Unlocked iPhones to take a bite out of France's wallets
Apple and French carrier Orange are launching the iPhone at 6:30 pm (1830 h) local time, with twelve stores opening after hours to accommodate the expected rush of customers.
The price for a fully unlocked iPhone in France is €749 ($1105 USD). With a two-year service contract, the iPhone is slated to cost €399. The Orange division of France Telecom reportedly has 63,000 individuals registered on its site receiving updates about the device.
New Jersey eyes VoIP network for emergency response
Federal and state governments are actively considering broadband VoIP systems with optional video as a more reliable communications system in emergency situations than radio.
NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - For faster and better emergency response when disaster strikes, a number of state and local authorities nationwide are now taking a serious look at building new "interoperable communications systems." One such interested party is the State of New Jersey, which plans to move behind its current 800 MHz radio system to a wireless system running voice, data and video over IP, speakers said today at the Maritime Security Expo.
Google breaks into the energy industry its own way
Google announced its RE<C ("Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal") project yesterday: a research and development project aimed at bringing alternative energy sources closer to affordability.
With the spotlight recently turned upon data centers, which US Assistant Secretary of Energy Alexander Karsner termed "centers of enormous waste" yesterday, Google is asserting its intentions to change this reputation, and wisely so, as the company's tremendous need for energy-hungry server facilities only continues to grow.
Ex-Broadcom exec latest casualty of stock option probe
Nancy Tullos, former Broadcom human relations chief, pled guilty Tuesday to charges of obstruction of justice. She will also assist the feds in their case against the company.
Broadcom recently corrected its books by some $2.2 billion as a result of the probe, the largest yet of any of the 200 companies now being investigated for stock option backdating.
Cyber Monday sales 4.7% above expectations
It was indeed a tremendous sales day in the US last Cyber Monday -- Yahoo's travails notwithstanding. ComScore estimates American consumers spent $733 million online that day.
According to comScore statistics released yesterday, sales volume for last Monday was up 21% over 2006, and 4.7% higher than its projection last week of $700 million even. But in an unusual prediction, the analytics firm's chairman, Gian Fulgoni, said it expects some days between now and Christmas to yield even higher online sales volume, past the $800 million mark.
TiVo to debut on the PC through Nero software
The two companies have signed an agreement that will bring the TiVo service to PCs in the near future. TV on the PC is a largely un-tapped market: approximately 50.8 million PC TV Tuners are said to be sold by 2011, according to In-Stat. Addressing this market could provide a solution to TiVo's considerable troubles in attracting new subscribers.
With the addition of the PC, the company will have a foothold in all the major avenues of media distribution -- cable, satellite, and now the computer. "The partnership with TiVo extends the TV experience for the connected digital home, enabling easy access anytime, anywhere to the most extensive TV content," Nero chief Richard Lesser said.
Yahoo apologizes for Cyber Monday commerce outages
One very non-economic reason for small businesses perhaps receiving less of the glory from Cyber Monday comes from Yahoo, whose Merchant Solutions hosting service suffered severe outages throughout the day.
Yesterday afternoon, Yahoo representative Rich Riley found himself confessing a serious problem with the commercial hosting service it provided for some 40,000 small business customers on Monday -- arguably the most important online shopping day of the year.
DOJ ends its quest for Amazon sales records
A federal judge in Wisconsin said that the federal government's request for the records of sales by an indicted man raised some concerns, causing the US Attorney's Office to drop the subpoena.
Robert D'Angelo, indicted in October, is being charged with tax evasion and mail fraud. The feds were seeking to force Amazon to hand over the records of nearly 24,000 books the man had sold through the site over the past four years.
London Olympics presents unexpected problem for data centers
Global data centers are finding themselves unable to implement potentially energy-saving initiatives because doing so may require short bursts of energy that exceed caps imposed by power companies, said one Sun official yesterday.
UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - In a twist of interlocking ironies, data centers worldwide are finding themselves incapable of implementing initiatives that could reduce their energy consumption over the long run, because their short-run requirements exceed the caps imposed on them by their power companies.
XP SP3 speed lead over Vista SP1 narrows under similar workloads
A heavily promoted performance test by an evaluation software firm appeared to situate Windows Vista SP1 performance against Windows XP SP3. But the initial workloads were actually different due to the Office software used, testers admitted to BetaNews today.
Devil Mountain Software's test results comparing similar workloads on systems with varying editions of XP and Vista -- including the latest service packs or their equivalents -- show the Vista system performing astonishingly more poorly, by a staggering 144%.
PS3 sales triple in November, Wii shortage continues
Sales of the PlayStation 3 have rocketed 298 percent since Sony introduced its cheaper $399 40GB model on November 2, but much of that boost may be attributed to Black Friday, when such increases are typical.
The news follows a similar positive week in Japan, where the PS3 outsold Nintendo's Wii for the first time. Still, Sony has a long road ahead if it hopes to catch up to the Wii globally; Nintendo has sold twice as many consoles as its Japanese rival.
UN: Emerging countries need more energy to solve energy problems
In a heartfelt plea to a conference on IT corporate responsibility for the environment, Zimbabwe's UN ambassador urged more must be done to help modernize countries such as his, so that they can participate in the effort to save the planet.
UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - Zimbabwe has a staggering 87% nationwide literacy rate. You read that correctly; it's among the highest in all of Africa, and its youth literacy rate is even higher. But the true miracle there is that technology plays so little of a role in that success, said Ambassador Boniface G. Chidyausiku to a UN conference of IT industry leaders in New York City this afternoon.
Verizon Wireless' open access move: The historic details
"We will allow customers to connect any device that meets our minimum technical standards, and be activated on our network," announced VZW CEO Lowell McAdam this morning.
It finally happened, either the inevitable or the impossible depending on your point of view: A major US carrier has committed to opening up its existing cellular networks to access by the customer's choice of devices, assuming they comply with basic technical requirements. With that comes the customer's choice of applications, and the mobile operating system on which they run.
NBCU adopts TiVo's advertising tags
TiVo's Stop||Watch, an advertisement system especially suited for time-shifted viewing, has received its first major supporting content provider: NBC Universal.
Lately, the corporation's NBC network has been adopting many new media formats in the apparent hope of finding the next source of big ad revenue. Its rush seems to include everything short of offering to tag logos on the side of passing trains.
Tech industry leaders: We're already reducing emissions
American IT firms are already hard at work reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing energy expenditures, some of their leading representatives told the United Nations today. Among their cases-in-point are server virtualization and remote printer management.
UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - A recent IBM project to move the processing power of some 3,900 of its own enterprise servers onto 30 mainframes has already saved the company $450 million in operational expenses and $30 million in additional energy costs, according to Rich Lechner, IBM's vice president for IT optimization. Lechner, along with several other industry executives and diplomatic leaders, spoke at a conference on the technology industry's responsibility for the global environment today at the UN in New York City.
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