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Tribune Co.'s new venture to spread the costs of some television operations across its 23 stations and those of Oak Hill Capital Partners' Local TV LLC will get to spread those costs over an even wider swath than first announced.
News Corp., the media company controlled by Rupert Murdoch, will sell eight of its Fox network-affiliated television stations in the U.S. to Oak Hill Capital Partners for about $1.1 billion in cash.
The sale in small markets will leave News Corp. with 27 stations in major markets including New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
The media conglomerate, which owns the New York Post, a controlling stake in BSkyB satellite TV service, and 20th Century Fox movie studio, recently closed a $5.6 billion deal to buy the Wall Street Journal publisher, Dow Jones.
The sale will probably be completed in the third quarter, News Corp. said in a statement Saturday. The purchase will help Oak Hill, the buyout firm founded two years ago by Robert Bass, a Texas oil billionaire, create a broader U.S. network. In May it paid $575 million to acquire stations in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Arkansas from The New York Times Co.
"It is part of News Corp.'s strategic decision to shed low-growth, noncore assets," said Richard Dorfman, managing director of the investment firm Richard Alan.
For Oak Hill, the purchase is "a classic private equity play," Dorfman said. "Ad dollars are migrating to the Web, but it's a government-licensed franchise that can throw off good cash flow and reliably service debt."
Oak Hill will get WJW in Cleveland; KDVR in Denver; KTVI in St. Louis; WDAF in Kansas City, Missouri; WITI in Milwaukee; KSTU in Salt Lake City, Utah; WBRC in Birmingham, Alabama; and WGHP in Greensboro, North Carolina, according to the News Corp. statement confirmed by Teri Everett, a spokeswoman.
Oak Hill has expanded into leveraged buyouts, high-yield debt and hedge funds, raising more than $4.6 billion from investors, including Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
News Corp. hired the New York investment banking firm Allen & Co. to advise it on the sale of the TV stations in June. Two months later, it agreed to buy Dow Jones, publisher of Dow Jones Newswires, Barron's and The Wall Street Journal, after months of negotiations with the controlling Bancroft family.
Murdoch plans to use the Wall Street Journal brand to attract viewers to its television networks and Internet users to Web sites.
"News Corp.'s focus today is much more on Internet properties, such as MySpace, and cable," said Dorfman. The sale of the stations "will help News Corp. raise capital. News Corp. is not walking away from the healthy broadcast world."
Showing posts with label Tech Investor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech Investor. Show all posts
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
This new mechanism could help explain the ear's remarkable ability to sense and discriminate sounds.
MIT finds new hearing mechanism
Discovery could lead to improved hearing aids
MIT researchers have discovered a hearing mechanism that fundamentally changes the current understanding of inner ear function. This new mechanism could help explain the ear's remarkable ability to sense and discriminate sounds. Its discovery could eventually lead to improved systems for restoring hearing.
The research is described in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of October 8.
MIT Professor Dennis M. Freeman, working with graduate student Roozbeh Ghaffari and research scientist Alexander J. Aranyosi, found that the tectorial membrane, a gelatinous structure inside the cochlea of the ear, is much more important to hearing than previously thought. It can selectively pick up and transmit energy to different parts of the cochlea via a kind of wave that is different from that commonly associated with hearing.
Ghaffari, the lead author of the paper, is in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, as is Freeman. All three researchers are in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. Freeman is also in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.
It has been known for over half a century that inside the cochlea sound waves are translated into up-and-down waves that travel along a structure called the basilar membrane. But the team has now found that a different kind of wave, a traveling wave that moves from side to side, can also carry sound energy. This wave moves along the tectorial membrane, which is situated directly above the sensory hair cells that transmit sounds to the brain. This second wave mechanism is poised to play a crucial role in delivering sound signals to these hair cells.
In short, the ear can mechanically translate sounds into two different kinds of wave motion at once. These waves can interact to excite the hair cells and enhance their sensitivity, "which may help explain how we hear sounds as quiet as whispers," says Aranyosi. The interactions between these two wave mechanisms may be a key part of how we are able to hear with such fidelity - for example, knowing when a single instrument in an orchestra is out of tune.
"We know the ear is enormously sensitive" in its ability to discriminate between different kinds of sound, Freeman says. "We don't know the mechanism that lets it do that." The new work has revealed "a whole new mechanism that nobody had thought of. It's really a very different way of looking at things."
The tectorial membrane is difficult to study because it is small (the entire length could fit inside a one-inch piece of human hair), fragile (it is 97 percent water, with a consistency similar to that of a jellyfish), and nearly transparent. In addition, sound vibrations cause nanometer-scale displacements of cochlear structures at audio frequencies. "We had to develop an entirely new class of measurement tools for the nano-scale regime," Ghaffari says.
The team learned about the new wave mechanism by suspending an isolated piece of tectorial membrane between two supports, one fixed and one moveable. They launched waves at audio frequencies along the membrane and watched how it responded by using a stroboscopic imaging system developed in Freeman's lab. That system can measure nanometer-scale displacements at frequencies up to a million cycles per second.
The team's discovery has implications for how we model cochlear mechanisms. "In the long run, this could affect the design of hearing aids and cochlear implants," says Ghaffari. The research also has implications for inherited forms of hearing loss that affect the tectorial membrane. Previous measurements of cochlear function in mouse models of these diseases "are consistent with disruptions of this second wave," Aranyosi adds.
Because the tectorial membrane is so tiny and so fragile, people "tend to think of it as something that's wimpy and not important," Freeman says. "Well, it's not wimpy at all." The new discovery "that it can transport energy throughout the cochlea is very significant, and it's not something that's intuitive."
This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health
Using a stroboscopic imaging system developed in MIT Professor Dennis Freeman's lab, Freeman's team obtained this video of wave motion along the ear's tectorial membrane (at top, the actual video showing nanometer-scale displacements, and at bottom, the same video, motion magnified (Liu et al., 2005) to make the motion more apparent).
View via MIT TechTV
View via MIT TechTV
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Google Buys Into Microblogging (Jaiku)
Otherwise, you probably assumed Jaiku is some game played with dice that Google will put in its employee lounges. I'll bet this second group represents something that rounds easily to 100 percent of the adult population.
For all of those people: Jaiku, like Twitter, is what has become known as a microblogging service that lets people send short blasts of information about themselves to their friends and to the public. The company is based in Helsinki, and was founded by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. Not surprisingly both have been heavily involved in the mobile phone world. (Here are Google's blog post and Jaiku's FAQ on the deal.)
Despite the obsession of a small corner of Silicon Valley with Twitter, I suspect this is hardly a blip in the evolution of the Internet. The terms of the deal were not announced, but doubtless the company was sold for an amount in the millions or low tens of millions of dollars.
Google is not picking up a significant number of users in buying Jaiku. And I don't see any evidence that Jaiku has technology that is very hard to build. So we've got to assume Google is paying a lot of money to hire a small group of engineers it likes, as it tends to do.
This may also be a sign that Google has overstaffed its business development department and is doing deals just to keep them busy.
Still, Jaiku and Twitter, which recently raised money from Union Square Ventures, are onto something. AOL Instant Messenger showed that there is something very engaging about watching what other people we know are doing - logging on and off, putting simple information in their 'away' messages. Facebook found a way to amplify this with an easy to update "status" message, brilliantly aggregated into a personal newsfeed for each user. Twitter and Jaiku, of course, are the newsfeed without the rest of the service.
So the question here, of course, is whether status updates really will become a mass product on a standalone service, or whether they will be a feature of some other more complex offering.
You've got to bet that status, presence and so on constitute a feature. It's too easy to add these to other services that are more engaging. And I suspect that there are enough other sites wanting to expand their use for social communication that there will be many offers for Twitter whenever it decides it's time to sell.
Google, after all, has decided that it is simply too complex to create a new interface for each good idea and has been on a campaign to focus on developing "features not products." The best example of this is the integration of its instant message system into Gmail. Indeed, you can already see little orange icons showing which of your Gmail contacts are online at any given moment. And it is easy to imagine that this interface could easily add a stream of text or photo blasts too.
I'm sure some users would like that. What's not clear is why Google needed to buy a standalone company to offer it.
By the way, I asked Google for comment and haven't heard back yet. I'll update this post if they reply and add anything.
UPDATE: I just ran across this bit of fan mail to Jaiku from Tim O'Reilly. He is particularly enamored of how the service can integrate into the address book of a few high-end cellphones. As you start to dial a person, you can see their latest status update and where they are. As Google moves into the phone software business, it's possible that this sort of feature might be interesting. Google certainly has a fondness for services that relates to geographical location.
Source:
Google buys Finnish startup Jaiku.
Google announced on Tuesday it is buying Jaiku, a Finnish startup specializing in letting friends use mobile telephones to share what they are doing at any given moment.
Google is making a priority of following Internet users as they go mobile and is even reported to be crafting a "gphone" with an open-source software platform tailored to its online services.
Jaiku is a social networking and mini-messaging service that enables people to keep track of each others' activities while on the move using curt missives sent to mobile telephones.
The Helsinki-based firm founded early last year by Jyri Engestrom and Petteri Koponen has been compared to the popular US-based service Twitter.
"Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder," Google product manager Tony Hsieh wrote in a posting on the California firm's website.
"Living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it's more difficult to keep track of everyone when they're running around at warp speed. That's why we're excited to announce that we've acquired Jaiku."
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Last month, Google's quest for devotees in the booming world of mobile online services led to its purchase of Zingku, a startup company that streamlines sharing pictures, messages and more via smart phones..
About Jaiku
Jaiku is now a part of Google. For more details about Jaiku and Google, see the Q&A about the acquisition.
Jaiku's main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you're attending, photos you've taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.
The most powerful instrument of social peripheral vision is your mobile phone. We've put in a special effort to create Jaiku Mobile, a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list. We modestly believe it is the best solution out there for seeing what your friends are up to. Currently Jaiku Mobile is available for phones based on the Nokia S60 software platform (see the list of compatible devices).
Check out our Jaikido blog for updates about the service. We appreciate your feedback, so feel free to comment away on the blog - or join our feedback and ideas channel.
For an insider's view into things happening at Jaiku, follow the updates from Jaiku Team
Thursday, October 4, 2007
BT creates Wi-Fi community
Fon was founded in Spain in early 2006. Broadband users who sign up to Fon's community agree to share their Wi-Fi connectivity through a separate, secure channel. They do this either for a 50 percent cut of the fees charged to their visitors or for the privilege of being able to surf other users' connections for free, though the community has since changed its rules to allow its members to do both.
One of the biggest hindrances to Fon's expansion has been resistance from Internet service providers, whose terms and conditions have tended to prohibit sharing of broadband connections.
Now BT, the largest ISP in the United Kingdom, has given its approval. By doing so, the telecommunications company has effectively extended its Openzone Wi-Fi network across the 3 million BT Home Hubs--or at least those Home Hubs whose users agree to share their broadband connection.
It is not yet clear whether BT users who share their connection will get remuneration for doing so, though it is likely that they will gain access to BT's new nationwide wireless network, plus Fon's global network of almost 200,000 hot spots. It is currently unclear whether BT's business customers will be offered the same deal.
BT has also invested an undisclosed amount in Fon and gained a seat on its board.
"This is the start of something very exciting for BT," Gavin Patterson, the managing director of BT Group, said Thursday. "Today we are launching a people's network of Wi-Fi, which could one day cover every street in Britain. We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity. If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of Fon and BT Openzone hot spots today, without paying a penny."
Patterson continued. "We have built a public Wi-Fi network and 12 wireless cities already, but today, we are saying to customers: let's build a Wi-Fi community together, which covers everywhere and serves everyone."
Martin Varsavsky, Fon's founder and chief executive, said, "From the beginning, Fon users believed in the concept of sharing and in the people's ability to participate in building something important that would benefit everyone," he said. "With BT Fon, those beliefs have proved to be well-founded."
Rumors that BT and Fon were in talks about the deal have been circulating for over six months, but Thursday's announcement is the first official confirmation of the tie-in. The collaboration between the two companies also raises the possibility of a comprehensive global network of Wi-Fi sharers--with the blessing of ISPs.
Fon has inked similar deals with Time Warner Cable in the United States--though that service is yet to be rolled out--and Neuf Cegetel in France, so BT broadband customers who agree to share their connectivity will soon gain free access to their counterparts' broadband in those countries.
Robert Lang, Fon's European chief, told CNET News.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday that Fon had compromised, in that its users will have to pay, albeit at a discounted rate, to use BT's Openzone hot spots and Wireless Cities hot zones, rather than gaining access for free.
The deal means that users of BT Fusion dual-mode handsets will be able to use those devices in far more locations around the world than had previously been possible. Fon also has a software client that can be used on Nokia's Wi-Fi-enabled N series handsets.
source : www.news.com
Sunday, September 16, 2007
New frontier for DNA team: A bar code for every animal
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Step into a forest in southern Ontario and a dizzying array of diversity pummels the senses: ferns line a stream, songbirds flit overhead, lichen pepper a tree stump, a mosquito finds the soft flesh on your arm.
Unless you have a degree in taxonomy, identifying all of the flora and fauna is an insurmountable task.
University of Guelph scientists hope to change that using something retail stores have relied on for years: bar codes. Researchers at the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario are starting to assign a unique DNA identifier in the form of a genetic bar code to every animal species on the planet.
They are not alone in their quest. Since the idea was first published in 2003 by University of Guelph professor Paul Hebert, DNA bar coding has been adopted by 160 organizations in 50 countries and more than 31,000 species have been coded.
Experts believe it has a host of applications, from catching agricultural pests at the border to quickly identifying disease-carrying mosquitos.
It will help researchers discover species and trace evolutionary patterns, says David Schindel, executive secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and host of next week's second international Barcode of Life conference in Taipei.
Scientists are bar-coding as many species as possible in an effort to create a global reference library, says Schindel.
Much like a fingerprint database, DNA bar-coding only works if there is a comprehensive catalogue from which to compare samples.
Barcoding will soon allow scientists to quickly identify hard-to-distinguish species within hours, rather than days. Taxonomists usually use physical characteristics, such as colour markings, to classify an animal. But that won't always work; scientists may only have a small piece of an organism to work with.
When dead birds carrying avian flu washed up on the shores of Scotland, it took weeks to identify the species as swans because they were so decomposed, Schindel says.
"If we could have bar-coded the species, we would have known what they were within a day and, possibly, where they came from," he says. "It would have been a big help for public health officials."
Hebert, who holds a Canada Research Chair in molecular biology, had long thought DNA could be used to identify species.
Scanning an animal's entire genome would cost too much and take too long, so he pinpointed a short piece of DNA - a section of a gene called cytochrome c oxidase 1, or CO1 - that could distinguish one animal from an other. It was a successful hunch, though it can't be used for plants.
"The results of the first wave of studies have been so positive that the plan to bar code all life is simply irresistible," Hebert wrote in an email while travelling in Korea.
He believes 500,000 animal species will be bar-coded within five years.
The Biodiversity Institute of Ontario, which opened in May, houses the world's leading DNA bar-code facility. Robert Hanner, an assistant professor at the University of Guelph and co-ordinator of the Fish Barcode of Life Campaign, says the lab is able to code between 12,000 and 20,000 samples a month, for $2 a sample.
Agricultural groups have approached them to bar-code insects that affect Ontario crops, he says.
Critics say DNA bar-coding isn't nearly as accurate as promised.
Felix Sperling, a biology professor at the University of Alberta, points out bar coding seems to work best for identifying species, such as birds, that are easy to distinguish by physical characteristics.
It does not work as well for other plant and animal groups, such as lichen, fungi and parasitic insects, he adds.
That doesn't bother Spencer Barrett, a University of Toronto professor of evolutionary biology, who is looking for a piece of DNA that can be used to distinguish plant species.
"The next big frontier, the next big scientific question, is to identify all of the biodiversity on Earth," he says, noting only 1.7 million species have been named of some 20 million to 30 million species.
HOW IT WORKS
Scientists only need DNA from a single gene to identify most species of animals on Earth.
• First, a tissue sample is collected and sent to a lab, where DNA can be extracted.
• The target piece of DNA - a portion of a gene called cytochrome c oxidase 1 (CO1) - is copied many times, using a technique called polymerase chain reaction.
• The copies are sequenced to determine the exact order of the four base pairs (A,T,C,G) within the strand of DNA, which generates the specific barcode for that species.
• The barcode information, along with the animal's taxonomic name, photos, GPS co-ordinates of where it was found, and other distinguishing characteristics, are entered into the Barcode of Life data system. It's accessible to anyone at www.barcodinglife.org.
PROMISING APPLICATIONS
• Quickly identifying species of mosquitos that carry diseases, including those that carry West Nile virus or malaria.
• Checking for consumer products made from endangered plants or animals.
• Identifying invasive insect pests on agricultural shipments going in and out of Canada
• Environmental monitoring - mapping how birds shift breeding territories in response to global warming, for example.
• Tracing unwanted plant and animal ingredients in foods.
The ecosystem of the mobile phone and iPhone,
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Just 74 days after launching its iPhone, Apple announced it had already sold 1 million of the things - a milestone that its previous blockbuster product, the iPod, took almost two years to reach.
And yet, to judge by the industry's chatter, the iPhone is already old news. More excitement swirls around rumours that Google, the Web-search giant that is Apple's neighbour in Silicon Valley, could enter the market with its own "gPhone." Google's boss, Eric Schmidt, has already said that the firm plans to bid for a prime slice of the wireless spectrum in a forthcoming auction, something Apple is also said to be considering.
In short, both mobile operators and handset-makers could soon be confronted with two of the world's sexiest brands as direct rivals. Publicly, Apple and Google are being diplomatic.
The industry is a stool with three legs - network service, devices, and the software and content that goes on them - and "I don't think any player in the ecosystem trying to glue it all together will be very successful," says Dipchand Nishar, who leads Google's mobile-phone strategy.
By this he may simply be conceding the obvious, which is that Google would not build hardware, even if it made the other two legs.
But Google seems to be up to something. It bought a company called Android in 2005 that specializes in mobile-phone software. It has Google Talk, a free Internet-calling service. In July it bought GrandCentral Communications, a firm that gives users one single phone number for life. And it recently filed a patent application for a new mobile-payment technology.
It would certainly be tempting to tie all these bits together into a new software "platform" for mobile phones and offer it to handset-makers as an alternative to existing smart-phone operating systems such as Symbian, Palm or Microsoft's Windows Mobile.
Naturally, Google's search, email and document services would be tightly integrated, along with its advertising technologies, which might pave the way for mobile service that is partly or wholly subsidized by advertising.
As a strategy, this might be just different enough from Apple's to assure harmony with its ally.
It would suit neither firm to open hostilities. So Google may concentrate on software for cheaper, mass-market devices, leaving Apple to make elegant, high-end hardware.
Friday, September 14, 2007
International Privacy Standard proposed by Google
This seems to me like it will be good for global businesses as a universal standard will allow a more streamlined approach to how to handle individual data.The world's largest Internet search company wants to create new ways to help keep Internet users safe.
Search giant Google Inc. will propose on Friday that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy to address growing concerns over how personal data is handled across the Internet.
Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will make the proposal at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Strasbourg, France, dealing with the intersection of technology with human rights and ethics.
Fleischer's 30-minute presentation will advocate that regulators, international organizations and private companies increase dialog on privacy issues with a goal to create a unified standard.
Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London.
"We don't want to be prescriptive about who does that and what those standards are because it should be a collaborative effort," the spokesman said.
Other organizations have already made progress on privacy standards, he said. For example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) created a nine-point Privacy Framework designed to aid countries without existing policies.
Google today proposed that governments and technology companies need to work together to create an international method that details how the personal information of users should be handled on the Internet. Google's Peter Fleischer, chief privacy officer, challenged members of the United Nations to help make sure user privacy remains safe.
"People look to us to show some leadership and be constructive," Fleischer said before speaking before the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. "By supporting global privacy standards, there will be a debate and part of that debate will be what are motives our."
A large problem is that privacy standards can vary greatly among countries, something that can cause issues for companies that operate in many countries. Along with not having a federal privacy law to protect consumers, laws in the United States often vary state-by-state: another roadblock that will likely need to be fixed.
Another problem facing companies such as Google is that many of the laws are extremely out of date when compared to how the Internet has progressed. An Internet law created by lawmakers just 10 years ago cannot fairly be used today.
"Privacy laws have not kept up with the reality of the internet and technology, where we have vast amounts of information and every time a credit card is used online, the data on it can move across six or seven countries in a matter of minutes," Fleischer said.
Assuming that data is passed through a small handful of information in a short amount of time, companies need to create a safeguard to make sure the data remains safe -- especially since a lot of nations have minimal data protection laws, Fleischer added.
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) recently created a privacy framework that organizers hope will help nations modify existing laws that deal with user privacy and protection. However, much work must be done due to legal gray areas and loose translation of the privacy framework - for example, general principles are highlighted, but nations are responsible for their own enforcement.
Google already has spoken with Yahoo! and Microsoft over privacy standards, and now plans to speak with regulators from a number of different nations.
At a time when Google is worried about government regulation and laws over privacy, critics of the search engine company claim its recent acquisition of DoubleClick Inc are concerned Google now has the ability to store too much user data. Due to rising pressure from European officials, Google agreed to hold cookies up to two years only - the company originally scheduled cookies to be deleted in 2038.
Some other privacy standard
The P3P standard
The P3P specification has a double nature. On the one hand it is standardizing technical issues to facilitate the exchange of privacy meta information. On the other hand it requires the website to provide certain information necessary to enable the user of do-it-yourself privacy protection (e.g. the entity processing the data, types of collected data, purpose of collection and the type of processing). Requiring this information P3P sets a (minimum) privacy standard.
By offering a P3P policy, websites are giving a binding promise to their users that they will follow the P3P standard as a whole. It is part of the promise to provide the information required by the P3P specification truly and comprehensively. It also includes a careful interpretation according to the P3P specification of what personal identifiable data actually is. All things considered using P3P means agreeing on a legally binding (minimum) privacy standard between the parties.
Legal Privacy Standard
Some countries have their own data protection laws requiring i.e. special user information or allowing data use for special purposes only. These legal privacy standards are especially within European Union member states higher than the P3P specification's requirements (e.g. which information has to be provided in the P3P policy).
The relations between the P3P privacy standard, other legal privacy standards and the parties involved are illustrated in the following chart.
700MHz open-access conditions sued by Verizon
US FCC auction of a thousand wireless licences for the 700MHz frequency after Verizon Wireless has challenged the rules of the game.
The FCC has attached open-access requirements to a 22 megahertz block of spectrum for the auction in mid-January.
Most of the mobile phone industry hated the idea of attaching conditions to any of the 700 MHz spectrum, but AT&T liked it.
Winning bidders of the 22 MHz worth of licenses are allowed to use any devices and application on their networks, as long as they don't harm the rest of the spectrum. Fighting against the FCC is legally messy and will take ages. Verizon suing will mean that the auction could be delayed for years.
Verizon claims FCC action "violates the US Constitution, violates the Administrative Procedures Act … and is arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by the substantial evidence and otherwise contrary to law."
The move might create a backlash against Verizon. Lawyers approached by RCR News said that the rules were designed to allow consumers, for the first time, to use their handsets with any network they desire, and download and use the lawful software applications of their choice.
People might get miffed that Verizon is using the court system to try to prevent consumers from having any choice of innovative services
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tata Tele launches Web browser Moblie
Tata Teleservices has launched a Web browser mobile phone 'Samsung Explore' that is customised to access the Internet.
At Rs 5,499, the phone has other features such as 0.3-mega pixel digital camera, FM radio, MP3 player, mobile tracker, SOS alert and provision to insert external memory cards.
Starter kits and SIM cards would be additionally charged. Tariff plans for Internet access include Rs 10 a day, Rs 30 for 7 days and Rs 99 for a month - all offering unlimited access at speeds of about 156 kbps, Mr Srinivas Rao Sarapalli, Chief Operating Officer, Tamil Nadu Circle, Tata Teleservices, said at a press conference.
Both pre-paid and post-paid consumers can use this phone. The company currently has over 1.9 crore subscribers, about 60 per cent of who access the Internet via mobile phones.
The company expects to sell about 4,000 'Samsung Explore' handsets this month, Mr Sarapalli said.
Subscriber base
Tata Teleservices has about 9 lakh subscribers in Chennai and Tamil Nadu telecom circles and is investing about Rs 400 crore this year to expand network in the State.
It expects to add about 60 lakh subscribers pan India and is investing about Rs 4,000 crore in network expansion and other activities.
More
Tata Teleservices, in association with Samsung Telecommunications, unveiled a web browser fully optimised for mobile Internet here on Thursday.
The web browser is being introduced on the Samsung 'Explore' handset.
"This innovation opens up the Internet to those without access to a personal computer," said Pankaj Sethi, President (Value Added Services), Tata Teleservices. The access speed will be between 40 to 80 kbps, enabling viewers to open any web page in 20-30 seconds, he added. The browser, which is expected to be three to four times faster than GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), will enable the user to browse all websites, search and email. It will, however, not be possible to show videos in the current devices. The browser is based on the QSC6020 product from the Qualcomm single chip family. The Samsung 'Explore' handset, which also has a camera, FM radio and MP3 player, is priced at Rs. 5,499. Mobile Internet will come at prices ranging from Rs. 10 a day to Rs. 99 a month with unlimited access.
Chennai Correspondent writes:
According to Srinivas Rao Sarapilli, Chief Operating Officer, (Tamil Nadu Circle), Tata Teleservices, the web browser, powered by Novarra Inc., can be downloaded on a handset enabled with Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW).
Mr. Sarapilli said Tata Indicom aimed at expanding its subscriber base in Tamil Nadu from nine lakh to a million users by the year-end. Its country-wide user base is estimated to be around 19 million, which the company wants to expand to 25 million in the next few months.
Web TV show
MySpace still has a few cards up its sleeve -- including the connections it has to some of the top names in traditional media, thanks to its parent company, media and entertainment giant News Corp.
The social-networking site announced today that it has signed an exclusive deal with Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the Hollywood duo that produced such hit TV shows as Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, for the rights to a new Internet drama the pair are working on, called Quarterlife.
Episodes -- or webisodes -- of the show, which follows a group of twentysomethings through the eyes of one young girl with a video-blog, will appear first on MySpaceTV, and then on the Quarterlife.com website.
Jeff Berman, the general manager of MySpaceTV, said in an interview that the show was a "landmark moment" for MySpace, and that it would be "the highest-quality serialized content ever to appear on the Internet. We're talking about the same production values as 24 or Prison Break."
There have been a number of episodic TV-style shows created for the Internet, including the popular Lonelygirl15 show, which was developed by a trio of unknowns and also appears on MySpaceTV. More recently, former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner's company created a show called Prom Queen, which aired on MySpaceTV and drew a large following.
Entertainment websites have been speculating for several months about a possible Internet offering from Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz, after a number of reports leaked out about TV writers and production staff working on something called Quarterlife. The Hollywood duo had a traditional TV show of the same name that ran briefly in 2005.
"We've been talking to [Zwick and Herskovitz] for the past several weeks, and we're delighted to be able to announce this," Mr. Berman said. The first "webisode" will be posted on MySpaceTV on November 11, he said.
Under the terms of the deal, the social-networking site has a 24-hour window during which the webisode will only be available on MySpaceTV. After that, it will appear on Quarterlife.com. Both sites will have interactive features, Mr. Berman said, but on MySpace viewers will be able to interact with the cast through their MySpace pages.
MySpace users and bloggers on other sites will also be able to "embed" the webisodes in their pages by pasting in a small chunk of code, as they can with video clips on other sites such as YouTube, Blip.tv and DailyMotion.
When asked whether the new show would have a mobile component involving cellphones, Mr. Berman said "stay tuned." He also said that MySpaceTV was working on several other projects with content creators in the entertainment community.
According to Mr. Berman, more than 50 million users stream video each month from their MySpace webpages, and the social-networking site as a whole produces 500 million individual video streams
Little More :24hoursnews sponsored by www.careerbd.com
Faced with Facebook's exponential growth, MySpace hopes to keep its users onside with what it says is the first network-quality television series produced directly for the internet.
The social network announced today it had secured the exclusive international distribution rights for Quarterlife, a new series from Emmy award-winning producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.
MySpace Australia spokesman Darain Faraz said the deal was just the first of many shows it planned to offer through MySpace TV, which up until now has consisted mainly of user-submitted clips.
He said within the next few weeks the site would announce a number of "local content sharing deals" with Australian content providers.
"We are on the verge of announcing some fairly huge stuff," he said.
MySpace has 3.8 million registered Australian users but its growth rate now lags well behind Facebook's, which earlier this year surpassed 200,000 Australian users.
But where Facebook's expansion is now being driven by third-party applications, which have rapidly expanded the functionality of the site, MySpace is looking to hold on to its users through new features such as MySpace TV and Instant Messenger.
Quarterlife, which will premier in seven languages on MySpace's global sites on November 11, delves into the lives of six people in their 20s and charts their "coming of age as a part of the digital generation".
The show was unashamedly written to appeal to today's tech-savvy youth - the central character, a young woman named Dylan, is a blogger whose video diary divulges a few too many of her friends' closest secrets.
It purports to be a "truthful depiction of the way young people speak, work, think, love, argue and express themselves".
To that end, Herskovitz and Zwick - the force behind My So-Called Life, thirtysomething, Legends of the Fall and Blood Diamond - will invite their audience to participate in the ongoing development of the series "through writing and video submissions".
There will be 36 episodes in total and the producers plan to create a mini social network around the show through a website, quarterlife.com. It will also have its own profile page on MySpace, which MySpace says will include bonus content such as character profiles, behind-the-scenes video footage and storyline secrets.
Herskovitz and Zwick said the fact Quarterlife was an independent project meant they had full "creative autonomy", which isn't always possible when producing shows for traditional TV networks.
"For better or worse, Quarterlife is truly our own vision," Herskovitz said.
The Quarterlife concept was originally conceived three years ago as a TV pilot called "¼ life", developed for the US network ABC. The project was axed due to "creative differences" between the producers and ABC, after which the script was completely rewritten for an internet audience.
"When Emmy award-winning producers come to MySpace TV - you know this is reaching a whole new level," Myspace CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a statement.
In the US, MySpace has already dabbled extensively in digital broadcasting, securing the rights to a number of smaller series and short clips including the web series Prom Queen, a teen-oriented serial drama made by a US studio owned by former Disney boss Michael Eisner.
AMD with quad-core processor -Intel new invention
24hoursnews : Intel is aiming to extend its performance lead over AMD with the introduction of the industry's first quad-core processors designed for multi-processor servers.
The chip giant has rolled out six quad-core Xeon 7300 series processors, which deliver more than twice the overall performance and more than three times the performance per watt of its previous generation of dual-core server chips. The chips are the last to be converted to Intel's Core micro-architecture, a process that has been under way since 2006.
The 7300 series are more energy efficient than previous chips. It comprises chips that run at clock speeds of up to 2.93GHz at 130W, several 80W processors and a 1.8GHz, 50W version that is targeted specifically at four-socket blade servers.
In addition to having twice as many cores, the 7300 chips come with up to four times the memory capacity of the dual-core multi-processor platforms, which Intel maintained will allow businesses to consolidate their server environments to reduce space, power and running costs.
"Intel Xeon-based multi-processor servers are the backbone of the enterprise," said Tom Kilroy, Intel vice president and co-general manager of the digital enterprise group.
"With the Xeon 7300 series, Intel is delivering new levels of performance and performance per watt, and is driving the Intel Core micro-architecture into such innovative systems as four-socket, 16-core blades that use less energy than our older models."
The Xeon 7300 series means IT managers can pool their single, dual- and quad-core Core-based servers into a dynamic virtual server infrastructure that allows for live, virtual machine migration. This should improve situations including failover, load balancing, disaster recovery and server maintenance.
Brian Byun, VMware's vice president of global partners and solutions, said: "VMware and Intel have worked together to optimise VMware ESX Server on the Xeon 7300. Our partners and customers benefit from increased platform choice and performance headroom from the quad-core four-socket server systems."
Intel said that the 7300 series running the VMmark benchmark designed for measuring virtualisation performance, achieved the highest single server result so far. Results from key server manufacturers testing the 7300 series are also proving encouraging.
HP has proclaimed world-record results for a ProLiant DL580 G5 server running the TPC-C benchmark for database performance, while IBM claimed its 7300-based, System x3850 M2 server using the SPECint*_rate_base2006 benchmark for integer throughout, also set a new world record.
Intel claims silicon crown despite AMD Barcelonaa.
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AMD's Barcelona Chip to Get Speed Boost This Year.
On the same day that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. officially released its Barcelona server processor, the company said it would have a faster version of the quad-core Opteron device out by year's end.
Initially, the top clock speed on the quad-core chip is 2 GHz. But Randy Allen, vice president and general manager of AMD's server and workstation division, said at the Barcelona launch event here Monday evening that the company will have a 2.5-GHz version ready for shipment in December.
The confirmation of the planned speed bump may have been the most significant bit of news out of the product launch, which was held at the Letterman Digital Arts Center on the grounds of the Presidio, a former U.S. Army base that now is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
The announcement mostly featured a long list of executives from hardware vendors offering support and praise for AMD without taking any shots at its main processor rival, Intel Corp. That was left to AMD officials, but even they rarely if at all mentioned Intel by name.
Hector Ruiz, AMD's chairman and CEO, said the company's initial development in 2003 of an x86-compatible Opteron that could run both 32-bit and 64-bit applications raised the bar "for what an industry should expect from a processor company."
Ruiz claimed that the new Opteron would have "a similarly profound effect on computing," even though Intel turned the tables on AMD and beat it to market with quad-core processors by 10 months. Last week, Intel released a new Xeon 7300 line of quad-core chips with clock speeds of up to 2.93 GHz.
Executives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Dell Inc. appeared at AMD's launch event in person or via video to announce plans to add the Barcelona chip to their server product lines, with shipments scheduled to begin as early as next month. Among them was Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell, who said his company intends to double its lineup of AMD-based systems by year's end.
Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and CEO, said his company is aiming to use the quad-core Opteron to double its AMD-based server business. However, Sun in January announced a deal with Intel to develop a full of line of Xeon-based servers and workstations. That ended a two-year-old strategy under which Sun had exclusively used Opterons in its x86 systems.
Friday, September 7, 2007
Intel Socket Xeon 7300 quad-core processor-
Compared with the company's previous-generation four-socket, dual-core products, the new quad-core Xeon 7300 series processors pack more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt - and at the same price, Intel says. The Xeon 7300 completes Intel's transition to Core microarchitecture, a move that Intel first announced in June 2006.
Intel's consolidation mission
Intel is pushing users to move away from the phased-out single-core processors onto the quad-core platform, saying the Intel Xeon 7300 is designed for server consolidation. It has four times the memory capacity of the previous generation: a four-socket, dual-core code-named Tulsa.
"We are not charging a premium for quad-core, so all of our dual-core processor pricing is replaced with quad-core prices," said Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president and general manager of the Server Products Group. "We've eliminated every reason not to go to quad core. Many [users] have single-core servers that are utilized only 15% to 20%. Now we have a platform with five times the performance of single core, so you can take dozens of underutilized systems, create virtual partitions and increase utilization dramatically."
The more energy-efficient Xeon 7300 series includes frequencies up to 2.93 GHz at 130 watts; several 80-watt processors; as well as a 50-watt version, or 12.5 watts per core, with a frequency of 1.86 GHz for ultradense deployments, such as four-socket blade servers.
It's also possible to upgrade the Xeon 7300 to Intel's next-generation chips. Code-named Dunnington, the 45-nanometer (nm) processor with four or more cores is due out next year, Skaugen said. In mid-2008, Intel plans to ship its Nehalem family of processors, which will include one to eight cores per product. In 2009, Intel plans to introduce its 32-nm manufacturing process.
In addition, the Xeon 7300 includes a new Data Traffic Optimizations feature that enhances data movement between processors, memory and I/O connections, Intel said. While previously an interconnect was shared, each processor will now have its own interconnect, Skaugen said.
The previously announced Intel VT FlexMigration will assist in the seamless upgrade of virtual machines to Intel's next-generation 45-nm Core microarchitecture-based platforms.
VMware Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., and Intel worked together to optimize VMware ESX Server on the Xeon 7300 for live migration with VMotion between Intel processor families. This means users with Intel Xeon processors can perform live migrations of virtual machines to servers with future-generation Intel processors.
Users won't be able to do live migrations between AMD and Intel-based servers, however.
AMD's two cents on Tigerton
When AMD of Sunnyvale, Calif., releases its first quad-core processor next week, the two-, four- and eight-socket versions of the chip, code-named Barcelona, will surpass performance of Intel's Xeon quad-core processor line.
"Tigerton has the unfortunate distinction of being near last in a line of a dying architecture based on a front-side bus bottleneck," said Bruce Shaw, director of server and workstation product marketing. "Nowhere are the limitations of a front-side bus architecture more keenly felt than in the high-end multiprocessor server market. So while Intel may publicly 'celebrate' the arrival of Tigerton, it is in fact the final inadequate attempt by Intel to make the front-side bus architecture scale."
AMD's quad-core processor will be on one die, making it the first "native" quad-core processor. Intel's quad-core processors are two dual cores stuck together.
"Tigerton is still a dual-core processor design, just as Penryn will be, said AMD's Shaw. "To achieve full-performance scaling on real-world multithreaded workloads, real design work is needed. Packaging dual-cores together into quad cores is insufficient, as Intel itself clearly understands. Why else transition to native quad core in late 2008?"
Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffer said Intel's Xeon quad-core processor performance is the same as if it were on a single piece of silicon. He did not confirm any plans to move to a single die in the future.
"We are interested in end-user performance, and we are proud of the performance we have been delivering," Knupffer said.
Since November 2006, Intel has introduced more than 20 quad-core processors in the server and desktop market segments.
Vendors add servers designed for Xeon 7300
Starting today, servers based on the Xeon 7300 series processors are available from more than 50 system manufacturers, including Dell Inc., Egenera Inc., Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, IBM Corp., NEC Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Super Micro Computer Inc., and Unisys Corp.
Today, for example, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced its enhanced lineup of multiprocessor-based server systems based on the Xeon 7300.
The rack-based HP ProLiant DL580 G5 server and the HP ProLiant BL680c G5, HP's first four-processor, quad-core server blade, offer increased performance with double the number of processor cores.
Pricing for the new Intel Xeon quad-core processors depends on the speed, features and volume ordered, and cost ranges from $856 to $2,301 in quantities of 1,000. For additional details on the performance characteristics of the quad-core Intel Xeon 7300 series, visit Intel's Web site.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Tech Investor Turns Guitar Hero
Roger McNamee may be more famous as a tech investor and author of "The New Normal" than as a guitar player, but that could be changing. For years he's had a jam-band called the Flying Other Brothers as a sideline to his investment work at Integral Capital, Silver Lake Partners and Elevation Partners. They played at various tech conferences and corporate events. Now that band has morphed into a new band called Moonalice, which is playing around the bay area this labor day weekend and touring across the US this fall. The band includes all-star players G.E. Smith (former bandleader from Saturday Night Live), Jack Casady, Barry Sless, Pete Sears, Jimmy Sanchez and Roger's wife Ann McNamee.
I had the pleasure of seeing Moonalice on Friday at Moe's Alley in Santa Cruz and they did a great job on some original songs as well as well-known and loved cover versions of songs from the Dead, Bob Dylan, Marshal Crenshaw and others. You can read more about Moonalice on my other blog www.guitarvibe.com.
They're playing on September 14th at the Hyde Street Pier as part of MSNBC's power lunch and on the 25th at Union Square. If you're in the area, check it out. Other upcoming gigs include Las Vegas, Denver, Portland, Seattle, Milwaukee, Columbus, New Jersey, Annapolis.
About Roger McNamee
Roger McNamee is a Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners. Prior to Elevation, Roger was a co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, the leading private equity fund focused on technology and related growth industries. He was a member of Silver Lake's Investment Committee and was involved in all aspects of that partnership. Prior to Silver Lake, Roger was a co-founder of Integral Capital Partners. Integral is a leading technology investor in late-stage venture and public company investments. Founded in 1991 by Roger, John A. Powell, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Integral pioneered the crossover investment strategy, which seeks maximum capital appreciation by making investments in expansion-stage private companies and growth-stage public companies in the technology and life science industries.
Prior to founding Integral, Roger managed the T. Rowe Price Science & Technology Fund and co-managed the T. Rowe Price New Horizons Fund, which was at that time the largest emerging growth fund in the U.S. Roger serves as a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, an overseer of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College, a director of the Rex Foundation, Move, and Forbes Media LLC. Roger holds a B.A. from Yale College and an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.
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