Ringing cell phones coming to a EU flight near you
Following six months of studies, the EU is finally ready to move forward with allowing in-flight cellular calls within the next month or so.
Once the plane has reached an altitude of 3,000 meters (9,850 feet), calls will be permitted. An on-board cellular tower of sorts will handle the calls, and then transfer them to the network on the ground.
AMD confirms 10% workforce cut, declining outlook
The worst is not over by a long shot for AMD. This afternoon, the company confirmed it would have to make very painful cuts, the repercussions of which are already being felt in terms of declining revenues.
Up until today, AMD had been saying it expected its revenue from the first calendar quarter of this year to decline "in line with seasonality" -- meaning, it would be lower than over the Christmas holiday because January always drops from December. And analysts had been responding to that claim, for the most part, with disbelief. As it turned out, the analysts were right.
Joost denies it's shrinking its sights to just the US
Is Web video distributor Joost, facing new competition from Hulu, shrinking its geographic coverage as a result? According to at least one recently published report, Joost has now decided to focus on the US only.
But last month, Nimbus Sport International unveiled deals with Joost spanning multiple continents, and a Joost spokesperson told BetaNews today that new but still unannounced agreements are also in the works for Europe and Asia.
Social media firm Imeem buys DRM firm Snocap
Today, imeem confirmed earlier reports that it had acquired content licensing and DRM company Snocap. No financial terms were disclosed.
After Snocap saw a major downsizing, laying off 60% of its workforce, the company made it known it was pursuing a sale. Four months later, reports started to circulate that social network for artists and musicians imeem had entered into an acquisition of the suffering company.
Vista SP1 'prerequisites' to gear up systems for auto updates
In a world, to sound like Don LaFontaine for a moment, where nothing could possibly go wrong, when something small does go wrong, it's huge. Today, Microsoft is hoping a small patch will make a huge difference to Vista's image.
The problems Microsoft had in simply rolling out early versions of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to its initial testers served to vindicate its worst critics' complaints: It didn't seem the company could even correct Vista correctly. The rollout problems were even the topic of at least one of Apple's recent anti-Vista Mac ads. But many of those problems were apparently caused by a minor issue with automatic updates; and now, Microsoft says it's publishing a patch for pre-SP1 Vista that will enable customers with Automatic Updates to apply the SP1 series of patches without fear of entering an endless reboot cycle.
Adobe to correct its controversial Photoshop Express terms Thursday
"You grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue...from [Your] Content" read its original Terms of Service, which apparently didn't go over well.
Maybe the company didn't expect anyone to actually read the Terms of Service word-for-word, or maybe it didn't actually read the text itself after "boilerplating" it from some other product. But last Friday, Adobe said it has altered the Terms with regard to its online Photoshop Express product, so that it doesn't appear the company will claim the right to open a service on the side that resells users' own photos.
HP floats a file backup service in the cloud
One thing you start to notice about companies doing business "in the cloud" is that it's becoming harder to tell whether they were software or hardware companies to begin with. This morning, Hewlett-Packard publicly launched a subscription-based backup service where the "cloud" houses duplicate data.
HP's Upline allows users to share their stored data with other Internet users via uniquely created URLs. Though HP offered similar services in the past, Upline was created using technology from Opelin, a startup company it recently acquired. Opelin created the Titanize software solution, though anyone searching for Opelin Titanize will now be redirected to HP Upline.
Online fraud up over 20% per year, says FBI operation
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (I3C) has released its annual report of online misconduct, with 2007 showing a huge increase in the amount of money lost to theft.
Though the number of complaints has been steadily decreasing since its peak in 2005, the total losses were the highest yet at $239.09 million. This is an increase of $40.65 million over 2006, or about 20.5% year over year.
Google claims credit for FCC wireless auction results
Two Google counsel said in a blog post this morning that Google didn't really want wireless bandwidth, even though it did place a bid during the FCC's recent 700 MHz spectrum auction.
Verizon Wireless spent $9.6 billion to win a majority of licenses for spectrum in the coveted C block. But Google is claiming at least partial credit for the auction's results, with the search engine leader saying today its intent was to drive up the asking price "in order to reach "the $4.6 billion reserve price that will trigger the important 'open access' and 'open applications' license conditions."
Felten: Some New Jersey voting machines can't add
A printed tape offered as evidence of the integrity of a Sequoia Voting Systems machine failed a very obvious test last week, as a Princeton professor noted a simple column of numbers actually added up to 105, not 106.
The Princeton University professor who has received national acclaim for his efforts to assess the true integrity of electronic voting machines, discovered one very simple error amid the evidence one manufacturer, Sequoia Voting Systems, had actually offered in its own defense. In recent weeks, Sequoia has found itself in hot water again for as many as sixty separate discrepancies reported in a single election in New Jersey last February 3.
Microsoft rolls out Silverlight maintenance release
The third update to Redmond's answer to Flash addresses several bugs within the platform.
The technology is still not seeing widespread use outside of Microsoft's own sites, but that is not stopping Microsoft from pressing forward with Silverlight. The company is simultaneously working on the second major version as well.
Icahn allies to get seats on Motorola board
Motorola said Monday it had reached an agreement with the activist investor to place two of his allies on the company's board, one of them effective immediately.
Icahn Enterprises chief Keith Meister will be appointed to serve on the board immediately, and also be nominated for election to the board on the 2008 proxy statement. Additionally, investment banker William Hambrecht will be nominated.
Facebook settles with group that claimed it had the idea first
After years of legal struggles over the two Harvard-rooted social networking sites and their respective origins, ConnectU and Facebook appear to be finally settling.
The suit dates back to 2004 in Boston's Federal District Court, when ConnectU's founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra sued Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly illegally using source code in his site that he had written for ConnectU's predecessor, called HarvardConnection.
Yahoo is open to some type of transaction with Microsoft
A complete withdrawal from the table at this point might spur shareholder resentment, but Yahoo's executives and board had to make some signal in light of Microsoft's claims last week of foot-dragging.
In recognizing what many independent financial analysts termed an untenable position, Yahoo's new chairman Roy Bostock and CEO Jerry Yang responded to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's "time is running out" statement on Friday by saying it would be unopposed to some kind of fair transaction with Microsoft that Yahoo's board would feel is in the best interests of its shareholders.
Sixteen updates on tap for April Patch Tuesday
An advance notification regarding Microsoft's Patch Tuesday promises eight security updates to Windows, Office, and IE vulnerabilities and eight more non-security related updates for Windows Update and Windows Server Update Services.
Five of the patches are rated as "Critical," the highest level of severity given to updates, and most of those patches affect Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. The remaining three updates are classified as "Important." These updates may require a restart. There will also be eight high priority but non-security related updates on Windows Update and Windows Server Update Service.
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