France one step closer to kicking file sharers off the Internet

Posted By Nicholas Deleon

French pirates may want to think twice about downloading that episode Entourage off the Pirate Bay. A new law just passed the Sénat that would cut file-sharers off the Internet. Those caught illegally sharing material, be it music, movies, software, or whatever else, will be warned, both by e-mail and regular mail. After two such warnings your connection is shut off.

Under the law, a new government body would be created to help patrol the France’s Internet use.

The law now has to be approved by the lower house of Parliament, the Assemblée nationale, which is directly elected by citizens.

There’s only one small problem with the proposed law: it directly conflicts with the wishes of all mighty Brussels, which has called such a measure—kicking people off the Internet for file-sharing—to be a violation of “civil liberties and human rights.”

Don’t mess with Brussels is the new Don’t mess with Texas.

Somebody Else’s Phone: Would you look through it?

Posted by Tim Leberecht

If you found somebody else’s phone, would you look through it? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you’re under 25, and there’s nothing more interesting than the “lives of others.”

The advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of “cellular oversharing” into a much gushed-about ad campaign for Nokia. “Somebody Else’s Phone” depicts the lives of three twentysomethings through their text messages, multimedia messaging service, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: the phone novel.

Fusing scripted content with real-life audience interaction, the campaign runs in 10 different languages, following the characters’ evolving storylines through a 24-7 feed of content, across three time zones, over 6 weeks.

Nice idea, though the blog of marketing firm Luon comments, “Sometimes it feels a bit like trying too hard. The advertising-tries-to-be-socially-smart thing, where it’s not clear what is real and what is fake.”

But that’s exactly the point. Fake authenticity–I’ve already written about “Mad Men” on Twitter in this context–is a burgeoning trend. Fake is fine, as long as it feels real. We’ll see more of it in 2009.

Motorola’s Turnaround Plans Meet with Skepticism

Analysts see a tough battle for the handset maker to increase sales amid a global economic downturn. Motorola’s own expectations for the current quarter are low

The latest flurry of turnaround plans for Motorola is being met with about as much enthusiasm as previous attempts to revive the company’s foundering mobile-phone business: not much.

During an Oct. 30 conference call discussing the third-quarter results that included falling sales and a wider loss, Motorola (MOT) co-CEO Sanjay Jha outlined plans to reduce costs, streamline the way the company makes products, and delay a spin-off of the handset business. Along with a dour warning that sales will continue to slump, the announcements did little to shore up confidence.

Motorola’s already embattled shares tumbled 5.3% to 5.17. RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue cut his 12-month Motorola price target to 7 a share from 8.

To trim losses and help eliminate $600 million in expenses, Motorola plans to cut about 3,000 jobs, two-thirds of them in the handset division. The company will also reduce its focus on certain markets, such as Europe, while stepping up emphasis on the Americas and China. Motorola also plans to retool products so that it makes low-end phones based on its own software and high-end phones that only run Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile operating system and the Android software developed by the Google (GOOG)-led Open Handset Alliance.
Grim Outlook

The moves are aimed at restoring the company’s dwindling fortunes. In the third quarter, the operating loss at Motorola’s handset division widened to $840 million from $248 million a year earlier. Unit sales dropped 32%, to 25.4 million from a year earlier, and the company’s market share plummeted to 8.4% globally, down from 9.5% in the second quarter and 22.4% in 2006, when Motorola’s Razr handset was all the rage. In the period, Motorola lost its No. 3 place among the world’s largest handset makers to Sony Ericsson, according to Strategy Analytics.

Prospects have only worsened this quarter—traditionally the most crucial for cell-phone makers because it includes yearend holiday purchases. Jha expects unit sales to be lower than in the third quarter. That’s in contrast to industry trends. Global cell-phone shipments should rise 10.5% to 11% in the quarter, according to research firm ABI Research.

Will revival efforts by Jha and co-CEO Greg Brown work? Not immediately. Motorola’s market share is likely to keep falling in the coming year, say analysts including Matt Thornton of Avian Securities and Ken Hyers of Technology Business Research. Thornton says the company’s share could dip to as low as 6% next year.

As Motorola focuses on making its phones more profitable, analysts say it may sacrifice the scale that makes it able to compete with bigger rivals including Nokia (NOK). The company currently sells about 100 million units a year; as the number drops, the cost of making each phone may increase.

Source: BusinessWeek

Google tries brinksmanship with DOJ in fight over Yahoo deal

Google’s ad deal with Yahoo probably couldn’t start soon enough for either company. Spending on ads is likely to be dropping in line with the economic contraction, and Yahoo could certainly use any cash it can get in order to avoid another round of layoffs. All that is likely to make the companies’ ongoing negotiations with the US Department of Justice over the antitrust implications of the deal that much more frustrating. Now, it appears that Google is trying to push things along by suggesting that it’s ready to walk away from the deal.

The potential partnership between the two companies would see Google place ads among those appearing with search results at Yahoo. According to the potential partners, Google ads would only appear when Yahoo had nothing relevant it could place on that page. Yahoo, for its part, claims that the deal would mean millions of dollars in annual revenue, which it would pump into improving its own ad-serving system. Both say that, since ad rates are controlled by auctions, the deal won’t allow either company to manipulate pricing.

Advertisers, for their part, have been concerned that any major changes of this sort will necessarily change what they pay, even if neither company directly intervenes. Perhaps more significantly, Microsoft has been publicly telling anyone who will listen that the deal represents a dangerously large market consolidation. Thus, it isn’t much of a surprise that the DOJ is looking into the deal’s antitrust implications. Although the general consensus is that the DOJ would be unlikely to prevail in court, the mere threat of delays, injunctions, and legal fees has brought all three parties to the negotiating table.

It now appears that the talks haven’t been going as quickly as Google would have liked them to. The search giant probably recognizes that, given recent economic events, it is very unlikely to ever again have a DOJ staff that’s this predisposed to letting market forces deal with concerns like antitrust. It is also watching the clock tick down to the election, after which the staff will start focusing on bringing its replacements up to speed and applying for new jobs. Google probably figures it’s now or not any time soon for the deal.

That’s almost certainly what’s behind a report in The Wall Street Journal that suggests that Google is ready to walk away and abandon the deal. This sent countless other news sources scurrying to ping their inside sources (we have none, so you’re spared that) and get responses from official spokespeople. The general consensus: both internally and publicly, Yahoo still wants the deal; Google spokespeople do too, and nobody knows what’s going on behind the search giant’s public facade.

Probably the most astute take on matters came from The Journal’s own blog site, where Kara Swisher referred to the rumors as Google “playing chicken” with the DOJ. She correctly notes that the original story more or less said that Google could walk away from the deal—unless it doesn’t, and lists a whole host of reasons that having the deal fall through would be a disaster for Yahoo. Although, on the plus side, she notes that it might finally kill off any Yahoo/AOL deal.

So, chances are very good that the rumors are simply Google’s way of nudging negotiations along, lest everyone get distracted and wind up focusing on voting for the country’s future direction instead.

Source: Arstechnica

Sun Unveils Mid-Range SPARC Enterprise Server

Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) on Monday introduced a mid-range SPARC Enterprise server with up to four sockets.

The T5440 is Sun’s first quad-socket, general purpose server powered by the company’s UltraSPARC T2 Plus processor and running the open-source version of the Solaris operating system. Each processor packs eight cores and 64 simultaneous threads on each single piece of silicon. In addition, the server has “logical domains,” or LDoms, virtualization technology that provides up to 128 isolated domains per server.

Until now the Sun SPARC Enterprise server was primarily used for running Web applications. Increasing the machine to four sockets makes it powerful enough to run enterprise resource planning and online transaction processing applications and other software for medium-sized organizations, Nancy Riley, head of group volume systems at Sun, said. The new system is expected to compete with IBM (NYSE: IBM)’s Power Series servers and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ)’s NonStop S series servers powered by Intel (NSDQ: INTC)’s Itanium processor.

Riley told InformationWeek that Sun’s server is substantially less expensive than competitors’ products. A SPARC Enterprise T5440 with 64 GB of memory will cost $80,000, compared to $90,000 for a comparable HP machines and $105,000 for an IBM server, according to Riley.

The Enterprise server is also available from Sun partner Fujitsu, which sells the machine under its own brand. Until now, Fujitsu did not have a mid-range server available for the U.S. market, a spokesman said.

The 4U T5440 has a maximum heat dissipation of 8,970.5 BTU per hour. A thousand BTUs, or British thermal units, per hour is equal to about 293 watts. Sun is shipping the server in volume starting Monday.

Source: Informationweek

Orange UK halts BlackBerry Bold sales

Orange UK has temporarily stopped selling Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Bold while it tries to figure out a solution to unspecified 3G-related problems on the handset.

The operator halted sales of the popular handset on Friday. According to a spokesperson, sales will resume when a software fix becomes available, though no date was given.

“Orange UK is committed to providing the BlackBerry Bold to its customers in the U.K.; however, Orange UK and (BlackBerry manufacturer) RIM are currently working on providing a maintenance release of software to address some reported 3G-related concerns,” a statement from Orange on Monday read.

“Although the reported 3G concerns have been limited to a minority of Orange customers in the U.K., Orange UK and RIM both take customer concerns very seriously and felt it was prudent to introduce a maintenance release of software for Orange UK customers,” the statement continued. “Orange UK and RIM apologize to customers for any inconvenience and expect to provide a software maintenance release soon.”

The company declined to give details to ZDNet UK about the problem. The BlackBerry Bold is the first in RIM’s line of smartphones to include high-speed 3G, or HSDPA, connectivity.

Source: Cnet

Blizzard launches WoW mouse

How do you kill that which has no life? With this.

It’s really WOW!!! Blizzard, in cahoots with peripherals specialists, SteelSeries, is launching a dedicated World of Warcraft gaming mouse, with an impressive (or ridiculous, dependent on personal POV) fifteen buttons.

Yes. FIFTEEN (see the pic if you doubt us).

There are more gamers in World Of Warcraft than actual human beings in Greater London, with fewer of the actual human beings in Greater London area slay each other on a daily basis (*except in certain areas of Hackney, Streatham and Brixton).

Blizzard’s new World Of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse pretty much means that WoW players (addicts) will no longer have to bother fiddling around with a keyboard each time they wish to cast a spell or slaughter an elf with your shiny new broadsword.

Which is a good thing, we suppose.

The WoW mouse features macros for up to 160 characters with 130 pre-defined commands which you can drag and drop into the macros you create.

If you like lights, this mouse is going to blow your tiny mind with “16 million illumination choices with 3 intensity and pulsation levels”.

What else? Oh, hell, its a mouse. If you like WoW then pre-order one right now, right here for $99 (£58).

Source: Techradar

Windows Mobile or an iPhone?? what do you think?

by Nilay Patel

Most of the Windows Mobile / iPhone cross-breeding we’ve seen has either involved elaborate WinMo skinning or terrible iPhone KIRFs, but we suppose it was just a matter of time before Microsoft’s mobile OS was made to run on Apple’s hardware — or at least that’s what it looks like here. Pretty much everything about this video is suspect, from the shadiness of the MyPhone2008 conference it was shot at to the interviewer’s ridiculously inane questions (“You don’t have girlfriends in Norway?”), but damn if that isn’t WinMo happily booting on what appears to be an iPhone 3G — we can’t tell, but it’s a good bet it’s jailbroken. The developer, Erik Kristiansen, says that mod is in beta right now but that he’s looking at a January release — we’ll see what more we can dig up before then. Video after the break.

Source: Engadget

MobUI acquires Action Engine, plans iPhone apps

Mobile-app development company MobUI announced Monday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and acquired Action Engine, a fellow mobile-app firm with customers including TiVo, AOL, and The Wall Street Journal.

Though terms of the acquisition haven’t been made public, the motivation for MobUI’s move is obvious: the success of Apple’s iPhone App Store. Since it was launched on in early July, more than 100 million mobile applications have been downloaded.

Other Action Engine customers include MarketWatch, Barrons, MSNBC, and Sports Illustrated. With the acquisition, MobUI said it plans to rapidly create iPhone, mobile Web, and downloadable applications for major consumer brands.

The round of funding was led by GlobalNet Mobile Solutions, a wireless application services provider in Latin America.

Source: Cnet

New MacBook Case Leak Rumors

Apple’s next-generation MacBook design has been all but confirmed, courtesy of leaks from both Apple itself as well as those with access to the casing in China. The Mac producer has posted a technician manual (PDF; since pulled) that discusses replacing an AirPort card in the display assembly of a “Late 2008″ MacBook or MacBook Pro, effectively proving that these two systems will receive an update this coming Tuesday with equally new internal hardware designs. No technical features aside from the already likely existence of Wi-Fi are directly shown in the two-page document. Separately, however, a Chinese Mac enthusiast site has posted additional case leaks that show the top halves of both the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Both line up with recently confirmed designs for the new notebooks and show a new, consistent design across Apple’s whole portable line that includes a seamless border, magnetic lid closure, and the trayless keyboard that first appeared with the original MacBook in 2006. The bottom is absent from both systems but has been reported in past rumors as an at least partly tapered design versus the near-flat surface of current models.

Either also shows a reduced number of ports versus today’s systems; in the case of the MacBook Pro, the shift is believed in part to stem from moving the slot-load optical drive from the front to the side for unknown reasons. The new 15-inch MacBook Pro now appears to have dropped its FireWire 400 and regular DVI connectors in favor of the lone remaining FireWire 800 port and a more compact mini-DVI jack.

Notably, the regular MacBook has dropped its one FireWire 400 port and now appears to depend exclusively on its two USB ports for external peripherals. The move would signal one of the first times a non-professional Apple portable has shipped without FireWire since 1999, when the original iBook carried just one USB port. The company’s incentive to do so outside of space concerns isn’t known.

No leaks have yet to surface of a redesigned 17-inch MacBook Pro or a revised MacBook Air, though Apple is now widely believed to be using a new NVIDIA platform for some or all of its portables that would improve visual performance on some systems and shrink the components inside.

Source: Electronista.com