8 February 2006 Technology News

last SG · 2006-02-09T09:55:45+00:00

Lost an IPod or Wallet? Look for It Online BOSTON - Maureen Silliman felt her empty pocket and gulped: Her new $300 iPod must have bounced out as she ran t...

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ICANN board approves settlement, price hikes

In a rare show of internal discord, the group that sets domain name regulation has approved a controversial proposal extending VeriSign's lucrative .com monopoly and allowing for price increases for those domains.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted 9-5 on Tuesday in favor of a settlement agreement that grants VeriSign the right to raise fees on .com domains by 7 percent annually.

The settlement, which arose out of a lawsuit filed by VeriSign against ICANN after the Site Finder flap in 2003, will be lucrative for both organizations. Based on the 48.1 million .com domains currently active at $6 per year, VeriSign is guaranteed at least $288.6 million in annual revenue--with price hikes at a rate that far outpaces inflation.

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The driving force behind Yahoo Research

Prabhakar Raghavan is modest for a man changing the world.

As head of technology research at Yahoo, the 45-year-old is a key figure in leading the development of the Internet, arguably the most important technology of our time. Products emerging from his laboratories are used by hundreds of millions of Internet users across the globe, including countless consumers and businesses.

More broadly, these innovations--Internet search, e-commerce, online entertainment, content-sharing and instant messaging, to name but a few--affect everything from how people relate and connect to one another, to how information is distributed and consumed, to how goods and services are bought and sold.

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Congress gives online colleges a boost

It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.

That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.

The provision is just one sign of how an industry that once had a dubious reputation has gained new influence, with well-connected friends in the government and many congressional Republicans sympathetic to their entrepreneurial ethic.

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Publicis to surf marketing waves of the future

As Google ventures deeper into the mainstream areas of media and advertising, many of the reigning powers there are watching with a mixture of fascination and fear.

"Is Madison Avenue about to get Googled?" the trade publication Adweek asked recently, after Google decided to buy a company that sells radio advertising and made forays into areas like video distribution.

On the Champs-Élysées, however, moves are afoot to forestall any such Googling. Last week, the Publicis Groupe, the advertising heavyweight based in Paris, opened Denuo (Latin for "anew"), with about 15 marketing futurists to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients, investors and, not least, Publicis itself.

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NASA laser device could assist at crime scenes

Warning: Objects in this photo may appear exactly to scale.

Technology developed by NASA engineers lets photographers add measurements to objects in a picture with the use of laser dots, the space agency said this week. That tool, which has helped NASA scientists find and analyze damage to spacecraft, may soon be widely useful to police investigating crime scenes.

The device, called the Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images, is a black box weighing about half a pound, and attaches directly to a camera. With twin lasers an inch apart, the tool can project a pattern of dots in a photographer's field of vision. Once the image loads into specialized software, the photographer can then set points of interest within the picture and set distances between those references.

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New Mexico spaceport gets bankrolled

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation into law on Wednesday that will allow his state to begin investing $110 million in a facility to launch tourists into space.

"These bills will help create tremendous economic impact for New Mexico, and particularly Southern New Mexico," Richardson said in a statement on the planned spaceport in Upham near the White Sands Missile Range.

"This is a unique opportunity for New Mexico to be on the ground floor of a new industry that will bring new companies, more high-wage jobs and opportunities that will move our state's economy forward," he added.

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Pay By Touch wants your fingers to do the shopping

More than two decades after bar code scanners were introduced for supermarket checkout lines, the grocery store industry is buying into another promising new technology that could make shopping more efficient and secure, and cut costs for retailers.

Solidus Networks, a start-up that operates as Pay By Touch, has developed a biometric fingerprint scanner that in recent months has experienced a surge in orders from community grocers and U.S. national chains. One of the company's first big customers was Piggly Wiggly Carolina, which last year purchased fingerprint scanners for all of its 118 stores after a four-store pilot program found shoppers who paid by fingerprint moved through the checkout line faster and returned to the store more often.

"We found that the people who used it started visiting our stores more often and spending more dollars," says Rich Farrell, vice president of information services at Piggly Wiggly. During a three-month pilot test, 15 percent of shoppers at participating stores signed up for the service, in which they completed a transaction with a fingerprint instead of entering a PIN code or signing a receipt. Store visits among those shoppers went up 12 percent, resulting in a 15 percent increase in spending.

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Sensor instantly detects cocaine in blood

Researchers have created a sensor to instantly test for cocaine in a person's blood, streamlining a process that otherwise takes hours.

The group, which includes scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara, a Nobel prize winner and two high school students, said the sensor could also conceivably be used to test for exposure to biotoxins and other substances.

The sensor contains a specific, artificially fabricated DNA molecule that reacts when it meets cocaine. In seconds, the molecule turns from a floppy, formless shape into a rigid structure. When adding a blood or saliva sample contaminated with cocaine to the sensor, the change can be instantly measured by sending electrons through the DNA and seeing how they travel.

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Turning nature's design into scientific breakthrough

When Jay Harman was a skinny 10-year-old swimming off the coral reefs of Australia's western coast, he had an insight that 37 years later would lead him to invent an industrial design that could change personal computing, aeronautics and how drinking water is purified.

As a nature-loving boy, the young Australian just wanted to swim faster, so he watched how fish moved through water and how seaweed undulated against the reef when a wave crashed.

The shape he noticed that day was a simple curve that fluidly formed into a spiral. From then on, Harman would see spirals as a common design in nature--in pinecones, whirlpools, a puff of smoke.

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iPod Hi-Fi has big-sounding ambitions

Steve Jobs is a self-confessed audiophile.

He's spent, well, a lot of money on speakers in his time, he told a small audience of reporters Tuesday. But he said he's now giving up those expensive speakers for the new iPod Hi-Fi, Apple's new speaker accessory for the iPod music player.

Whether that's literally true, or a bit of Jobsian hyperbole to underscore a point, it's undeniable that Apple's new speakers do push the company further out of the computing world and into the home electronics business--if only a little further.

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Toshiba to release HD-DVD player

A Toshiba Entertainment representative told CNET Japan that the company plans to release titles in the HD-DVD format on March 28. This supports the company's assertion during January's Consumer Electronics Show that it would release an HD-DVD player in March. At the time, Toshiba said the first players would cost $499 and $799.

Jiji-tsushin, a news outlet in Japan, reported that Toshiba will release a HD-DVD drive for PCs in April and an HD-DVD recorder in May. Toshiba earlier said they would release a notebook with an HD-DVD drive and discuss the specs this quarter. Toshiba leads the HD-DVD camp. Sony, Samsung and Philips are part of the rival Blu-ray camp. Blu-ray players will come out later in the year and cost more.

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Apple launches new Intel Mac Minis, iPod Hi-Fi

CUPERTINO, Calif.--Apple Computer on Tuesday introduced its third Intel-based Mac, a revamped version of its petite Mac Mini.

The new Mac Mini will be available, starting immediately, in two models. The low-end model sells for $599 and comes with a 1.5GHz Intel Solo single-core chip, a 60GB hard drive and a combo drive that can play DVDs and burn CDs.

The higher-end version will sell for $799. It comes with a dual-core 1.67GHz Core Duo processor, an 80GB hard drive and a SuperDrive that burns CDs and DVDs.

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Origami: Enough of anything?

Microsoft's Origami is shaping up to be cheaper and smaller than today's Tablet PC, but the device will likely miss the software maker's most ambitious targets for size, price and battery life.

When Chairman Bill Gates first outlined the notion of an ultramobile PC at a hardware conference last year, he talked about a device that would weigh less than a pound, have all-day battery life and could cost less than $800, possibly as little as $500.

Those are still Microsoft's goals when it comes to its much talked-about Origami project. However, the first Origami devices, which are set to arrive before the end of April, will likely not reach those lofty ideals. Instead, the machines are likely to start somewhere near the $800 mark and have battery life that hovers around four hours, according to a source familiar with the first-generation products.

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Intel issues revenue warning

Intel warned on Friday that its first-quarter revenue will fall below expectations, marking the second consecutive quarter in which the chip giant has surprised Wall Street.

The company cited weaker-than-expected demand for its chips and a slight decline in market share as the reason for the warning. The chip giant also issued an earnings warning for the fourth quarter of last year.

Intel said it now expects its first-quarter revenue to be in the range of $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion, compared with its previous forecast of $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion.

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The new Salesforce approach to outages

Salesforce.com has responded to some of the criticism it has suffered after service outages left users without their CRM services for as long as an hour and a half.

These problems hit the headlines just before last Christmas when Salesforce faced its biggest outage to date. Since then the service has suffered intermittent faults, prompting the company to launch its own service to track outages.

The service, trust.salesforce.com, launched late last month, tracks the system performance of Salesforce's four main servers--two in the U.S., one covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and one covering the Asia-Pacific region. At the end of each day it publishes a performance summary, with a traffic-light color-coding system using green, amber and red to indicate good service, minor problems and outages, respectively.

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IBM's research juggling act

Paul Horn, the director of IBM Research and a physicist by training, faces one of the toughest math problems at the computing giant: how to divide a $5 billion to $6 billion yearly research budget across hardware, software and--increasingly--services.

IBM Research is a 60-year-old institution that's had its hand in many technologies people now take for granted. The list extends to everyday devices like hard drives and programming languages. But today, about half of Big Blue's revenues derive from consulting services--hardly a hard science.

Horn's job is to make the squishy field of services resemble something like an engineering discipline. Without applying technologies and research to services, IBM Global Services risks being undercut on price by lower-cost rivals.

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Patent auctions: Lawyer's dream or way of the future?

On April 5, guests of Ocean Tomo will gather for a $500-per- person cocktail reception and awards dinner at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

The next morning, the same people will gather for a patent auction that could lead to some really nasty lawsuits in the future.

Chicago-based Ocean Tomo, a patent consulting firm that includes Ross Perot as an investor, will put on the auction block approximately 400 patents applicable to semiconductors, RFID (radio frequency identification), wireless communications, automotive technology, food, energy and the Internet. The patents will be grouped in 68 blocks ranging in estimated value from $100,000 to more than $5 million.

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HP prepares 'infinity' campaign for Itanium servers

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Hewlett-Packard plans to launch a major new ad campaign in coming days using the infinity symbol to try to show the potential of its Itanium-based Integrity server line.

The symbol--a figure eight turned on its side made out of speckles--was featured prominently next to Chief Executive Mark Hurd, who touted his company's commitment to the Integrity line in a meeting with customers at HP headquarters here Thursday.

The campaign will launch in coming days, spokesman Don Gentile said Thursday. It's part of the massive financial commitment HP has made to products using the beleaguered high-end Intel Itanium processor. Intel and HP are leading an effort to regain momentum for the chip that stalled because of product delays, software incompatibility and poor initial performance.

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What's behind open-source ID push?

Big guns IBM and Novell threw their weight behind a previously obscure open-source identity management project this week, leading analysts to wonder: What's in it for those companies?

The two technology heavyweights are backing an initiative code-named Higgins Project, which the companies pitch as an open-source response to Microsoft's forthcoming InfoCard technology. Both Higgins and InfoCard are being presented as ways to give people more control of their personal data when doing business online. The systems also promise to work with the multiple authentication systems on the Net, making it easier for people to manage Internet logins and passwords.

Microsoft has been talking about InfoCard for some time now, and Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated it for the first time at last month's RSA Conference. The technology is to be built into Windows Vista, the next version of Microsoft's flagship operating system, and will also be available for Windows XP.

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'Rev F' ends single-core Opteron era for AMD

SAN FRANCISCO--Advanced Micro Devices will launch "Rev F" versions of its Opteron chips in the third quarter, a move that ends the single-core server processor era and paves the way for four-core models.

The company had discussed some Rev F details before, but in a meeting here Monday, on the eve of its rival's Intel Developer Forum, product marketing manager Kishna Weaver narrowed the launch date to the third quarter from just mid-2006.

With Opteron, AMD has opened a new front in its decades-long competition with Intel. Intel previously had the x86 server market to itself with its Xeon model, but with Opteron, AMD beat Intel to market with several features and has been gaining market share. One such feature was the use of dual processing cores.

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