Latest Technology News

At the same time Apple was celebrating the iPhone's launch in Germany, elsewhere the company was defending its price structure for iTunes.

The European Commission claims that the record labels are forcing iTunes to not allow European residents to purchase music from stores in other countries in the EU. This apparently runs afoul of the bloc's laws, and the Commission isn't happy about it.

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Service Pack 1 for the developers' toolkit for the second edition of Microsoft's just-in-time high-level language interpreter for embedded equipment was released yesterday.

.NET Micro Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 tackles an interesting issue for embedded systems: code signing. A device vendor may have any number of reasons why it would prefer for its binary code to be signed and authenticated: perhaps to serve the authenticated user, perhaps to help authenticate the firmware code, but most often to ensure that users can't change the code. Up until Windows XP Embedded, embedded systems developers looking to produce signed code had to encode their security catalogs in their program's binaries.

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While the top-of-the-line 8 GB Apple iPod nano still retails for $199, the completely revised new model costs Apple about $7 less to build than the previous edition, based on a preliminary teardown analysis by iSuppli. With a bill-of-materials at $82.85 per unit, according to iSuppli's estimate, Apple enjoys a nearly 42% markup in retail price.

Of course, that's not the company's wholesale margins for its resellers, though a great many units are sold through Apple Store outlets and through Apple.com - where it can feel the full benefit.

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Apple and T-Mobile said Wednesday that the carrier will begin selling the iPhone in Germany on November 9, the same day UK consumers first see the device.

T-Mobile is Germany's largest provider with 30.7 million customers. It is also the only carrier in the country that will have deployed EDGE data across its entire network by the end of 2007, which is central to the data capabilities of the iPhone.

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Verizon today announced the fall lineup for its V Cast Mobile TV service, and this year, several network TV shows will debut on Verizon phones at or around the same time.

Verizon's V Cast mobile TV, launched in the first quarter of this year, announced its fall programming lineup today. At least ten new shows are expected to debut at the same time on Vcast as on broadcast television. Never before has watching soon-to-be-canceled shows been so convenient.

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In the only raw performance test figures revealed yesterday by Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger at Fall IDF in San Francisco, preliminary tests of the company's forthcoming quad-core "Harpertown" architecture Xeon 5400 show it beating a quad-core Opteron 2300 system in the critical SPEC floating point throughput rate test by just over 4%.

"We have leadership on a broad range of benchmarks," Gelsinger proclaimed yesterday, "literally every benchmark. But the area where competition is closest is in bandwidth-intensive and floating-point areas. And what we see here is [that], with the improvement of the 1600 [MHz] front-side bus, [and] the larger cache of 3.2 GHz, going from [Intel] Clovertown to Harpertown, a 34% improvement."

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On Tuesday, CBS became the second network behind Fox to indicate that it will likely be staying on iTunes. In comments to the Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment conference, CEO Les Moonves said the company will be staying out of the battle and that the network "likes our relationship with iTunes." Moonves' comments follow that of News Corp, which owns the Fox network.

Shortly after NBC Universal pulled its own programming, News Corp's president Peter Cherin told Reuters that they planned to stay on the network and had "a perfectly good relationship with Apple." Later, the company said they expected the negotiations to be contentious, however it is still expected that the two sides will eventually come to a deal.

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Google is beta testing a new type of ad with a select number of its clients that allows them to take advantage of the rise in popularity of the widget.

Called Google Gadgets, the ads can be placed freely on web pages and the iGoogle pages of interested consumers. From there, the advertiser can regularly update the ad's content to keep the user's interest while at the same time advertising their products.

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In a clever marketing move that had some of us fooled, IBM revealed today it was doing much more than beginning the process of rebuilding its own applications suite. In fact, Beta 1 of the new Lotus Symphony is already under way.

It's not so much a symphony, I wrote in a 1984 review of Lotus Symphony, but a cacophony. Lotus, I said, fails to make the value proposition about why users should invest nearly a thousand dollars in software whose components collectively sell for less than that, and whose best in class includes the best spreadsheet at that time, Lotus 1-2-3.

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Time Warner is "looking hard" at selling off the internet access portion of its AOL division over the next 12-18 months, Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons said on Tuesday.

NEW DETAILS Rumors have been floated in the past about a sale of AOL's US ISP business, but up until now Time Warner -- including Parsons himself -- had denied that it was even a possibility. Parsons did admit earlier in the year that he had been approached by several groups looking to buy the ISP.

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Based on the initial word we're receiving from the Fall Intel Developers' Forum in San Francisco this afternoon, there are no major surprises other than the lack of surprises. There is no delay in the company's plans to roll out the first commercial 45 nm processors, code-named Penryn, this November as scheduled.

During his keynote speech at IDF, CEO Paul Otellini turned up the volume in his efforts to psych out his competitor, using a verbal image we've already seen get under AMD's skin. Intel is now actually calling its roadmap, by name, "tick-tock."

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Following the New York Times' announcement Tuesday that it would be doing away with its premium online content, Rupert Murdoch hinted that the Wall Street Journal may be considering a similar move in the future at a conference for media held by Goldman Sachs in New York. Many have said giving away WSJ content online for free may hurt the paper's overall revenues, however Murdoch says he isn't buying that argument.

The media mogul seems to be following the same reasoning that the Times did: that by opening it up, and with good content, the revenues from selling advertising on its pages could far surpass any revenues it may have made off a subscription-only format. The current format has constrained any considerable online advertising, as it has caused the sites customer base to be more US-centric, and consumers generally frown upon ads in premium services.

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AOL debuted a beta of BlueString on Tuesday, a new service which would allow consumers to upload and share digital media at no cost.

Each user would receive 5GB of online storage. They would eventually have the capability in the fall to link directly to video clips and photos from third-party services without the need to upload or move them to BlueString, AOL said. During the test, the company said it would allow users to connect to their Flickr accounts.

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Just two years after it introduced its premium online subscription service, the New York Times on Tuesday said it will be doing away with TimesSelect on Wednesday and allowing free access to the majority of its content.

The paper made a modest income off of the service, which had about 227,000 paying subscribers and was generating around $10 million in annual revenue. However, it felt ad sales from opening up most of its content and archives would be much more lucrative.

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The impending launch of the iPhone in Great Britain has had many paying rapt attention to see which mobile network would support the device. With the launch date set for tomorrow, it appears no one was paying closer attention than the carriers themselves.

A full two months ago, the BBC cited early reports that Apple's choice of carrier for its iPhone was O2. Owned by Spain's Telefonica, the company reportedly edged out its competitors by agreeing to hand over the largest proportion of customer-derived revenue - as much as 40%. The remainder is to be divided between O2 and its exclusive retailer Carphone Warehouse, which not only gets a commission but also its own revenue share.

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