Latest Technology News

Adobe's already dominated the Internet with Flash, and now, the company has begun its move to the next connected platform: the home theater. This morning, Adobe introduced Flash for the Digital Home which is designed for use on connected HDTVs, set-top Boxes, Blu-ray players, and other such devices.

Familiar Flash-based videos, apps, and widgets will be available on home theater devices as soon as the second half of this year, Adobe says. Since the company has a strong backing from OEMs, chipmakers, cable companies, and content creators in its Open Screen Project, the delivery of Flash-based content is going to become much more uniform.

Even though the United States' DTV transition has been handled with all the grace of a pianist wearing boxing gloves, there is still hope for a relatively smooth introduction to mobile DTV, despite the host of standards, brand names and incompatible technologies. The first market with a genuine mobile DTV deployment has been revealed.

Washington, D.C. will begin to broadcast mobile digital television in late summer, with the local CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox and ion stations participating. The stations will reportedly broadcast exactly the same shows and commercials that they're broadcasting to standard televisions.

After spending decades waking up every morning, as Scott McNealy's old keynote speeches used to repeat, thinking singularly of how to slay the beast that is Bill Gates, his company finds itself this morning swallowed by Larry Ellison. Signifying the apparent catastrophic collapse of Sun Microsystems and IBM to have come together, in bargaining efforts that both sides vehemently and vociferously declined to comment about, Sun has agreed to be acquired by Oracle.

"One of the key reasons that Oracle's acquisition strategy has been so successful is because we buy companies with market-leading products," stated Oracle CEO Larry Ellison this morning, literally parading his latest acquisition like the latest trophy among many, or like a big game fisherman hauling in a shark. "PeopleSoft was #1 in human resources. Siebel was #1 in customer relationship management. BEA's WebLogic was the #1 Java virtual machine. Hyperion was #1 in enterprise performance management. And so on. Sun Microsystems has a variety of exciting products, but two of their software products -- the Sun Solaris operating system and Sun's Java programming language -- were instrumental in Oracle's decision to acquire Sun."

11:45 am ET April 20, 2009 - Sun Microsystems' announcement last week came before the business deal last weekend that led to the absorption of Sun by Oracle. Most noteworthy from Monday morning's joint conference call with Oracle and Sun management was that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison characterized the deal as a software acquisition. Though the fact that Sun makes servers was mentioned (Oracle does now as well), that fact wasn't high on anyone's list this morning. And because no questions were taken from the press, we don't actually know the fate of the Sun Fire server lineup that Jacqueline Emigh covered just late last week.

Sun's new x86 hardware is designed to bring speed, simplicity, and "obviously savings, [as we] deliver the same application performance as before," said Sun CTO John Fowler, in a rollout this week at Sun's North American Partner Summit in Las Vegas.

Zoho may never have the name recognition of a Google or even an OpenOffice, but the company's quest to provide a comprehensive, extraordinarily Web-friendly business application suite continues. Widgets are the latest addition to its stable.

The six Zoho Gadgets -- Docs, Mail, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Planner -- are available for Facebook, iGoogle, and Orkut, as well as sites cognizant of OpenSocial XML (e.g., MySpace, Blogspot, Zoho or other wikis), and there's a generic embeddable version as well. The company says on its blog that more will come.

The small subset of software 'app stores' most likely to survive includes Apple's download site, Google's Android Store, and RIM's new BlackBerry App World, according to recent analysis during a webcast featuring Andy Castonguay, Yankee Group's research director.

But outside of downloadable apps, other big differentiators in the increasingly crowded broadband gadget space will include size of the device, connectivity, keyboard, screen, and user interface.

Microsoft's annual TechEd conference, which is taking place in Los Angeles this year from May 11 to 15, will play host to the official debut of Windows Mobile 6.5, the Windows Mobile Team Blog said today.

On The opening day of TechEd at 2:15 pm PDT, Stephanie Ferguson, the General Manager of Business Experiences at Microsoft, will lead the launch presentation of the Windows Mobile release that is meant to bridge the gap between old key-and-D-pad-driven interface with the touch-based interface.

The most recent quarterly analysis from Futuresource Consulting estimates that 12 million non-PlayStation 3 Blu-ray players will ship this year, showing the substantial increase in support for the format which from July 2006 to January 2009 shipped only 10.7 million players, according to DisplaySearch.

Futuresource is putting a lot of stock in this year's holiday season, expecting shipments to exceed six million units in the fourth quarter alone.

The real reason people started buying Windows 3.0 wasn't really because of the wealth of new software made for Windows for the first time. Seriously, that wasn't the reason. By the time people learned about stuff like Lotus 1-2-3G and WordPerfect for Windows -- which were both going to change the world, if you'll recall -- they were already sold on Windows 3.0 for another reason: the smooth on-screen fonts. Because let's face it, Windows/386 looked like it belonged on an 8-bit computer, compared to Macintosh.

Late last night, the BlackBerry System 4.5 upgrade finally came through for users of those older-style units that actually look like BlackBerrys. In it, you'll find relief...in the form of the replacement of the thing that made the 8800s and older units look pale compared to the (slow) Storm, or the iPhone: the disgusting looking default system font.

The four men behind the Pirate Bay torrent sharing site were sentenced to one year in prison and fined 30 million Kronor in damages this morning, after having faced charges from the Stockholm District Court of "promoting other people's infringement of copyright laws."

The court's statement to the media said, "By providing a Web site with...well-developed search functions, easy uploading and storage possibilities, and with a tracker linked to the Web site, the accused have incited the crimes that the filesharers have committed."

Later this year, perhaps, Sony Ericsson might have some good news -- maybe from the release of its Idou phone, with its rumored 12-megapixel camera. But that better day is a long way off as the partnership posts its third straight quarter of losses on Friday, this time to the tune of $387 million.

Analysts expected losses in about that range after the group gave out preliminary guidance last month, so the effect of bad news on the company's stock was minimal. The announcement that the company would also lay off 2,000 workers probably didn't hurt either.

T-Mobile, America's sole purveyor of the Sidekick, begins taking pre-orders today for the new LX version of the well-liked, swivel-screen handset. Customers reserving a unit by the end of the month including through this T-Mobile address will receive theirs May 12 -- one day before the device goes on sale to the general public.

Service-provider improvements to the latest version of the Sidekick include 3G support on T-Mobile's HSDPA network and better data-migration options for those switching from another T-Mobile handset. Inside, there's new GPS functionality; integrated Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter support via Skick-customized applications, including the ability to directly upload photos from the camera (now shooting at 3.2 megapixels) to MySpace and video to other social-networking sites; ShoutCast streaming-radio and YouTube video support; upcoming support for Microsot Exchange; and a 3.2" F-WVGA screen with 854x480 resolution.

We'll have more on this story later today, but be advised that the Swedish court has returned with four guilty verdicts in the Pirate Bay trial. Founders Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde have been sentenced to a year each in jail and millions of dollars in damages.

The BBC has an early report, and Sunde, who was made aware of the verdict several hours before its official announcement, tweeted the results and noted that "Nothing will happen to TPB, this is just theatre for the media." Needless to say, an appeal is in the works, as is a press conference by TPB.

Sony BMG, Warner, Atlantic, Arista, and Universal Music Group have been battling an intrepid group of Harvard Law scholars after 25-year old grad student Joel Tenenbaum was hauled into court for alleged copyright infringement through illegal file sharing.

In January, Tenenbaum and his counsel moved to invite the Courtroom View Network in to webcast the trial, feeling that it would be an issue of "keen public interest." While the motion was approved in the District court, the record labels involved in the case took the issue to the Court of Appeals, which today denied the District Court's ruling.

After delaying its plan to test capping subscriber bandwidth usage, Time Warner has opted to retreat from the approach altogether.

In a statement today, Chief Executive Office Glenn Britt said, "It is clear from the public response over the last two weeks that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about our plans to roll out additional tests on consumption based billing. As a result, we will not proceed with implementation of additional tests until further consultation with our customers and other interested parties, ensuring that community needs are being met."