In a post this afternoon in an unusual location -- the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog -- the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and "compatibility mode" documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe's PDF format, in the company's first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.

This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications -- that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS -- Microsoft's own try at an interoperable display format -- has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.

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The intellectual property war which at one point had Microsoft owing Alcatel-Lucent a penalty of over $1.5 billion, may end up with the latter actually owing the former. First that penalty was reduced in light of new Supreme Court guidelines, and then last September an appeals court overturned the jury verdict, ruling in favor of Microsoft.

Yesterday, Microsoft was handed another victory, as first reported by my friend and colleague Liz Montalbano at PC World, with the US Patent and Trademark Office overturning the validity of two Alcatel-Lucent patents, concerning methods for how a user selects calendar entries from an onscreen menu. Microsoft had owed the France-based holder of the Bell Labs patent portfolio some $357.7 million, which has since accrued interest.

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Repeating his belief that the synergies between Skype, eBay, and PayPal would be and are limited, eBay CEO John Donohoe announced today his company will spin off Skype in an initial public offering in 2010. That will mark the five-year anniversary of eBay's acquisition of Skype.

Comments from Donohoe during an earnings call in January of this year caused speculation that auction company eBay was looking to offload popular VoIP service provider Skype. Donohoe said, "I think we're now confident that the synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal...We are going to continue to run and operate the business. It's not a distraction currently and at such time when we have further announcement to that, we'll let you know, but for now, we are very pleased with the momentum of the business and it's not a distraction."

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Built on an entirely new architecture known as the Symmetrix Virtual Matrix Architecture, EMC's new VMax departs from more customary data center storage arrays such as its own DMX-4 through its unprecedented scalability, contended Dave Donatelli, president of EMC's Storage Division, in a webcast today. The new Symmetrix V-Max storage array is designed to scale to tens of thousands of terabytes of storage and tens of millions of I/O operations per second.

The new array also uses APIs from VMware -- a company in which EMC holds majority ownership -- to automate provisioning of storage across hundreds of thousands of VMware virtual machines running on PC servers. But EMC will also provide a set of parallel capabilities for deployments of Microsoft's Hyper-V, predicted Simon Robinson, an analyst at the 451 Group.

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If it wasn't the general state of the economy taking a toll on Intel this quarter, the numbers from Santa Clara would send stockholders racing toward the nearest open window: Operating income nosedived 68% over the prior year's first quarter, to $670 million on $7.1 billion in revenue -- and that revenue number is less than three-quarters of what Intel was making this time last year.

But in desperate need of a plus sign, Intel is seizing upon one this afternoon: After all that cost-cutting is taken into account, net income was up 176% over the disastrous fourth quarter of last year, to $647 million. That's enough to have CEO Paul Otellini proclaiming the worst is over, telling investors, "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns."

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Nintendo announced last summer that it would be updating its Wiimote controllers with an add-on called MotionPlus that promises "true 1:1 response in gameplay." Now, the peripheral has a price and a US launch date.

Similar to the way Wii Play was packaged with an additional Wiimote, the $49.99 Wii Sports Resort will include the MotionPlus controller add-on, and will ship on July 26. It will also be available individually for $19.99. The unit, which plugs into the bottom port on the Wiimote, will not enhance the control of all games. Rather, it will only affect MotionPlus-compatible titles, which with the exception of Red Steel 2 by UbiSoft, will likely all be sports games.

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During yesterday afternoon's complete service outage at private VoIP service provider Ooma, along with the simultaneous hold-up of e-mail delivery for some BlackBerry customers, the provider's chief marketing officer, Rich Buchanan, told both customers and reporters through his Twitter feed that Internap, a data co-location services provider, was to blame. But in a statement to Betanews this afternoon, an Internap spokesperson denied any kind of service problem on its side of the network.

The spokesperson told Betanews, "There was a ticket opened with Ooma at Internap regarding this issue...Our NOC personnel determined that there was nothing happening within our network and that it probably was a problem after the hand-off was made from Internap to the Ooma network itself. The Ooma personnel are still investigating...The packet loss they were experiencing during the approximate 90 minutes they were having issues, likely caused dropped calls to their customers (as VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss)."

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Each of the major US mobile carriers has its own exclusive touchscreen smartphone, and they are providing the fuel for the smartphone market's continuing growth. We are closing in on an all-fronts update, so prepare for another round of comparisons and competition.

AT&T leads the pack with the Apple iPhone, which will receive its 3.0 software update at an unspecified time this summer.
T-Mobile has the Android-based G1, which will be updated to Version 1.5

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"Do you want the Internet to turn into a jungle?" asked European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, to open her weekly English-language address this morning. "This could happen, you know, if we can't control the use of our personal information online."

Comm. Reding's message accompanied an announcement that the EC has launched the first stage in what could be a long, drawn-out series of proceedings against one of its own member nations, the United Kingdom. At issue is the UK's handling of online privacy laws, under the nearly two-year-old administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The surface issue is what made news in the UK, at least in the general press: The EC has been concerned that the behavioral advertising service Phorm, a service built in association with leading UK carrier BT, may be enabling data collection policies that go beyond the limits mandated by EC directives.

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Just one month after its acquisition of a partner company called Kidaro, which produced desktop virtualization software, Microsoft yesterday announced the immediate availability of a greatly enhanced version of its own desktop virtualization package for its volume license customers. As part of its latest update to Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), Microsoft's new Enterprise Desktop Virtualization software (MED-V) will let companies deploy software running in older versions of Windows, to appear on clients running newer versions such as Vista.

What this means is, software that ran fairly well in Windows XP or Windows 2000, and Web-driven software that runs using Internet Explorer 6 but not IE7 or IE8, can now run in a virtual envelope that leverages Virtual PC. Meanwhile, clients' users won't notice anything unusual; legacy apps' icons will appear on clients' desktops as though they were installed on their local systems.

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Korean software company EYA Interactive announced the upcoming "Grand Opening Beta" of its Free MMORPG called Titan Online, which is the English-language version of "Mo Siang," a martial arts-themed MMO based in China (both in story and server) and popular in Southeast Asia.

On April 28, Titan Online will open to the public in an unlimited beta, and will let users download and play the game until its commercial launch, which does not yet have a date. All players will begin the game at the same level to foster an environment of fair competition, and once the software has officially been launched, nothing on the player's end will change.

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Google released a developer preview of the next version of Android, officially adding the "cupcake" features to the operating system's SDK that have been a vague reality for Android users since late last year.

Yesterday evening, Android developer Xavier Ducrohet announced that developers can now download an early version of the Android 1.5 SDK, based upon the Cupcake branch of the Android Open Source Project.

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12:45 pm EDT April 14, 2009 - This afternoon, a spokesperson for the data center co-location service Internap -- a name brought up in connection with both the Ooma and RIM service failures yesterday, which took place at approximately the same time -- denied any service outage, though admitted to some routine router replacements and maintenance.

Ooma's single data center, mentioned by its technical VP in his blog post yesterday, is located on the West Coast -- Internap, meanwhile, is located in Atlanta. Any service issues related to both services may have had to have been incidental.

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According to a statement today from its chief architect and founder, Garrett Camp, the business relationship between content location service StumbleUpon and auction service eBay has ended.

"This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus: helping people discover interesting Web content," Camp wrote. "Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the Web's largest recommendation engine, and we think this is the best way to get us there."

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One week from tomorrow, Bluetooth 3.0 will be unleashed upon the wireless world.

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group confirmed to Phone Scoop late last week that next week's All Hands Meeting in Tokyo will be official unveiling of the updated Bluetooth spec.

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