Apple rivals wield anti-compete lawsuits to fight executive flight
Apple's competitors are trying to enforce non-compete clauses in court as a way of preventing executive talent -- and maybe valuable intellectual property -- from flowing in Apple's direction.
At least two high-level industry executives hired away by Apple lately have beem slapped by ex-employers with charges of breaking non-compete pacts. Mark Papermaster, sued by IBM this month, follows Michael Fenger, who got hauled into court by Motorola in July.
IAB releases fresh guidelines for online ads ecosystem
The organization representing the lion's share of online ads sales in the US is looking to streamline the process of getting those ads in front of you. Mad Men material it's not... or is it?
At its annual Ad Operations Summit in New York this week, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) rolled out five industry initiatives that are meant to improve efficiencies between ad sellers and the sites that present those ads -- and hey, a little sales growth stimulation wouldn't hurt either.
Microsoft sorts out government sites, sounds
US appeals court denies patent to 'abstract' risk management system
In yet another sign that it's getting harder to gain -- and keep -- "business method" patents, a pair of inventors lost an appeals court bid this week to patent an energy-related risk management system.
Can an inventor patent an "abstract process," something involving nothing more than thoughts? A US appeals court this week said "no" in a case concerning a patent request around a system for managing energy costs.
PDC 2008: Recapping a week with Windows 7 and Azure
With the debut of Windows 7, Office 14 and its Web counterpart, along with a completely new Windows "operating system" for the cloud called Azure, PDC 2008 was a week that didn't let up. For those who didn't catch all of the news, here's a quick recap of our coverage.
Microsoft welcomes a new member to the Windows family: Azure
AOL: Hello to Facebook, goodbye to Xdrive, Pictures
All in the same week, AOL opened up user access to outside social networks, while starting to shut down user access to its own AOL Pictures, Xdrive and Bluestring services.
AOL told users this week that it's closing down access to its own AOL Pictures, Xdrive, and Bluestring services as of the end of this year. Yet at the same time, the company went ahead with previously announced plans to link the AOL Home Page to various outside services.
Verizon-Alltel merger approved by DOJ, but with conditions
The United States Department of Justice has conditionally approved Verizon's acquisition of Alltel, provided Verizon divests from 100 markets.
Verizon and Alltel issued joint statements last summer announcing the $28.1 billion acquisition. The combination would result in the single largest mobile network in the United States. As such, the Antitrust Division of the U.S Department of Justice has also required one of the biggest mobile sell-offs thus far in order for the merger to take place.
Sorry folks, Opera Mini won't be coming to the iPhone
In a New York Times interview this week, Opera's Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said Opera Mini has been ported to the iPhone, but cannot be released.
Though the issue was only touched upon briefly in the interview, it confirms the restrictive nature of Apple's SDK that developers such as Mozilla's Rob Sayre have complained about. The NYT said Opera Mini couldn't be released because it competes with Apple's Safari.
Another 100,000 Sony batteries recalled
A voluntary recall has been issued for another 100,000 Sony batteries that power notebooks from HP, Toshiba, and Dell.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall yesterday for approximately 35,150 laptops in the US and said another 65,000 were sold worldwide. The Commission said there have been 19 reports of these batteries overheating, 17 of which described overheating to the point of incineration.
Psystar puts Blu-ray on a Mac OS desktop first
Although reportedly now in legal mediation talks with Apple, Mac clonemaker Psystar this week introduced Blu-ray -- a technology not yet supported by Apple -- in an optional drive for its Mac desktop PCs.
A furious round of legal charges and countercharges with Apple hasn't stopped Psystar from shipping its latest Mac clone, a desktop PC enabled with Blu-ray. Meanwhile, accounts are surfacing that the clone maker plans a Mac laptop, too.
PDC 2008: Toolkit for asynchronous programming emerges from robotics
On Wednesday at PDC, research took center stage, as the company took time to show off its virtual telescope and its experimental engineering projects. But one of these projects is something that applies to big business, not just laboratories.
LOS ANGELES - You might think that a real-world implementation of something that emerged from a project at the Robotics division of Microsoft Research would have something to do with, perhaps, just maybe, a robot. But one of the big surprises at this year's PDC was the emergence of a runtime toolkit for enterprise software developers that ostensibly enables a new -- or, more accurately, unimplemented -- method for dealing with very large scale tasks and problem-solving, that's directly inspired by the way Microsoft is programming robots to deal with complex tasks dynamically.
PDC 2008: Cross-platform .NET surprisingly makes a fast game scripting engine
An open source project to make a common language runtime for Linux, Mac, and iPhone that's .NET-compatible, has ended up succeeding in an area no one may have expected at first: as an artificial intelligence provider for gaming engines.
LOS ANGELES - The annual Microsoft PDC conference is perhaps the least likely place you'd expect to find a demonstration of an open source programming and scripting environment that runs on Linux and Mac. But the scripting language in this case is C#, created by Microsoft. And what's most impressive about Mono, the open source implementation of the .NET Framework CLR (which also, by the way, has a version for Windows) is that it's being implemented as host of a replacement for the scripting language in one of the most popular cross-platform MMO gaming engines: Unity3D.
PDC 2008: Will multitouch change the Windows application?
The research and resources that Microsoft has invested in its Surface project will soon pay off for everyday Windows users, with new multitouch functionality being added to Windows 7. But how soon will Windows apps feel the change?
LOS ANGELES - The next version of Windows will enable more multitouch applications, but it cannot automatically convert apps to multitouch that haven't had the capability before. There is a way to enable the scroll bar controls to register vertical and horizontal scrolling capability in case their container app happens to be running in a system that has multitouch, but that's the limit of how much conversion that the next Windows API can do by itself.
OpenID announcement leads to Google kerfuffle
Google's announcement of testing on a new API for OpenID identity providers drew cheers from some quarters. But a few observers seethed at a perceived breach of orthodoxy.
The new API, announced Wednesday, would allow users to log in using their Google account information. Google based that choice on multiple studies indicating that users found it easiest to use information they already easily remembered, such as their e-mail address.
Napster Mobile comes to select AT&T handsets
Today, AT&T and Napster announced that more than 13 million AT&T customers spanning 25 different model phones now have access to Napster Mobile.
Owners of six different BlackBerries, including the Curve and the controversial Bold, the AT&T Quickfire, Samsung's Access and Matrix, and many more can now enter the "AT&T Music" menu under "Shop Music," and access Napster Mobile along with eMusic Mobile. The only other U.S. cellular carrier that supports Napster Mobile is CellularONE.
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