Samsung Electronics has begun shipping a flash memory-based solid state disk drive (SSD) that offers better performance than many of the flash drives currently available, the company said.
The 64G byte drive has a SATA II interface that can support data reading at speeds of 100M Bps (bytes per second) and writing at 80M Bps. That makes it 60 percent faster than SATA I drives of the same type and two to five times faster than conventional hard-disk drives, according to Samsung.
SSDs use flash memory rather than magnetic storage, which means faster reading and writing of data, lower power consumption and zero noise. They've been around for several years although it is only recently, after flash memory chip prices fell, that they have become practical for use in laptop computers.
The drives were announced back in November when Samsung started supply samples of the drives to PC makers. Commercial versions of the drive are now available and will be offered as options on some Dell and Alienware laptops in the coming weeks, said Samsung. Prices were not announced.
Samsung is also planning to target the enterprise server market and other applications that demand high-speed data transfer.
Despite their advantages over hard-disk drives, SSDs are only taking off slowly because they are much more expensive. To get around this problem Samsung showed a 128G-byte SSD based on MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash, at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's a cheaper but not as powerful or efficient version of flash chip than the SLC (single level cell) used in most SSDs drives until now. The SLC-type memory chips last about 10 times as long as MLC chips.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Sony hits greenhouse gas emission cuts target early
Sony is beating its own target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and will begin promoting a sustainable lifestyle to consumers through its products, its chief executive said Friday.
On this topic
Green Grid lays out ambitious action program
Tech CEOs push for green computing
Greenpeace applauds MacBook Air
Deploying Residential Wi-Fi Wireless LANs: RF Repeaters for Coverage and Reliability
Get practical tips, IT news, how-tos, and the best in tech humor.
"Sony alone has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent to date, exceeding our original target of a 7 percent reduction by 2010," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, at the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Climate Savers conference in Tokyo. The conference was held at Sony's new headquarters in Tokyo, which itself has helped the company to achieve its goal. Greenhouse gas emissions from the building are 40 percent lower than at equivalent conventional buildings.
Sony is one of 12 companies that has joined the WWF's Climate Savers initiative, under which they pledge to an aggressive cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Tech companies Hewlett-Packard and Nokia are also members as are Allianz, Catalyst, Collins Companies, Nike, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa Express, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra Pak and Xanterra Parks and Resorts.
At the conference the companies signed a declaration that recommitted themselves to action and expanded their work to include partnering with business partners to further cut emissions, the promotion of a low-carbon lifestyle to their customers and greater transparency of their carbon footprint and environmental activities.
"For Sony this means we will proactively look to expand our emissions reductions beyond our sites to include logistics and other parts of our business," said Stringer. "We must also continue to improve the energy efficiency of our products, particularly televisions which consume the most energy of all our home electronics products. Yet while the trend is towards larger screens and more sophisticated functions that inevitably consume more power Sony's televisions are already among the industry leaders in terms of energy efficiency."
Stringer said Sony expects the operating power of electronics products to be reduced to half their existing levels in a few years.
"I am confident that our engineers can meet these expectations," he said.
And just as the company has created products like the Walkman Stringer said Sony will now look to promote and help people adopt sustainable lifestyles through its products.
For companies like Sony one of the greatest inefficiencies in their products comes from the standby power that is consumed continuously when the device is not in use. It's not a great deal of power per product but the number of such devices has multiplied in recent years so the total amount of energy used in this way is now becoming quite large.
"Standby power is a huge and growing share of electricity use because those things are plugged in 24/7 but nobody when they buy a computer buys it based on its efficiency in using standby power," said James Leape , director general of WWF International, at a Tokyo news conference. "You're thinking about a hundred other things when you buy your computer and so the market doesn't work. And so standards are crucial and the industry can lead on that by defining norms but its a place where government action can be quite important."
Many of the largest PC makers have joined together under the banner of the Climate Savers computing initiative and have pledged to reduce power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010. The companies plan to highlight some of their advances and technologies at the Cebit exhibition that will take place in Germany in March.
Energy use by IT equipment is growing fast. The recently published report, "An Inefficient Truth," found about 10 percent of energy consumption in the U.K. is by IT equipment -- equivalent to the output of four nuclear power stations.
On this topic
Green Grid lays out ambitious action program
Tech CEOs push for green computing
Greenpeace applauds MacBook Air
Deploying Residential Wi-Fi Wireless LANs: RF Repeaters for Coverage and Reliability
Get practical tips, IT news, how-tos, and the best in tech humor.
"Sony alone has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 9 percent to date, exceeding our original target of a 7 percent reduction by 2010," said Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony, at the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF) Climate Savers conference in Tokyo. The conference was held at Sony's new headquarters in Tokyo, which itself has helped the company to achieve its goal. Greenhouse gas emissions from the building are 40 percent lower than at equivalent conventional buildings.
Sony is one of 12 companies that has joined the WWF's Climate Savers initiative, under which they pledge to an aggressive cut in greenhouse gas emissions. Tech companies Hewlett-Packard and Nokia are also members as are Allianz, Catalyst, Collins Companies, Nike, Novo Nordisk, Sagawa Express, Spitsbergen Travel, Tetra Pak and Xanterra Parks and Resorts.
At the conference the companies signed a declaration that recommitted themselves to action and expanded their work to include partnering with business partners to further cut emissions, the promotion of a low-carbon lifestyle to their customers and greater transparency of their carbon footprint and environmental activities.
"For Sony this means we will proactively look to expand our emissions reductions beyond our sites to include logistics and other parts of our business," said Stringer. "We must also continue to improve the energy efficiency of our products, particularly televisions which consume the most energy of all our home electronics products. Yet while the trend is towards larger screens and more sophisticated functions that inevitably consume more power Sony's televisions are already among the industry leaders in terms of energy efficiency."
Stringer said Sony expects the operating power of electronics products to be reduced to half their existing levels in a few years.
"I am confident that our engineers can meet these expectations," he said.
And just as the company has created products like the Walkman Stringer said Sony will now look to promote and help people adopt sustainable lifestyles through its products.
For companies like Sony one of the greatest inefficiencies in their products comes from the standby power that is consumed continuously when the device is not in use. It's not a great deal of power per product but the number of such devices has multiplied in recent years so the total amount of energy used in this way is now becoming quite large.
"Standby power is a huge and growing share of electricity use because those things are plugged in 24/7 but nobody when they buy a computer buys it based on its efficiency in using standby power," said James Leape , director general of WWF International, at a Tokyo news conference. "You're thinking about a hundred other things when you buy your computer and so the market doesn't work. And so standards are crucial and the industry can lead on that by defining norms but its a place where government action can be quite important."
Many of the largest PC makers have joined together under the banner of the Climate Savers computing initiative and have pledged to reduce power consumption of computers by 50 percent by 2010. The companies plan to highlight some of their advances and technologies at the Cebit exhibition that will take place in Germany in March.
Energy use by IT equipment is growing fast. The recently published report, "An Inefficient Truth," found about 10 percent of energy consumption in the U.K. is by IT equipment -- equivalent to the output of four nuclear power stations.
Report: Toshiba halts HD DVD production, mulling future
Toshiba has halted production of HD DVD players and recorders and is close to making a decision on whether to throw in the towel on the high-definition movie disc format, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported Saturday evening.
he decision, which NHK said will likely cost the company several tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars), is being made in the face of flagging support by movie studios and major U.S. retailers.
"We are making considerations following the impact on sales of Warner's announcement but we haven't made any decision," said Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Toshiba, when reached on Saturday evening. He was referring to the January decision by Warner Bros to stop issuing movies on HD DVD and go solely with Blu-ray Disc.
Other local media reports on Saturday said an official announcement from Toshiba is likely in the coming week.
HD DVD has been battling Blu-ray Disc for just under two years to become the defacto replacement for DVD for high-definition video. HD DVD is backed by Toshiba and a handful of other companies including Microsoft and Intel but Blu-ray Disc counted a larger number of consumer electronics heavy hitters. The main backer of the format is Sony and other supporters include Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung, LG and Philips.
Both formats delivered a similar audio and video quality and the main difference comes down to the movies available on each format. Most movie studios have taken one side or the other so consumers are left with a difficult decision. As a result many have walked away from stores with neither an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc player and the market has performed poorly.
The Warner Bros decision in January has been seen by many as the beginning of the end for HD DVD. With Warner pulling out HD DVD only two of the major Hollywood studios, Paramount and Universal, are left backing the format.
In the weeks since the Warner announcement things have gotten worse for HD DVD. In the last week Netflix, an Internet-based movie rental company in the U.S., said it would cease supporting HD DVD and then on Friday Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S., said it would stop selling HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray Disc.
he decision, which NHK said will likely cost the company several tens of billions of yen (hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars), is being made in the face of flagging support by movie studios and major U.S. retailers.
"We are making considerations following the impact on sales of Warner's announcement but we haven't made any decision," said Keisuke Ohmori, a spokesman for Toshiba, when reached on Saturday evening. He was referring to the January decision by Warner Bros to stop issuing movies on HD DVD and go solely with Blu-ray Disc.
Other local media reports on Saturday said an official announcement from Toshiba is likely in the coming week.
HD DVD has been battling Blu-ray Disc for just under two years to become the defacto replacement for DVD for high-definition video. HD DVD is backed by Toshiba and a handful of other companies including Microsoft and Intel but Blu-ray Disc counted a larger number of consumer electronics heavy hitters. The main backer of the format is Sony and other supporters include Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung, LG and Philips.
Both formats delivered a similar audio and video quality and the main difference comes down to the movies available on each format. Most movie studios have taken one side or the other so consumers are left with a difficult decision. As a result many have walked away from stores with neither an HD DVD or Blu-ray Disc player and the market has performed poorly.
The Warner Bros decision in January has been seen by many as the beginning of the end for HD DVD. With Warner pulling out HD DVD only two of the major Hollywood studios, Paramount and Universal, are left backing the format.
In the weeks since the Warner announcement things have gotten worse for HD DVD. In the last week Netflix, an Internet-based movie rental company in the U.S., said it would cease supporting HD DVD and then on Friday Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the U.S., said it would stop selling HD DVD in favor of Blu-ray Disc.
Microsoft offers patent protection for Office binaries
Microsoft on Friday said it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the Office Open XML (OOXML) file-format standards process.
The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft's format and the possible standard.
Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.
Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company's Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to "promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML, and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers."
The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML, as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.
According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them, as outlined in an article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.
Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.
To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.
Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML's rival file format, Open Document Format (ODF), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft's format and the possible standard.
Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.
Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company's Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to "promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML, and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers."
The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML, as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.
According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them, as outlined in an article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.
Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.
To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.
Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML's rival file format, Open Document Format (ODF), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
Amazon's S3 storage service down for several hours
Amazon's data storage service was down for several hours on Friday morning, leaving businesses that rely on the service offline.
As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.
She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.
Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.
A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.
Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end.
Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. "It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote. "We desperately need an update... it's a huge hit on our reputation."
Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.
Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability."
Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
As of around 9 a.m. on the West Coast of the U.S., the issue had been resolved, according to an Amazon employee posting on a user group forum. "This morning's issue has been resolved and the system is continuing to recover," wrote Kathrin, the Amazon employee, on the forum.
She said that the company plans to post technical information about what exactly happened, but that the priority is to make sure the system is stable.
Companies use Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, to store and quickly retrieve large amounts of data, often to run Web sites and services.
A press spokesman said that one of three geographic locations for the service was unreachable for about two hours, but that it was operating at 99 percent of normal performance before 7 a.m. on the West Coast. "We've been communicating with our customers all morning via our support forums and will be providing additional information as soon as we have it," said Drew Herdener in a statement.
Many customers appeared not to have gotten that communication. They complained on the forum about a lack of information from Amazon about the outage and when it would be fixed. One suggested that Amazon could have at least posted a message on the front page of the Web services site, so that customers would be aware that the problem wasn't on their end.
Others wrote about the problems that the outage was causing their businesses. "It's becoming very embarrassing for us here," one wrote. "We desperately need an update... it's a huge hit on our reputation."
Many of the users said that the service was down for around three hours.
Gustavo, a user in Brazil, said that his company hosts more than 30,000 images from a large television station in Brazil. "Now we are having several problems because of this S3 issue," he wrote. "My company chose to work with Amazon because of its reliability."
Late last year, Amazon introduced a new service level agreement for S3 that guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime each month. If the service slips below that level, the company promised to provide service credits to certain users.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Google finds evil all over the Web
The Web is scarier than most people realize, according to research published recently by Google.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.
In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.
Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.
In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.
Some of the data surprised Provos.
"When we started going into this I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.
It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.
"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."
"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.
Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia, (4 percent) Malaysia (2.2 percent) and Korea (2 percent).
It costs next-to-nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."
Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.
So how to stop this growing pestilence?
Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.
But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.
The search engine giant trained its Web crawling software on billions of Web addresses over the past year looking for malicious pages that tried to attack their visitors. They found more than 3 million of them, meaning that about one in 1,000 Web pages is malicious, according to Neils Provos, a senior staff software engineer with Google.
These Web-based attacks, called "drive-by downloads" by security experts, have become much more common in recent years as firewalls and better security practices by Microsoft have made it harder for worms and viruses to directly attack computers.
In the past year the Web sites of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" movie and the Miami Dolphins were hacked, and the MySpace profile of Alicia Keys was used to attack visitors.
Criminals are getting better at this kind of work. They have built very successful automated tools that poke and prod Web sites, looking for programming errors and then exploit these flaws to install the drive-by download software. Often this code opens an invisible iFrame page on the victim's browser that redirects it to a malicious Web server. That server then tries to install code on the victim's PC. "The bad guys are getting exceptionally good at automating those attacks," said Roger Thompson, chief research officer with security vendor Grisoft.
In response, Google has stepped up its game. One of the reasons it has been scouring the Web for malicious pages is so that it can identify drive-by-download sites and warn Google searchers before they visit them. Nowadays about 1.3 percent of all Google search queries list malicious results somewhere on the first few pages.
Some of the data surprised Provos.
"When we started going into this I had the firm intuition that if you go to the sleazier parts of the Web, you are in more danger," he said.
It turns out the Web's nice neighborhoods aren't necessarily safer than its red-light districts.
"We looked into this and indeed we found that if you ended up going to adult-oriented pages, your risk of being exposed [to malicious software] was slightly higher," he said. But "there really wasn't a huge difference."
"Staying away from the disreputable part of the Internet really isn't good enough," he noted.
Another interesting finding: China was far and away the greatest source of malicious Web sites. According to Google's research, 67 percent of all malware distribution sites are hosted in China. The second-worst offender? The U.S., at 15 percent, followed by Russia, (4 percent) Malaysia (2.2 percent) and Korea (2 percent).
It costs next-to-nothing to register a Web domain in China and service providers are often slow to shut down malicious pages, said Thompson. "They're the Kleenex Web sites," he said. Criminals "know they're going to be shut down, and they don't care."
Malicious site operators in China fall into two broad categories, Thompson said: fraudsters looking to steal your banking password, and teenagers who want to steal your World of Warcraft character.
So how to stop this growing pestilence?
Google's Provos has this advice for Web surfers: Turn automatic updates on. "You should always run your software as updated as possible and install some kind of antivirus technology," he said.
But he also thinks that Webmasters will have to get smarter about building secure Web sites. "I think it will take concentrated efforts on all parts," for the problem to go away, he said.
GPS helps you find your friends
Location-based services appeared here, there and everywhere at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, as service providers maneuvered to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile phones shipping with integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) modules. Many of the services put the emphasis on finding your friends, not finding your way, as GPS evolves into more of a social tool.
Yahoo announced a service called oneConnect that will to alert you when contacts arrive in town, warn you what mood they are in and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. Yahoo intends to collect this information by combining status updates from sites like MySpace with GPS data from mobile phones and other information from Web mail and instant messaging services, a kind of aggregation for social networks. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google's Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's Outlook Web mail, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life division.
Communology, of Cologne, Germany, promoted a similar notion of social-network aggregation. Its Mobile Mash-Up can help sites like Facebook or Xing offer mobile users the ability to locate friends or tag photos with information about where they were taken. Communology sells "white label" services, using its Live Media software platform to build social-networking services for other brands.
Linking up with Facebook is a strategy that also occurred to Wayfinder: it now offers a GPS widget for Facebook users called LocateMate. The company also introduced a forum for users of its software to share favorite routes and locations at MyWayfinder.com, with links to digital mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.
GyPSii showed a BlackBerry client for its mobile social-networking service. It already offers versions for handsets running Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. The service allows users to share photos, videos and other information, tagging it with location data. Last year, GyPSii, based in Amsterdam, acquired Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Benefon, one of the first to build GPS modules into mobile phones.
One of the strangest location-based mobile social networks revealed at the show allows users to share information about ... public toilets. MizPee.eu offers reviews of toilets in Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome posted by community members, with ratings for cleanliness and cost. Showgoers hoping to use the site to beat the long lines for toilets on site were disappointed, though: the nearest one listed is 1.45 kilometers from the showground.
Yahoo announced a service called oneConnect that will to alert you when contacts arrive in town, warn you what mood they are in and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. Yahoo intends to collect this information by combining status updates from sites like MySpace with GPS data from mobile phones and other information from Web mail and instant messaging services, a kind of aggregation for social networks. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google's Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger and Microsoft's Outlook Web mail, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo's Connected Life division.
Communology, of Cologne, Germany, promoted a similar notion of social-network aggregation. Its Mobile Mash-Up can help sites like Facebook or Xing offer mobile users the ability to locate friends or tag photos with information about where they were taken. Communology sells "white label" services, using its Live Media software platform to build social-networking services for other brands.
Linking up with Facebook is a strategy that also occurred to Wayfinder: it now offers a GPS widget for Facebook users called LocateMate. The company also introduced a forum for users of its software to share favorite routes and locations at MyWayfinder.com, with links to digital mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.
GyPSii showed a BlackBerry client for its mobile social-networking service. It already offers versions for handsets running Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. The service allows users to share photos, videos and other information, tagging it with location data. Last year, GyPSii, based in Amsterdam, acquired Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Benefon, one of the first to build GPS modules into mobile phones.
One of the strangest location-based mobile social networks revealed at the show allows users to share information about ... public toilets. MizPee.eu offers reviews of toilets in Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome posted by community members, with ratings for cleanliness and cost. Showgoers hoping to use the site to beat the long lines for toilets on site were disappointed, though: the nearest one listed is 1.45 kilometers from the showground.
Report: Yahoo board reported split over Microsoft bid
Yahoo Inc.'s Chairman Roy Bostock is leading a group of the company's board members in favor of accepting Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited US$44.6 billion takeover bid, according to a new report.
The informal group headed by Bostock also includes other board members and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, according to the report in the New York Post, which quoted unnamed sources close to the situation. Board members Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Softbank Capital, and Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Publishing Inc., are standing behind Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who does not want to accept Microsoft's offer.
On Monday, Yahoo's board rejected Microsoft's offer, saying it undervalued the company.
According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers who are so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders. Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders.
Yang sent a letter to shareholders Wednesday night, saying that Microsoft's bid substantially undervalues the company and that Yahoo is positioned to take advantage of growth in the online advertising market.
Yahoo could not be reached for comment.
The informal group headed by Bostock also includes other board members and billionaire investor Ron Burkle, according to the report in the New York Post, which quoted unnamed sources close to the situation. Board members Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at Softbank Capital, and Robert Kotick, CEO of Activision Publishing Inc., are standing behind Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who does not want to accept Microsoft's offer.
On Monday, Yahoo's board rejected Microsoft's offer, saying it undervalued the company.
According to the Post, the discord revolves around Yang and his followers who are so opposed to selling the company to Microsoft that Bostock and his group fear they will act out of emotions rather than their fiduciary duty to Yahoo shareholders. Such an action could expose the board to lawsuits by shareholders.
Yang sent a letter to shareholders Wednesday night, saying that Microsoft's bid substantially undervalues the company and that Yahoo is positioned to take advantage of growth in the online advertising market.
Yahoo could not be reached for comment.
Successful SOA implementations are on the increase
Most SOA implementations are now successful, with nearly four out of ten enterprises meeting all their goals and 60 percent meeting most of them.
That's according to a survey carried out by SOA governance company Amberpoint, which found that 38 percent of SOA installations met their targets. The company also found that just 1.5 percent of SOA projects ended in failure -- a figure well below the industry average for all software projects.
Ed Horst, Amberpoint's VP of marketing was surprised by this particular result and could offer no explanation for it. He did point out that a number of respondents say that they had decided not to proceed with an SOA project, but even if these were taken into account, the number of failures still wouldn't reach five percent.
He could not explain why the failure rates were so low and couldn't say whether the respondents were implementing trial SOA projects for the more simplistic implementations. "Unfortunately, we didn't ask the supplementary question as to what type of projects they were doing. However, only 20 percent of the respondents were installing SOA in a single department implementation, so it seems that most of the enterprises were not taking the simple approach," Horst said.
One of the main themes to come from the survey was that SOA was no longer seen as being synonymous with web services. 58 percent of enterprises now include "non-SOAP" messaging (such as MQ or RMI) in their SOA systems, while packaged applications such as SAP are included in 68 percent of SOA systems.
Horst said the results showed that there was a new maturity in the market. What had changed was that people were no longer frightened of SOA and no longer believed that everything had to be designed up-front, he said. "The biggest problem that users faced was trying to design everything at once and trying to anticipate every single problem. While it is a good idea to do some design up-front, it's far better to implement something and learn from your mistakes."
He added that company was now thinking of making the SOA survey a regular event but said that he didn't expect to see a massive change in the figures for successful and unsuccessful implementations. "I'm not sure we can improve on that," he said. "In fact, I would expect to see a minor dip in the number of successful deployments."
That's according to a survey carried out by SOA governance company Amberpoint, which found that 38 percent of SOA installations met their targets. The company also found that just 1.5 percent of SOA projects ended in failure -- a figure well below the industry average for all software projects.
Ed Horst, Amberpoint's VP of marketing was surprised by this particular result and could offer no explanation for it. He did point out that a number of respondents say that they had decided not to proceed with an SOA project, but even if these were taken into account, the number of failures still wouldn't reach five percent.
He could not explain why the failure rates were so low and couldn't say whether the respondents were implementing trial SOA projects for the more simplistic implementations. "Unfortunately, we didn't ask the supplementary question as to what type of projects they were doing. However, only 20 percent of the respondents were installing SOA in a single department implementation, so it seems that most of the enterprises were not taking the simple approach," Horst said.
One of the main themes to come from the survey was that SOA was no longer seen as being synonymous with web services. 58 percent of enterprises now include "non-SOAP" messaging (such as MQ or RMI) in their SOA systems, while packaged applications such as SAP are included in 68 percent of SOA systems.
Horst said the results showed that there was a new maturity in the market. What had changed was that people were no longer frightened of SOA and no longer believed that everything had to be designed up-front, he said. "The biggest problem that users faced was trying to design everything at once and trying to anticipate every single problem. While it is a good idea to do some design up-front, it's far better to implement something and learn from your mistakes."
He added that company was now thinking of making the SOA survey a regular event but said that he didn't expect to see a massive change in the figures for successful and unsuccessful implementations. "I'm not sure we can improve on that," he said. "In fact, I would expect to see a minor dip in the number of successful deployments."
Four newspaper companies form online ad partnership
Four major U.S. newspaper chains launched an online advertising network on Friday that will let advertisers book national campaigns through a single point of contact, reaching 50 million people a month across the U.S.
Investors include the Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and New York Times companies, which publish flagship newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, respectively.
The network, QuadrantOne, will let an advertiser place ads on hundreds of Web sites focused on 27 major markets, targeting users by what they are viewing, their online behavior and demographic information.
QuadrantOne is most notable for the online players that aren't participants, such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. This latest move by the newspaper companies may be designed to assert greater control over their print and Web properties.
Yahoo reached a landmark revenue-sharing deal in November 2006 with seven U.S. publishers. Yahoo provides search services, places job ads on its own HotJobs site and sells Web advertising. The deal was expanded in April 2007, with some 264 newspapers distributing their content on Yahoo's portal.
One of the QuadrantOne's investors, the Hearst company, is participating in the Yahoo deal.
Google's PrintAds program lets its customers who are already buying contextual Web-based ads to also place ads in 600 daily and weekly U.S. newspapers. Google also offers easy tools for customers to design their own ad that can be uploaded to particular newspaper.
The Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle participate in PrintAds.
If newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google.
Online advertising accounted for about US$16.9 billion in revenue in 2006 and is expected to rise to $50.3 billion by 2011, according to a December 2007 report from the Yankee Group.
The U.S. newspaper industry is in dire straits, in part because of a bumpy U.S. economy, declining print readers and falling print advertising revenue.
Critics argue that newspaper companies waited far too long to revamp their businesses with the surge in online publishing and advertising over the last 15 years.
Companies such as Google, which has made a fortune in Web-based advertising, have reaped some gains at the expense of newspapers, as advertisers look for cheaper and more targeted ways to reach buyers.
Classified advertising, once a bread-and-butter source of revenue for newspaper, has also declined over the years due to advertising boards such as Craig's List.
Investors include the Tribune, Gannett, Hearst and New York Times companies, which publish flagship newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, respectively.
The network, QuadrantOne, will let an advertiser place ads on hundreds of Web sites focused on 27 major markets, targeting users by what they are viewing, their online behavior and demographic information.
QuadrantOne is most notable for the online players that aren't participants, such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. This latest move by the newspaper companies may be designed to assert greater control over their print and Web properties.
Yahoo reached a landmark revenue-sharing deal in November 2006 with seven U.S. publishers. Yahoo provides search services, places job ads on its own HotJobs site and sells Web advertising. The deal was expanded in April 2007, with some 264 newspapers distributing their content on Yahoo's portal.
One of the QuadrantOne's investors, the Hearst company, is participating in the Yahoo deal.
Google's PrintAds program lets its customers who are already buying contextual Web-based ads to also place ads in 600 daily and weekly U.S. newspapers. Google also offers easy tools for customers to design their own ad that can be uploaded to particular newspaper.
The Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle participate in PrintAds.
If newspapers develop better ways to sell their own online ads, they may not have to share revenue with their Web counterparts such as Yahoo and Google.
Online advertising accounted for about US$16.9 billion in revenue in 2006 and is expected to rise to $50.3 billion by 2011, according to a December 2007 report from the Yankee Group.
The U.S. newspaper industry is in dire straits, in part because of a bumpy U.S. economy, declining print readers and falling print advertising revenue.
Critics argue that newspaper companies waited far too long to revamp their businesses with the surge in online publishing and advertising over the last 15 years.
Companies such as Google, which has made a fortune in Web-based advertising, have reaped some gains at the expense of newspapers, as advertisers look for cheaper and more targeted ways to reach buyers.
Classified advertising, once a bread-and-butter source of revenue for newspaper, has also declined over the years due to advertising boards such as Craig's List.
OLPC, IDB to launch pilot project in Haiti
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC) has teamed up with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to launch a pilot project in Haiti, the first time the group will be able to comprehensively evaluate the idea of giving laptops directly to students as a learning tool.
OLPC, which makes the US$188 XO laptop aimed at kids in developing nations, will contribute $2 million to the project, while IDB will provide a $3 million grant. The project aims to distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools, the groups said in a statement.
The organizations are financing the project to test whether the use of laptops in schools on a one-to-one basis can improve teaching and learning in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world.
"We have studies about the impact of computer labs and shared computers in the classroom, but there's never been a comprehensive evaluation of the learning model based on giving each child a laptop," said Emma Näslund-Hadley, the IDB's project team leader. "This is crucial to determine the effectiveness of this model under conditions of extreme poverty and as a tool for accelerating learning."
One aim of the project is to determine how the laptops can be used to help solve problems such as a shortage of qualified teachers, as well as educating children of different ages and grades in the same classroom. The Haitian government hopes the laptops can help speed up the learning process for students who enter school late or have to repeat grades, according to the release.
Teachers and students will be trained how to use the laptops and carry out basic maintenance and trouble shooting. Some students will receive vocational training to handle more complex laptop repairs.
The project will be evaluated by UNESCO's Regional Office on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will conduct standardized math and language tests before and after the pilot project to determine performance improvements. Observers will also gauge whether the laptops affect attitudes and behaviors regarding school management, the value families place on education, the use of laptops at home, and the perceived educational progress of the students.
The OLPC project started as an attempt to build a US$100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.
The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.
OLPC, which makes the US$188 XO laptop aimed at kids in developing nations, will contribute $2 million to the project, while IDB will provide a $3 million grant. The project aims to distribute XO laptops to 13,200 students and 500 teachers in 60 Haitian primary schools, the groups said in a statement.
The organizations are financing the project to test whether the use of laptops in schools on a one-to-one basis can improve teaching and learning in Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world.
"We have studies about the impact of computer labs and shared computers in the classroom, but there's never been a comprehensive evaluation of the learning model based on giving each child a laptop," said Emma Näslund-Hadley, the IDB's project team leader. "This is crucial to determine the effectiveness of this model under conditions of extreme poverty and as a tool for accelerating learning."
One aim of the project is to determine how the laptops can be used to help solve problems such as a shortage of qualified teachers, as well as educating children of different ages and grades in the same classroom. The Haitian government hopes the laptops can help speed up the learning process for students who enter school late or have to repeat grades, according to the release.
Teachers and students will be trained how to use the laptops and carry out basic maintenance and trouble shooting. Some students will receive vocational training to handle more complex laptop repairs.
The project will be evaluated by UNESCO's Regional Office on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, which will conduct standardized math and language tests before and after the pilot project to determine performance improvements. Observers will also gauge whether the laptops affect attitudes and behaviors regarding school management, the value families place on education, the use of laptops at home, and the perceived educational progress of the students.
The OLPC project started as an attempt to build a US$100 laptop and work with governments to pass them out to kids in poor nations, but the XO, will likely end up costing nearly double that amount at first. The organizers of the effort, led by academics and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hope high-volume sales of the device will drive down costs.
The goal of OLPC is to make sure nobody misses out on the benefits of computing. The fear is that the price of a PC is keeping too many people in developing countries from learning how software, the Internet and communications via computing can improve their economies, job prospects and lives, or that poor countries will fall further behind the modern world due to their inability to access computers.
Investment firm extends offer to buy Transmeta
An investment firm on Wednesday extended its unsolicited offer to buy the remaining shares in Transmeta, keeping Intel's former chip-making rival on its toes.
Riley Investment Management is offering US$15.50 per share in cash to buy out Transmeta, an offer similar to the one it made on January 30 which expired on Wednesday. The current offer is due to expire on February 28.
Riley Investment is a Transmeta shareholder, holding a 6.6 percent stake in the company.
Transmeta paid little heed and did not respond to the initial offer by the end of the two-week deadline, said Bryant Riley, managing member of Riley Investment Management, in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
"I do not understand how a Board which has overseen such heavy losses and actively participated in the continued decline of shareholder value, while, at the same time, personally benefiting financially, can react in this manner," wrote Riley in the filing. Riley has repeatedly questioned the unnecessary expenditure and strategic direction of the company.
In a January 31 derivative complaint filed in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara, Riley's investment firm accused Transmeta's management officials of mismanagement and asset waste.
In the complaint, Riley Investment accused defendants of paying an "outrageous, illegal and unconscionable bonus" of over $10 million to legal counsel John O'Hara Horsley for "simply settling" an intellectual property lawsuit against Intel, and granting President and CEO Lester Crudele and Chief Financial Officer Sujan Jain $1.2 million in cash bonuses in connection with the Intel settlement "in which they played no material part," according to court documents.
Intel last year settled a LongRun technology patent dispute with Transmeta for US$250 million.
Riley also questioned Transmeta management's commitment to LongRun2 and developing shareholder value from it, Riley wrote in an earlier SEC filing. LongRun2 technology helps processors become more power-efficient.
Transmeta did not return requests for comment.
Riley Investment Management is offering US$15.50 per share in cash to buy out Transmeta, an offer similar to the one it made on January 30 which expired on Wednesday. The current offer is due to expire on February 28.
Riley Investment is a Transmeta shareholder, holding a 6.6 percent stake in the company.
Transmeta paid little heed and did not respond to the initial offer by the end of the two-week deadline, said Bryant Riley, managing member of Riley Investment Management, in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
"I do not understand how a Board which has overseen such heavy losses and actively participated in the continued decline of shareholder value, while, at the same time, personally benefiting financially, can react in this manner," wrote Riley in the filing. Riley has repeatedly questioned the unnecessary expenditure and strategic direction of the company.
In a January 31 derivative complaint filed in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of Santa Clara, Riley's investment firm accused Transmeta's management officials of mismanagement and asset waste.
In the complaint, Riley Investment accused defendants of paying an "outrageous, illegal and unconscionable bonus" of over $10 million to legal counsel John O'Hara Horsley for "simply settling" an intellectual property lawsuit against Intel, and granting President and CEO Lester Crudele and Chief Financial Officer Sujan Jain $1.2 million in cash bonuses in connection with the Intel settlement "in which they played no material part," according to court documents.
Intel last year settled a LongRun technology patent dispute with Transmeta for US$250 million.
Riley also questioned Transmeta management's commitment to LongRun2 and developing shareholder value from it, Riley wrote in an earlier SEC filing. LongRun2 technology helps processors become more power-efficient.
Transmeta did not return requests for comment.
'Critical' Linux kernel bugs discovered
Security researchers have uncovered "critical" security flaws in a version of the Linux kernel used by a large number of popular distributions.
The three bugs allow unauthorized users to read or write to kernel memory locations or to access certain resources in certain servers, according to a SecurityFocus advisory.
They could be exploited by malicious, local users to cause denial of service attacks, disclose potentially sensitive information or gain "root" privileges, according to security experts.
The bug affects all versions of the Linux kernel up to version 2.6.24.1, which contains a patch. Distributions such as Ubuntu, Turbolinux, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian and others are affected.
The problems are within three functions in the system call fs/splice.c, according to an advisory from Secunia.
"In the 2.6.23 kernel the system call functionality has been further extended resulting in... critical vulnerabilities," said iSEC Security Research in an advisory.
Secunia disagreed about the bugs' seriousness, giving them a less critical ranking.
Exploit code for the vulnerabilities has been released publicly on the hacker site milw0rm.com, and Core Security Technologies has also developed a commercial exploit for the bugs, researchers said.
Researchers advised system administrators to update their kernels immediately.
Last month, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bug-fixing scheme uncovered an average of one security glitch per 1,000 lines of code in 180 widely used open source software projects.
Secunia also previously discovered that the number of security bugs in open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers, far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.
The three bugs allow unauthorized users to read or write to kernel memory locations or to access certain resources in certain servers, according to a SecurityFocus advisory.
They could be exploited by malicious, local users to cause denial of service attacks, disclose potentially sensitive information or gain "root" privileges, according to security experts.
The bug affects all versions of the Linux kernel up to version 2.6.24.1, which contains a patch. Distributions such as Ubuntu, Turbolinux, SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian and others are affected.
The problems are within three functions in the system call fs/splice.c, according to an advisory from Secunia.
"In the 2.6.23 kernel the system call functionality has been further extended resulting in... critical vulnerabilities," said iSEC Security Research in an advisory.
Secunia disagreed about the bugs' seriousness, giving them a less critical ranking.
Exploit code for the vulnerabilities has been released publicly on the hacker site milw0rm.com, and Core Security Technologies has also developed a commercial exploit for the bugs, researchers said.
Researchers advised system administrators to update their kernels immediately.
Last month, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) bug-fixing scheme uncovered an average of one security glitch per 1,000 lines of code in 180 widely used open source software projects.
Secunia also previously discovered that the number of security bugs in open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers, far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year.
SCO to get $100M bailout; McBride out if deal goes through
Five months after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as part of a reorganization effort last September, The SCO Group Inc. Thursday unveiled a potential US$100 million cash infusion and a plan to take the embattled company private.
In an announcement, Lindon, Utah-based SCO said that the cash will come from Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners L.P. (SNCP) and partners in the Middle East who "have agreed to provide up to $100 million to finance a plan of reorganization for The SCO Group Inc."
Under the deal, which must be approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Delaware who is reviewing the company's bankruptcy filing, SNCP would gain a controlling interest in the company and take it private.
Two notable clauses are present in a 15-page "Memorandum of Understanding" filed with the court by SNCP to outline the proposal: SCO CEO Darl C. McBride, who has led the company since 2002, would be required to "resign immediately" once the deal is completed, and SCO must "continue to pursue aggressively the company's claims in the Novell/IBM litigation and other pending litigation against AutoZone Inc."
SCO has been on the defensive since 2003, when the company filed a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM, alleging that it improperly contributed some of SCO's Unix intellectual property for use in Linux. SCO then also sued Novell, charging that the company had falsely claimed to own the legal rights to Unix. Last August, SCO was handed a big defeat when a U.S. District Court judge in Utah ruled that Novell is, in fact, the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The judge also ruled that as a result, Novell could direct SCO to revoke its copyright infringement claims against IBM.
Under the proposed deal, the cash infusion will mean that SCO "is poised to emerge from Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the coming year," according to the announcement. "The board of directors of SCO has unanimously determined that this financing and plan of reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders, creditors and employees," the statement continued."
SCO officials declined to answer questions about the arrangement late Thursday.
Jeff Hunsaker, president and chief operating officer of SCO Operations, said in a statement that the deal not only would allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy "but it also marks an exciting future for our business. This significant financial backing is positive news for SCO's customers, partners and resellers who continue to request upgrades and rely upon SCO's UNIX services to drive their business forward."
A new business plan has been established for the company, "that includes unveiling new product lines aimed at global customers. This reorganization plan will also enable the company to see SCO's legal claims through to their full conclusion."
Stephen Norris, managing partner for SNCP, said in a statement that his company sees "tremendous investment opportunity in SCO and its vast range of products and services, including many new innovations ready or soon to be ready to be released into the marketplace. We expect to quickly develop these opportunities, and to stand behind SCO's existing base of customers and partners."
This isn't the first financial proposal made for SCO since it filed for bankruptcy. Last October, the company announced a "potential" $36 million payment for SCO's Unix business from JGD Management Corp., an umbrella business of New York-based investment firm York Capital Management LLC. The deal did not go through.
In recent months, SCO has been focusing on its initiatives for software aimed at mobile devices. In the last two weeks, SCO unveiled layoffs of about 30 workers as part of a reorganization plan. The announcement was made in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
In an announcement, Lindon, Utah-based SCO said that the cash will come from Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners L.P. (SNCP) and partners in the Middle East who "have agreed to provide up to $100 million to finance a plan of reorganization for The SCO Group Inc."
Under the deal, which must be approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Delaware who is reviewing the company's bankruptcy filing, SNCP would gain a controlling interest in the company and take it private.
Two notable clauses are present in a 15-page "Memorandum of Understanding" filed with the court by SNCP to outline the proposal: SCO CEO Darl C. McBride, who has led the company since 2002, would be required to "resign immediately" once the deal is completed, and SCO must "continue to pursue aggressively the company's claims in the Novell/IBM litigation and other pending litigation against AutoZone Inc."
SCO has been on the defensive since 2003, when the company filed a $5 billion lawsuit against IBM, alleging that it improperly contributed some of SCO's Unix intellectual property for use in Linux. SCO then also sued Novell, charging that the company had falsely claimed to own the legal rights to Unix. Last August, SCO was handed a big defeat when a U.S. District Court judge in Utah ruled that Novell is, in fact, the owner of the Unix and UnixWare copyrights. The judge also ruled that as a result, Novell could direct SCO to revoke its copyright infringement claims against IBM.
Under the proposed deal, the cash infusion will mean that SCO "is poised to emerge from Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the coming year," according to the announcement. "The board of directors of SCO has unanimously determined that this financing and plan of reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders, creditors and employees," the statement continued."
SCO officials declined to answer questions about the arrangement late Thursday.
Jeff Hunsaker, president and chief operating officer of SCO Operations, said in a statement that the deal not only would allow the company to emerge from bankruptcy "but it also marks an exciting future for our business. This significant financial backing is positive news for SCO's customers, partners and resellers who continue to request upgrades and rely upon SCO's UNIX services to drive their business forward."
A new business plan has been established for the company, "that includes unveiling new product lines aimed at global customers. This reorganization plan will also enable the company to see SCO's legal claims through to their full conclusion."
Stephen Norris, managing partner for SNCP, said in a statement that his company sees "tremendous investment opportunity in SCO and its vast range of products and services, including many new innovations ready or soon to be ready to be released into the marketplace. We expect to quickly develop these opportunities, and to stand behind SCO's existing base of customers and partners."
This isn't the first financial proposal made for SCO since it filed for bankruptcy. Last October, the company announced a "potential" $36 million payment for SCO's Unix business from JGD Management Corp., an umbrella business of New York-based investment firm York Capital Management LLC. The deal did not go through.
In recent months, SCO has been focusing on its initiatives for software aimed at mobile devices. In the last two weeks, SCO unveiled layoffs of about 30 workers as part of a reorganization plan. The announcement was made in a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Microsoft executive shakeup prepares for Yahoo acquisition
Microsoft confirmed a number of high-level executive changes, moves that could be designed to better position the company to digest an acquisition of Yahoo, an analyst said.
In addition to a number of executive promotions, Microsoft announced that Bill Veghte, senior vice president of the Online Services and Windows Business Group; Satya Nadella, senior vice president, Search, Portals and Advertising Group; and Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, are all taking on new responsibilities in running Microsoft's online services, including Windows Live, Search and MSN.
Microsoft may be positioning Nadella to take on the responsibility of the technical integration of Yahoo if the acquisition happens, said Rob Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft is anticipating a shift in its online strategy around the purchase of Yahoo, which means, among other things, that they're replacing people running the old strategy," he said.
If Nadella is being brought in to integrate Yahoo into Microsoft, he doesn't have the best track record, said Helm. He was the head of the Microsoft Dynamics unit and was charged with integrating a couple of other acquisitions, including Great Plains. "On his watch, relatively little happened in the way of successful integration," said Helm. However, Nadella had the post for just a year, so perhaps he didn't have the opportunity to do more, he said.
Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group, is moving out of a role in Microsoft's online group. He'll step down from his position in August, Microsoft said. He plans to stay with the company, but Microsoft did not say in what capacity.
Despite these positioning moves, the Yahoo deal is still uncertain, Helm said. "It's still up in the air, though it seems unlikely that Microsoft would walk away after a bid like this," he said.
Microsoft also said that Andy Lees, who leads marketing for the Server and Tools Marketing and Solutions group, will take over for Pieter Knook as senior vice president of the Mobile Communications Business. Word of Knook's departure surfaced on Thursday with an announcement from Vodafone that he'd joined the mobile operator.
Lees' appointment, as someone with a marketing background, seems to follow a shift in the mobile group toward a focus on consumers, Helm said. Microsoft recently announced plans to buy Danger, a youth-focused mobile software company, and appointed a new marketing executive to target consumers. Pressure from the iPhone, which has done remarkably well in a very brief time, could be driving the shift in strategy for the mobile group at Microsoft, Helm said.
Other announcements from Microsoft include news that Brad Brooks will take over for Michael Sievert, who is leaving the company, as corporate vice president of Windows Consumer Product Marketing. Steve Guggenheimer will become corporate vice president of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Division, moving on from a marketing position with Microsoft's Application Platform effort.
In addition to a number of executive promotions, Microsoft announced that Bill Veghte, senior vice president of the Online Services and Windows Business Group; Satya Nadella, senior vice president, Search, Portals and Advertising Group; and Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft's Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group, are all taking on new responsibilities in running Microsoft's online services, including Windows Live, Search and MSN.
Microsoft may be positioning Nadella to take on the responsibility of the technical integration of Yahoo if the acquisition happens, said Rob Helm, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft is anticipating a shift in its online strategy around the purchase of Yahoo, which means, among other things, that they're replacing people running the old strategy," he said.
If Nadella is being brought in to integrate Yahoo into Microsoft, he doesn't have the best track record, said Helm. He was the head of the Microsoft Dynamics unit and was charged with integrating a couple of other acquisitions, including Great Plains. "On his watch, relatively little happened in the way of successful integration," said Helm. However, Nadella had the post for just a year, so perhaps he didn't have the opportunity to do more, he said.
Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group, is moving out of a role in Microsoft's online group. He'll step down from his position in August, Microsoft said. He plans to stay with the company, but Microsoft did not say in what capacity.
Despite these positioning moves, the Yahoo deal is still uncertain, Helm said. "It's still up in the air, though it seems unlikely that Microsoft would walk away after a bid like this," he said.
Microsoft also said that Andy Lees, who leads marketing for the Server and Tools Marketing and Solutions group, will take over for Pieter Knook as senior vice president of the Mobile Communications Business. Word of Knook's departure surfaced on Thursday with an announcement from Vodafone that he'd joined the mobile operator.
Lees' appointment, as someone with a marketing background, seems to follow a shift in the mobile group toward a focus on consumers, Helm said. Microsoft recently announced plans to buy Danger, a youth-focused mobile software company, and appointed a new marketing executive to target consumers. Pressure from the iPhone, which has done remarkably well in a very brief time, could be driving the shift in strategy for the mobile group at Microsoft, Helm said.
Other announcements from Microsoft include news that Brad Brooks will take over for Michael Sievert, who is leaving the company, as corporate vice president of Windows Consumer Product Marketing. Steve Guggenheimer will become corporate vice president of the Original Equipment Manufacturer Division, moving on from a marketing position with Microsoft's Application Platform effort.
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