologies) Amendment Act 2008, which was passed before Key's election, came into force. A clause in the act allowed ISPs to terminate a user's account based upon suspected illegal file sharing, similar to theThree Strikes Rule being drafted in France at the same time.

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