Nokia to pay $314 million to German workers, $0 to government
Outraged Germans are getting some but not all of what they want from Nokia, now that the Finnish cell phone maker has agreed to pay a severance package worth $314 million USD to workers displaced by its upcoming factory move to Romania.
Under the final pact announced this morning, Nokia will continue plans to close its plant in Bochum, Germany on June 30. But after that date, the phone manufacturer will establish a "transfer company" that will employ the displaced German workers for up to one year.
Literature 2.0: Collaborative book authoring goes beta on WEbook
The horribly overused "2.0" tag has made its way to the authoring community in a new online book publishing community called WEbook, which launched in public beta today.
Claiming to be a sort of open source approach to authoring literature, WEbook is a forum where new books can be composed by an individual wishing to "sandbox" his work, or by communities who submit content on a given subject which can then be voted into a book. The site's founders say they hope it does for publishing what Linux did for software and Wikipedia did for information.
Motorola gets veteran AT&T dealmaker as board chair
As Motorola sets about splitting off mobile phones from the rest of its business, the struggling wireless vendor has chosen a new interim chairman: David Dorman, the architect of an earlier reorganization at AT&T.
As the new chief of Motorola's board, Dorman brings experience with both company restructuring and acquisitions, having already achieved mixed results at AT&T and elsewhere.
iPhone Software 2.0 provides clues to 3G model
Hackers who have diligently worked to keep the iPhone unlocked have recently discovered something buried in the code which reveals the chipset of the 3G model.
An entry used to refer to the phone's chipset is listed as "SGOLD3," which is the nomenclature used by Infineon to refer to their third-generation chips. Teardowns have revealed the current iPhone uses the SGOLD2, the predecessor to this model.
After an 11-year holdout, Iomega agrees to a buyout
It's the end of another great technology brand that came to light, shot like a comet, and then started blinking out all during the 1990s. Iomega held out as long as it could, and in the end, a nearly quarter-billion-dollar buyout may not be all that bad.
When my ten-year-old daughter asked me the other day why there was no "A" or "B" drive on any PC she had ever used, I gave her the short and sweet answer that the older drives that used to have those letters are now too small to be significant. The real answer, of course, was Iomega.
Adobe Media Player 1.0 goes live with clear, high-def content
The Flash manufacturer's move at taking content-protected video off of the browser and moving it onto its AIR platform, no longer has the luxury of being able to excuse any remaining bugs.
It could soon become one of the most ubiquitous examples of the AIR platform in popular use: Adobe today formally published its Adobe Media Player 1.0 software, which is designed to be both a delivery system and stand-alone console for Flash video, including high-resolution media.
Flickr gets video, but for 'pro' members only
Yahoo's Flickr photo sharing site has added the ability for users to upload videos to their photo collections, but only if they're "pros."
Flickr users paying $24.95 a year for the Pro account upgrade have gotten the additional privilege of uploading their videos to the site. Videos must be under 90 seconds in length and under 150 MB in size to be converted to Flash and hosted on Flickr. Acceptable original formats include AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG1, 2, and 4, and 3Gp, with various proprietary codecs unconfirmed.
TiVo gets TV Guide license for international market
TiVo has announced its deal with Gemstar-TV Guide to allow international TiVo deployments to offer Gemstar's interactive program guide.
Gemstar's TV Guide channel and interactive programming guides have found a home in set top boxes from Comcast, Time Warner, DISH Network, Cox, and more. In fact, it's an onerous task to find a place where the new Macrovision subsidiary hasn't licensed one of its properties.
Should kids be taught 'Internet safety' in schools?
Can kids be taught to avoid dangers on the Internet while also taking full advantage of all of the good things available online? The State of Virginia, for one, thinks that classroom instruction will work.
In one of the first efforts of its kind in the US, Virginia has launched a program for "Internet safety" in schools.
New Korean Samsung HSUPA phones will upload at 2 Mbps
Samsung today unveiled its new HSUPA slider, the M470, in the company's Korean homeland.
Having blazed the way with its first High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) device, the W200 -- which promised download speeds 1.8 Mbps -- as early as May 2006, Samsung showed off today the M470, its first device to use HSUPA...and in so doing, claimed upload speeds of 2 Mbps.
Motorola bus tour brings some good news for WiMAX
A live demo of mobile WiMAX was successfully presented by Motorola at a sold out trade show in Singapore this week, not long after it announced completion of a successful trial of the technology in Thailand.
Show-goers taking a bus tour at the WiMAX Forum Congress Asia reportedly experienced Web browsing, video conferencing, and other wireless applications while moving past Motorola 400 access points (APs) along the route, with mobile hand-off between the APs. Motorola provided backhaul to its facility in Singapore over its wireless IP equipment.
H-1B limits met after just one week of petitions
As the debate continues over foreign-born students educated in America taking their skills to other countries, the US continues to limit the number of non-citizen students working here to a number that can be met in under one week's time.
Last Tuesday was the first day for the US Citizenship and Immigration Service to receive employers' petitions for foreign workers to obtain H-1B visas, to perform bachelor's and master's degree-level work in the US during its fiscal year 2009, beginning this October. Yesterday morning, the first scheduled filing period ended, and USCIS reports the number of petitions already well exceeded its annual quota of 65,000 for the bachelor's category, and 20,000 for the "advanced degree" category.
CyberLink adds BD-Live support to PowerDVD
The top-of-the-line version of the company's disc playback software will now support Blu-ray's advanced interactivity platform, the company said Tuesday.
PowerDVD 'Ultra' has already been certified for several HD formats, including Blu-ray Profile 1.1. It also supports BD+, AVCHD, and BD-RE 3.0. With Profile 2.0 support now under its belt, it becomes one of the most-feature rich disc playback applications available.
HP enters the low-cost student PC market, but is $499 too much?
Hewlett-Packard today announced a new low-priced $499 mini-notebook aimed at school students and business professionals wanting a small, low-cost system capable of withstanding the kinds of punishment that only a school can dish out.
The HP 2133 Mini-Note is the latest effort by the world's #1 PC maker to approach a market with still very little competition, though with very high growth potential.
With 4G ahead, AT&T names a wireless veteran as its CTO
Now that AT&T is starting to crystalize its strategy for the 4G wireless era, wireless industry veteran John Donovan has been named its chief technology officer.
Although AT&T announced the appointment just today, Donovan has actually been on the job at AT&T since at least Thursday of last week, when AT&T broke its silence about plans for its future LTE network. The company won a major chunk of B-Block spectrum in the FCC's recent 700 MHz auction, and boasted of that victory immediately after the FCC lifted its gag order around the auction.
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