Top Democrats ask for restrictions on XM + Sirius
Two leading Democrats in the US House, who both chair committees overseeing the FCC, are asking for the Commission to place conditions upon its final approval of any merger between the nation's only two satellite radio providers.
Rep. John Dingell (D - Mich.) chairs the Committee on Energy and Commerce, while Rep. Edward Markey (D - Mass.) chairs the Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, part of the Commerce Committee.
iSuppli: 1Q 2008 DRAM revenues fall 39 percent
Research firm iSuppli says the high stakes game of "chicken" between memory chip manufacturers is continuing the sharp decline in revenues overall.
While revenues only dropped 7.4 percent sequentially, year-over-year they plummeted 39 percent. Top DRAM producer Samsung padded its market share lead during the quarter, ending at 30.6 percent of the market, but it came at the expense of making a profit.
Digg makes official its adoption of a 'semantic Web' standard
It could be the very thing the Web has lacked all these years, even with its wealth of intermingled hyperlinks: a markup language for conclusively identifying context. Now, Digg is making the bold attempt to be its biggest "beta tester."
One of the principal deficiencies all these years about HTML or XHTML as a markup language has been the absence of any genuine, built-in feature for explaining to indexing services or even to browsers with intelligent features, just exactly what a page contains at a granular level. Metadata could conceivably help categorize data, assuming everything on a page had the same category; but with more Web pages these days constituting whole blogs, whole-page metadata is rapidly becoming useless.
Microsoft claims 2-to-1 sales edge for GTA IV on Xbox 360
Microsoft says anecdotal evidence indicates its version of Grand Theft Auto IV is doing much better than Sony's, although Sony seems to dispute that claim.
So far, there are no hard numbers available, so Microsoft's claims cannot be verified. To its defense Sony is disputing the claims as inconsistent with its own reports, although it will not provide more data until further reports are received.
Netgear moves toward SMB-grade gigabit switches
At the Interop show in Las Vegas this week, Netgear continued its focus on SMB customers with its rollout of a new 802.11n wireless access point, a ReadyNAS storage solution, and three gigabit Smart Switches.
"We see strong growth in market demand for our SMB products, especially our ReadyNAS [storage] and Smart Switches," contended Netgear CEO and Chairman Patrick Lo, during a recent financial call with analysts.
Evidence T-Mobile is inching closer to a 3G rollout
Several pieces of evidence were found this week pointing to T-Mobile's launch of a 3G network in select markets today. However, it appears today's launch is only an early step toward a complete UMTS network.
TMO news posted a leaked internal T-Mobile document from April 29, announcing the launch as a part of the company's "Big 5 goal to Deepen Coverage and Begin High-Speed Service Rollout." It clarifies that this phase of 3G only affects the voice channel; all data transmission will still rely on T-Mobile's EDGE network.
Microsoft snags key Photoshop developer from Adobe
Microsoft has hired Mark Hamburg, a 17-year-veteran of Adobe's Photoshop product and most recently its new Lightroom product.
Although Microsoft did not confirm independently to BetaNews at press time, news reports indicate that Hamburg's likely new job is the "Future of OS User Experience" group at the company.
Analysts: Ad-supported mobile games are on the way
According to analysts Screen Digest, advertising will account for more than 20 percent of all mobile TV revenues on a worldwide basis by 2012. So get ready for the ad-funded games, especially after mobile TV becomes universally available.
Four years from now, more than 60 million ad-funded mobile games will be downloaded each year worldwide, according to results of of a new survey by analyst group Screen Digest.
Expression Studio 2 released to retail
Microsoft's principal challenge to Adobe's creative suite now officially enters the second stage of its life cycle, with the release this afternoon of Expression Studio 2.
On the one hand, Microsoft is moving its Expression suite for Web developers towards more generally adopted Web standards with a more genuine embrace of PHP in addition to ASP.NET, with the final release today of version 2. On the other hand, it adds complete support for its Silverlight platform, showing it still has intentions to build a platform for the Web -- just not the same one it was building before.
Creative settles over MP3 player capacities
eBay unfairly invested in Craigslist's competition, its defense alleges
Last week, eBay -- an investor in classified ad site Craiglist -- filed suit against it in Delaware for "unfairly diluting eBay's economic interest in Craigslist by more than 10 percent," according to details released just yesterday.
After the suit was issued, Craigslist's official blog said eBay's action came without any forewarning, and immediately struck the classified ad publisher as unethical. With most of the suit's details posted today (a considerable chunk of important data was redacted at the behest of Craigslist) in a public version of eBay's claim (PDF available here), it appears eBay is accusing Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster of implementing "self-dealing transactions" that were designed to benefit Craigslist at eBay's expense.
Apple to take on Blockbuster with same-day movie releases? Not so fast.
Today's news that Apple will offer movies for download on the same day as their DVD release was widely interpreted as a major breakthrough that will put iTunes in direct competition with Blockbuster. But there's a catch: Apple will only sell the movies, not rent them.
Movie download services ranging from CinemaNow to Vudu to iTunes have long been hamstrung by availability problems. Some movies can be purchased while others can be rented, and there is usually a delay before the films are available for download after their release on DVD.
Xobni gets cold feet over Microsoft acquisition
Less than two weeks after it had agreed to be acquired by the Redmond giant, the small e-mail startup has walked away from the deal.
Negotiations had been ongoing between the two companies over the past few weeks, with an agreement reached in mid-April. Xobni distributes a plug-in for Outlook that shows how contacts are linked to one another.
Cross-platform Ruby on Rails gets SaaS management tool set
With the number of Ruby developers projected by Gartner to more than quadruple to 4 million by 2013, start-up New Relic is getting into the act with an application management service for Ruby on Rails (RoR) that runs cross-platform.
Already in use among high profile Web sites that include Twitter, Hulu, and Helium.com, Ruby on Rails is an open source, database-driven Web application framework -- geared to ease of use and high productivity -- based on Ruby, an object-oriented programming language derived from Perl. Now, New Relic is launching a software-as-a-service (SaaS) package for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, for managing applications created in the emerging cross-platform Web development environment.
AOL, Real, Yahoo must pay millions in outstanding music royalties
The artists' rights organization ASCAP will be receiving tens of millions in back royalties from 2006, from the leading Web radio broadcasters. But it's much less than what it had proposed, and way less than what royalties groups wanted last year.
A long-standing dispute over how much Internet streaming radio services owe in composers' royalties dating back to 2006 was settled yesterday in US District Court in New York. There, Judge William C. Conner issued a decision whose intricate formulas had their data, sadly, redacted from the public copy of the decision (PDF available here, black marks and all), although the end result is that AOL Radio, RealNetworks, and Yahoo will probably find themselves collectively owing more several million in back royalties.
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