---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: inttk2004 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Nov 21, 2007 2:15 PM
_______________________________________________________ INTERNET THINK TANK FLASH NEWS November 21, 2007 _______________________________________________________ About Us Internet Think Tank is a portal software and development firm specializing in portal modules, portal development tools and customized portal programming/deployment. Through portal technology, Internet Think Tank envisions enormous opportunities to enhance how people and companies interface with the Internet. Visit our website at http://www.inttk.com _______________________________________________________ Business *BEA Tries to Prove Its Worth to Oracle BEA Systems has been hoping to prove it is worth more than the $6.7 billion that Oracle offered to pay for it last month. Its third-quarter financial report, with net income up 59 percent and revenue up 11 percent, may have helped the company's case. BEA has plenty at stake in the report yesterday, its first full quarterly financial report in more than a year. Alfred Chuang, the chief executive, has repeatedly said that Oracle's $17 a share offer for BEA significantly undervalued it. The board set a price of at least $21 a share. "These results demonstrate not only significant progress in our operating profitability, we also believe they will materially impact how investors value BEA," Mr. Chuang said. "You are now able to see the very significant profitability improvements we have made over the last several quarters." (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *Qualcomm's Profits Nearly Double Qualcomm Inc. reported that its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings nearly doubled on demand for chips that power high-end cell phones, but its estimate of first-quarter profit was on the low end of Wall Street's expectations. The world's second-largest supplier of cell phone chips said it expected a first-quarter profit between 50 and 52 cents per share, excluding certain items. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial expected 52 cents. Qualcomm projected first-quarter revenue between $2.3 billion and $2.4 billion, compared to an average analyst estimate of $2.38 billion. The soft predictions came despite strong quarterly performance. Qualcom earned $1.13 billion, or 67 cents per share, during the three-month period ended Sept. 30, up from $614 million, or 36 cents per share, in the same period last year. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *Ericsson Sees Weak Fourth-Quarter Sales Telecom equipment maker Ericsson on Tuesday predicted a weak fourth quarter due to tightening U.S. and European demand and unrest in emerging markets, sending its shares down 11 percent. After issuing a profit warning in the third quarter, the world's biggest maker of mobile-network gear said that sales and margins for the fourth quarter would be at the lower end of a forecast range it had given as recently as last month. Analysts and investors said they were concerned about the company's ability to monitor the performance of its business and were disappointed Ericsson did not give a clear sign when it would start to see improvements. "It's not good news," said Leo Schmidt, an equities analyst at insurer Chubb Corp, which owns Ericsson shares. He said investors were spooked by the repeatedly revised forecasts. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *Internet Veterans to Launch Start-up Investment Fund Veteran Internet executives from AOL and InterActiveCorp plan to unveil on Thursday a new firm to coach early stage entrepreneurs in digital markets and invest in their start-up Internet and mobile companies. LaunchBox Digital--founded by Julius Genachowski, former chief of business operations at IAC; Sean Greene, founder of The Away Network; and former AOL Chief Technology Officer John McKinley--will offer start-ups up to $1 million in financing. "There's a capital gap emerging as venture funds get larger and put more money to work per deal, but as cost to start companies go down, it gets harder for early stage companies to figure out where to go to get early stage funding," Genachowski said in a phone interview. Some venture capital funds now invest no less than $5 million to $10 million in individual companies, he said. Funds now prefer to bet on already-proven winners in an increasingly competitive market for Internet start-ups. (Source: http://www.news.com ) _______________________________________________________ Early Adaptor Blog How to become a kindle author, China goes gaga for the iPhone, the 20 worst venture capital investments of all time and why the number 150 is important for social networking in the E.A. Blog. http://earlyadaptor.tumblr.com/ _______________________________________________________ Portals *Give it a Whrrl: Service Blends Net, Friends' Advice The Internet is handy for finding restaurants, stores and nightclubs, but word-of-mouth recommendations still rule. Jeff Holden, co-creator of a new service called Whrrl, hopes to marry the two. The goal: create a social discovery experience that combines the power of the Internet with the dead-on trustworthiness - and fun - of getting recommendations from friends."This is personalization for the real world," says Holden. "We're trying to help people find and discover things that there is basically no way to do today." Whrrl is accessible from PCs or mobile devices, making it a true "two-screen" service, says Holden, CEO of Pelago, which created Whrrl. (Source: http://www.usatoday.com ) Whrrl http://www.whrrl.com/ _______________________________________________________ Internet *Video, Interactivity Could Slow Down The Web By 2010 Enjoy your speedy broadband Web access while you can. The Web will start to seem pokey as early as 2010, as use of interactive and video-intensive services overwhelms local cable, phone and wireless Internet providers, a study by business technology analysts Nemertes Research has found. "Users will experience a slow, subtle degradation, so it's back to the bad old days of dial-up," says Nemertes President Johna Till Johnson. "The cool stuff that you'll want to do will be such a pain in the rear that you won't do it." Nemertes says that its study is the first to project traffic growth and compare it with plans to increase capacity. Nemertes says that the bottleneck will be where Internet traffic goes to the home from cable companies' coaxial cable lines and the copper wires that phone companies use for DSL. (Source: http://www.usatoday.com ) ________________________________________________________ Weekly Quote "So we have great momentum, we've brought our Windows Mobile 6 software to market, we're driving forward on our future releases and we'll have to see what Google does. Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world." --Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft and one of Google's biggest competitors. Ballmer, predictably sidestepped a request to make any specific comments on the Android software platform during a Tokyo news conference. Ballmer went on to note the successes that his company has had with its Windows Mobile platform, which commands a sizeable share of the smartphone market, especially in North America. He said Windows Mobile is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. He added that Microsoft will likely license 20 million Windows Mobile handsets this year. (Source: http://www.computerworld.com.au ) ________________________________________________________ Wireless *Vodafone Challenges Exclusive German iPhone Deal British telecommunications operator Vodafone wants a court to decide whether Deutsche Telekom can have exclusive rights to German distribution of the iPhone mobile telephone, a press report said Tuesday. "It is not right that our clients can only get an iPhone by signing a long-term contract with Telekom," the head of Vodafone in Germany, Friedrich Joussen, told the mass circulation daily Bild Zeitung. T-Mobile, the mobile subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, acquired exclusive German distribution rights for Apple's multi-media iPhone, which has caused a stir as it is introduced worldwide. "We want a rapid judicial clarification to know if the iPhone should be available to all or only to some," Joussen said. (Source: http://news.yahoo.com ) *Web Guru Berners-Lee Warns Against 'Walled Gardens' for the Mobile Internet There may be all kinds of technology issues, business plan problems and potential failures to address before the mobile Internet becomes a success. But for Tim Berners-Lee there's really only one issue. On the opening day of Mobile Internet World in Boston, the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web told a packed hall that the mobile Internet needs to be fully and completely the Internet, nothing more and nothing less. It needs to be free of central control, universal, and embodied in open standards. "The Web is an open platform on which you build other things," he said. "That's how you get this innovation. The Web is universal: you can run it on any hardware, on any operating system, it can be used by people of different languages…It's a sandbox where people can [play and] exercise their creativity. It's very important to keep the Web universal as we merge the Internet with mobile." (Source: http://www.networkworld.com ) ________________________________________________________ Technology *AMD Launches New Graphics Cards Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday took a step toward delivering its next-generation Phenom processor, launching graphics cards that will work with the upcoming processor to provide better graphics. The next-generation Phenom quad-core processors, due out next week, are part of the "Spider" platform, which uses cards, the processor and a chipset in one platform to deliver better graphics, performance-per-watt and improved high-definition video. The Phenom launch is part of the promise AMD made when it acquired ATI last year to deliver chips that enhance graphics capabilities. After acquiring ATI for US$5.4 billion, AMD said it would work on a chip code-named "Fusion," which will integrate a GPU (graphics processing unit) and CPU on a single die. Fusion is expected to be delivered by late 2008 or early 2009. (Source: http://www.pcworld.com ) *IBM Turning Data Centers Into 'Computing Cloud' IBM Corp. said it plans to release new products next year that will allow organizations to make wider and more efficient use of the computing resources in their data centers. The idea is to make the resources available in a virtual "computing cloud" so they can be accessed wherever they are needed. That could mean on a distant server running an e-commerce application during a busy shopping season, or on a desktop in a laboratory that's trying to run a compute-intensive science application. The challenge with such computing has been the complexity in managing such a widely distributed architecture. IBM announced Thursday it will offer new products, based partly on existing open-source software, to simplify tasks like ensuring security, data privacy and reliability, and getting high rates of system utilization. IBM is calling the initiative Blue Cloud, and compared its significance to its decision several years ago to throw its weight behind Linux, which helped the open-source OS become more widely accepted by corporations. (Source: http://www.pcworld.com ) *AT&T to Sell Equipment to Monitor Workplaces AT&T plans to introduce a nationwide program today that gives owners of small- and medium-size businesses some of the same tools big security companies offer for monitoring employees, customers and operations from remote locations. Under AT&T's Remote Monitor program, a business owner could install adjustable cameras, door sensors and other gadgets at up to five different company locations across the country. Using a Java-enabled mobile device or a personal computer connected to the Internet, the owner would be able to view any of the images in real time, control room lighting and track equipment temperatures remotely. All the images are recorded on digital video, which can be viewed for up to 30 days. "It is Big Brother, but in this day and age, you need these type of tools" for theft protection, weeding out false accident claims and other risks, said Beaux Roby, owner of a chain of five Mama's Café restaurants and two banquet halls in Texas. Mr. Roby has been using the system for nine weeks as part of a pilot program. "You have fraudulent claims from customers that trip and fall and things like that," he said. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) ________________________________________________________ You Tube *Sony BMG and Yahoo Ink Online Video Deal Sony BMG Music Entertainment has inked a licensing deal with Yahoo Inc. that clears the way for people to upload files with music or video content by the record company's artists to Yahoo, the companies said Tuesday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Like similar deals, the agreement calls for Sony BMG to receive a cut of advertising revenue, Yahoo said. The deal also covers the distribution of music videos via Yahoo player applications and widgets that computer users can place on other Web sites. The agreement marks the first time Sunnyvale-based Yahoo has reached a deal with a major recording company over licensing content in user-created videos. Sony BMG, home to recording artists such as Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen and Slayer, reached a similar licensing deal with Google Inc. last year. That agreement also includes Google subsidiary YouTube. The Sony BMG-Yahoo deal reflects the popularity of computer user-created videos, which often include copyrighted content. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *YouTube Launches Site to Battle Online Bullying The first online anti-bullying channel has been launched with the help of celebrities such as Leona Lewis, Girls Aloud, Arsene Wenger and Patrick Stewart. YouTube has produced the site with charity Beatbullying, and hope children will post videos and messages online about their experiences with 'cyberbullying'. The charity is increasingly concerned about cyberbullying, which involves persecution by email, mobile phones or on social networking websites. The site also provides young people, teachers and parents with information and advice on how to tackle bullying. Emma-Jane Cross, the chief executive of Beatbullying, said: "We are very confident it will change people's lives. (Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk ) You Tube Beat Bullying http://uk.youtube.com/user/Beatbullying ________________________________________________________ Security *Apple Patches 41 Bugs in Monster Day of Fixes In one of its biggest update days in memory, Apple Inc. late Wednesday patched 41 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X, rolled out the long-anticipated (and likely last) update for Tiger, quashed 10 bugs in the Windows version of Safari and upgraded a slew of other applications. Only an update to iPhoto, one of the Apple-branded applications bundled with Macs, is relevant to users running Leopard, the new operating system introduced three weeks ago. Both Security Update 2007-008 and the update to Mac OS X 10.4.11 include the 41 fixes, 15 of which could be considered critical by virtue of Apple's designating them capable of "arbitrary code execution," its terminology for an attack that could result in a compromised Mac. The more than two dozen remaining patches fixed flaws that could crash the system or applications, poison the Mac's DNS cache, allow malicious Web sites to conduct drive-by downloads, or let hackers steal information or look at files on the hard drive. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *Virus Infections Reflect Sloppy Manufacturing Seagate is warning customers of its external hard drives that their bare drive may not be so bare after all -- it might have a Trojan hidden on it. The infection is relatively harmless, unless you play "World of Warcraft," and still very rare. Only 1,800 machines were infected. But it does raise the issue of problems in the manufacturing process. The issue involves Maxtor Basics Personal Storage 3200. Seagate bought Maxtor in 2005 for $1.9 billion. Somehow, a virus called Win32.AutoRun.ah, a molar virus that searches for passwords to online games, got on the drives. All but one of the games affected are Chinese. The one non-Chinese game is "World of Warcraft," an online game from an American firm, Blizzard Entertainment. After grabbing the login and password info of a game, the info is sent to servers based in Korea and the U.S., not China as previously believed. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) ________________________________________________________ Legal *Lawsuit Accuses Comcast of Blocking File-Sharing Apps A lawsuit filed in Alameda County, Calif., Superior Court alleges that Comcast Corp. intentionally interferes with Internet file sharing and blocks or slows some applications to a "mere crawl." The 22-page complaint, filed in Superior Court on Tuesday on behalf of Comcast subscriber Jon Hart of the San Francisco Bay Area, said that Philadelphia-based Comcast has a practice of "severely limiting" the transmission speed of peer-to-peer file sharing and Lotus Notes e-mail. It calls the practice unlawful and fraudulent. The complaint also said that Comcast's advertising, which claims its high-speed Internet service is "lightning fast" and "mind-blowing," is false and violates the California Consumers Legal Remedies Act. Hart is represented by attorney Mark Todzo and other attorneys at San Francisco-based Lexington Law Group LLP who have requested class-action status for the lawsuit on behalf of other affected Comcast customers. (Source: http://www.computerworld.com ) *Judge Orders White House to Hold E-mails A federal judge Monday ordered the White House to preserve copies of all its e-mails, a move that Bush administration lawyers had argued strongly against. U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy directed the Executive Office of the President to safeguard the material in response to two lawsuits that seek to determine whether the White House has destroyed e-mails in violation of federal law. The White House is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits brought by two private groups - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government and the National Security Archive. The organizations allege the disappearance of 5 million White House e-mails. The court order issued by Kennedy, an appointee of President Clinton, is directed at maintaining backup tapes which contain copies of White House e-mails. The Federal Records Act details strict standards prohibiting the destruction of government documents including electronic messages, unless first approved by the archivist of the United States. (Source: http://news.yahoo.com ) *New Bill would Punish Colleges, Students Who Don't Become Copyright Cops A massive education bill introduced into Congress contains a provision that would force colleges and universities to offer "technology-based deterrents" to file-sharing under the pain of losing all federal financial aid. Section 494 of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 is entitled "Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention" that could have just as easily been called "Motion Picture and Recording Industry Subsidies," as it could force schools into signing up for subscription-based services like Napster and Rhapsody. Under the terms of the act, which is cosponsored by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) and Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), schools will have to inform students of their official policies about copyright infringement during the financial aid application and disbursement process. In addition, students will be warned about the possible civil and criminal penalties for file-sharing as well as the steps the schools take to prevent and detect illicit P2P traffic. (Source: http://arstechnica.com ) *Police Arrest Teenager Over Virtual Theft Police in the Netherlands have arrested a teenager suspected of stealing virtual objects inside a popular social networking site, it has emerged. The 17-year-old, who has not been named, is alleged to have tricked players of 3D cartoon world Habbo Hotel before removing a number of virtual items they had bought. It is believed to be the first time European officers have arrested someone for stealing virtual property. "The accused lured victims into handing over their Habbo passwords by creating fake Habbo websites," said a spokesman for Sulake, the Finnish company that runs Habbo. "As in many other virtual worlds, scamming for other people's personal information such as user names has been problematic for quite a while." The website, which has around 6 million users each month, is popular among teenagers and younger web surfers around the world. Users of the site are able to create and dress characters, or decorate their virtual hotel rooms with items and furniture bought using real money. (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk ) ________________________________________________________ Gadget of the Week *Amazon Kindle Finds a New Use for 3G Amazon.com isn't the first company to sell an electronic book reader with an easy-on-the-eyes E-Ink display, but its method for delivering those books may have opened up a whole new use for mobile data networks. Users of the Kindle, introduced Monday for a list price of US$399, can select and buy books with the device and download them in less than one minute, according to the company. They can also buy the day's newspaper on the spot or subscribe to daily newspapers, magazines and blogs for a monthly fee. Newspapers are delivered overnight and blogs several times a day. To deliver all this data, Amazon is using Sprint Nextel's 3G (third-generation) cellular network. But Kindle owners will never see a bill for that service, because the cost will be included in the price of the content. It's a rare move that might be repeated as content providers and mobile operators look for successful formulas for making money off high-speed data networks. (Source: http://www.pcworld.com ) Amazon Kindle vs. Sony Reader http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4232344.html?nav=RSS20 _______________________________________________________ Tech Terms typosquatting Consumers have a 1 in 14 chance of landing on a "squatted" site if they mis-type a web address. Typo-squatters use common misspellings of popular brands, products and people to register domains. Consumers are redirected to alternative sites, which generate click-through advertising revenues and ensnare users in scams. _________________________________________________________ On the Web The search giant's mobile offensive, like the iPhone, may force new cracks in the way the wireless industry operates. "Getting Inside Google's gPhone" http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2007/tc2007095_107344.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily Teenagers are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to? "The Death of E-Mail" http://www.slate.com/id/2177969/ I Want My iTV . But I won't be getting it soon. While the technology is mostly in place, the players-from cable companies to film studios-can't agree on how to make it happen. "I Want My iTV" http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_47/b4059401.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily _________________________________________________________ Wired Index November 20, 2007 $20.96 Last Week -0.54 Year to Date +16.57% Guinness Atkinson Global Innovators Fund (IWIRX) tracks the share prices of 40 public companies, selected by the editors of Wired magazine to represent the forces driving the new economy. For more information about the fund including past performance, see the link below: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=iwirx ___________________________________________________________ ***Apeluri umanitare George Cuzuc: website http://www.cuzuc.netfirms.com/index.htm Emilia Baba-Paun: website http://www.help-ema.puls-il.ro ------------------------------------------------------------- **[RomaniaUSA] "Romani. Pur si Simplu" ------------------------------------------------------------- http://egroups.yahoo.com/group/romaniausa Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romaniausa/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/romaniausa/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! 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