---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: inttk2004 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Jan 9, 2008 1:55 PM
_______________________________________________________ INTERNET THINK TANK FLASH NEWS January 9, 2008 _______________________________________________________ About Us Internet Think Tank is an Internet technology and research firm specializing in enterprise web applications and web services. Internet Think Tank develops and promotes technology that enhances how people use the Internet in new and exciting ways. To learn more about Internet Think Tank, visit our web site at http://www.inttk.com _______________________________________________________ Business *EU Seeks Single Market for Online Services The European Commission will make proposals by mid-2008 aimed at creating a single European market in the burgeoning sector of online music, films and games, it said on Thursday. A major objective will be to tackle illegal downloads, which the Commission said were discouraging many content providers from making their products available on the Internet. "Europe's content sector is suffering under its regulatory fragmentation, under its lack of clear, consumer-friendly rules for accessing copyright-protected online content and serious disagreements between stakeholders about fundamental issues such as levies and private copying," EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.A spokesman said Reding did not ultimately exclude legislation in the area but that was not the aim of the present move, which would start with a non-binding recommendation. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *Intel Leaves the OLPC after Dispute Well, that was short: Intel has announced it is leaving the One Laptop Per Child project. The news, first reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal in an e-mail alert, comes just six months after Intel and OLPC founder Nick Negroponte agreed to settle their differences and join forces, united in their goal to bring computing power to emerging nations. The breakup comes after Negroponte apparently wasn't willing to share Intel with others. According to Intel, Negroponte asked the chipmaker to stop selling its Classmate PC while it was part of the OLPC, which is currently shipping its XO laptop based on a chip from AMD. The Classmate PC was one of the sources of friction between Negroponte and Intel before they joined forces in July. Negroponte went on 60 Minutes in May and accused Intel of dumping Classmate PCs below cost in order to keep OLPCs out of the hands of needy children. Intel and OLPC were working on an Intel-based version of the XO laptop, according to Agnes Kwan, an Intel spokeswoman, but the OLPC insisted that Intel end its production of the Classmate PC. (Source: http://www.news.com ) *Hey, Wanna Buy a Subscription? Beginning in early March, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) will have a new option for licensing Microsoft software through resellers - via subscription. Dubbed the Open Value Subscription, the plan will enable SMBs to license the software they use on a "lease-like" basis, according to a posting New Years' Day on the Microsoft Small Business Community Blog. However, as the post points out, it is not a lease, although it has some of the financial benefits of one. "This option provides the up-front cost-saving benefits of a lease-type model … where they can pay to use the software for a set period of time with the flexibility to increase or decrease in size as their business size does year over year," said the post by Eric Ligman, Microsoft's U.S. senior manager for small business community engagement. "At the end of the initial term, clients have the options to continue the subscription, buy out the subscription to own the licenses, or to end the subscription," he added. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) *Frontline, Silicon Valley's Wireless Startup, Folds Frontline Wireless, the startup backed by an elite group of Silicon Valley investors, has closed for business, according to a statement from Mary Greczyn, a spokesman. Last month, the company had an initial application with the Federal Communications Commission to bid on a nationwide block of spectrum in the upcoming auctions. The closure was first reported by RCR Wireless News. Bidders were required to make upfront payments to the F.C.C. by Jan. 4 to be able to proceed with the bidding. The block of frequencies that Frontline had expressed interest in required a payment of $128 million. Ms. Greczyn declined to say whether Frontline paid the deposit. Last fall, Frontline complained that the Commission was setting the minimum bids too high for the spectrum. A person who was involved in the company said that Frontline tried in recent weeks to raise the money for the bid but couldn't. "It was a funding issue," the person said. He spoke on the condition that he not be identified because of Commission rules meant to limit collusion among bidders in the auction. (Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com ) _______________________________________________________ Portals *Wikia Search Launches Wikia Search launched live Monday in its first publicly accessible form. The search engine, backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is an open source search tool that allows collaboration. Wikipedia and Wikia operate independently and are unrelated except for Wales' involvement in each. Wales announced plans for the project last year and said he wanted to provide an open alternative to Google Wikia Search uses a social networking model, allowing users to create profiles, select friends, share photos, and manage privacy preferences in addition to providing traditional search capabilities. Users can click on an option to start or participate in discussions about search rankings and write mini-articles about search terms. "Today marks a significant, albeit initial step in our project to build a search engine," Wales, co-founder and chairman of Wikia, said in an announcement. "For the better part of the past year we've been working in the background to get to the stage we're at today -- an open-to-everyone alpha. We expect Wikia Search to be like fine wine in that it will get better and better as time goes by and more and more people contribute. I've said before that Internet search must be more open and transparent and today marks a major milestone in our mission to make it just that." (Source: http://www.informationweek.com ) Wikia Search http://alpha.search.wikia.com/ *'Social Search Engine' Claims Better Results The creators of Wikipedia promised to shake up the search industry with it's open source search engine project. But upstart EarthFrisk.org thinks it's gone one better with today's launch of what it calls the first "Meta-Social-Hybrid Search Engine." Rather than compete directly with search giants like Google and Yahoo, EarthFrisk leverages those results and adds a community rating system for which it's applied for a patent. EarthFrisk delivers what it says are the best search results from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask and Clusty (itself a meta-search engine that combines results from different search engines) and filters out spam. In a brief test of several topics (Wii, Hybrid Cars, John Edwards), EarthFrisk gave a consistently clean set of relevant results. Users can rate the results, which are then assigned a color value (called a CV rating) like a traffic light, green considered the top rating. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) EarthFrisk http://www.earthfrisk.org/index.php *3-D Web Browsing Gets More 'Reel' An innovative add-on for Web surfers is now available for free download. SpaceTime 1.0, which adds a 3-D view to multiple Web and search pages, officially launched this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The idea is that the stacked pages are easier to pick and choose from versus tabbing through separate pages or multiple browsers. For searches, SpaceTime simultaneously loads 10 results at a time, each in its own page or window. Users can flip through the results, re-arrange the pages or manipulate them as desired. Similarly, commerce sites like eBay and Amazon; RSS feeds, Flickr, YouTube and others can be accessed from the SpaceTime interface as a stack of separate pages. For example, YouTube fans can have SpaceTime show the most popular clips of the day shown as stacks as if they were on a reel. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) SpaceTime 1.0 http://www.spacetime.com/ _______________________________________________________ Internet *Weave Is A Exciting New Firefox Add On Mozilla's new project called Weave is an exciting new add-on to Mozilla's popular browser Firefox. While in its infancy, the service plans to be a way for users to save and access their personal browsing information across multiple machines. It's a little bit like Google's Web history, del.icio.us, and a Web password saver all wrapped up into one. Some use cases for Weave (as listed by Mozilla) include: accessing your history and bookmarks from your home version of Firefox on your mobile Firefox browser, shared/collaborative bookmarking, and personalization tools to let you log in and sync up your home bookmarks, plug-ins and passwords on another machine; all things that are typically a pain unless you're technically proficient or know how to plan ahead. Weave version 0.1, which Mozilla's Labs team rolled out a few weeks back, lays the foundation for Web developers to add Weave integration into their services. It's limited to some very basic back-end tools for developers, although version 0.2 which is planned for "early 2008" is adding a full-blown API, and a user interface complete with settings to let you control how much of your information Weave can access. (Source: http://www.webware.com ) Weave http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/ *Mob Rule Brings Higher Quality at Gawker Nick Denton, who has shown a rather keen eye for the evolution of media in the blogging age, is now trying to rein in the fly-by blog posts at Gawker Media. Rather than paying his growing army of bloggers on a fixed rate, often $12 per post, he will now pay a salary plus a bonus based on the number of times their posts are viewed by users. (Mr. Denton made sure Valleywag, one of his sites, published his memo on the change before it was leaked elsewhere.) It would be easy to say that this is a move to pander to the whims of the masses. And indeed, Mr. Denton suggests that the switch will reduce the number of posts on topics that people find boring. But it turns out that Gawker's audience is demanding quality over quantity. Mr. Denton says he's noticed that the posts that generate the most interest are those that actually have something new to say. And these, sometimes take a little more time to report and write. (Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com ) *Australian Politicians Warned on Porn Filters Labor's plan to introduce mandatory internet filters will send Australia down a censorship path similar to China's and Singapore's, but will not stop computer-savvy children looking at banned sites, according to the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. The council's vice-president, David Bernie, said the Federal Government plan was political grandstanding. It would force users to ask internet service providers to lift a block on extremely violent and pornographic sites. "It is a gimmick," Mr Bernie said. "It's been sold to the public as protecting children from pornography but what is dangerous about these filters is that parents will think their children can't access pornography on the internet when in fact they can. "Anybody who's computer-savvy can work their way around these filters in about two minutes maximum," he said. Mr Bernie said the filters would lull parents into a false sense of security and discourage them from monitoring their children's internet activities. Only adults would be restricted by the filters, he said. (Source: http://www.smh.com.au ) ________________________________________________________ Weekly Quote "The general trend is that privacy is being extinguished in country after country. Even those countries where we expected ongoing strong privacy protection, like Germany and Canada, are sinking into the mire." --Simon Davies, director of London-based Privacy International, which released a study on the issue. Individual privacy is under threat around the world as governments continue introducing surveillance and information-gathering measures, according to an international rights group. Although privacy was improving in the former communist states of eastern Europe, it is worsening across Western Europe, the report said. Concerns about terrorism, immigration and border security were driving the spread of identity and fingerprinting systems, according to the report. Greece, Romania and Canada had the best records of 47 countries Privacy International surveyed. Malaysia, Russia and China ranked worst, but Great Britain and the United States also fell into the lowest-performing group of "endemic surveillance societies." (Source: http://www.usatoday.com ) ________________________________________________________ Wireless *Yahoo Opens Mobile Web Platform After losing some of its luster on the personal computer, embattled Internet icon Yahoo Inc. is hoping to outshine Google and other rivals on the mobile phone. In a move announced Monday, Yahoo opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications, known as "widgets," will help attract more on-the-go users, which will bring the company more money from advertising. The Sunnyvale-based company also unveiled a redesigned home page for mobile phones that includes more content and enables visitors to designate material they want highlighted. And it released an upgrade to its "Go" software that is supposed to facilitate Web surfing on mobile phones and enable Yahoo to show ads with graphics. (Source: http://news.smh.com.au ) *Ask.com Lets you Ask for Directions on Mobile Ask.com on Thursday launched a free service that lets users of Web-enabled mobile devices get directions just by speaking. With "Click to Speak" you say your location and the address of where you want to go or the closest intersection. Within a few seconds you will receive a text message with a link to directions that can be used for walking or driving. No need to type in addresses. Ask.com's Mobile Directions home page let's you say the start and end addresses to get directions. The system uses technology from Dial Directions, a provider of voice-activated location-based services. Ask.com Mobile works on any mobile Web browser and does not require a download. Carrier and data charges may apply. (Source: http://www.news.com ) Ask.com Mobile Directions http://mobile.ask.com *Apple Patent App covers Wireless Purchasing Beyond Starbucks Apple's iPhone and iPod touch could be destined for more retail tie-ins than just music at Starbucks. A new patent application from the computer maker hints that its sights could be set far beyond just wireless music purchases. The specific patent in question, which Apple first applied for back in 2006, is titled Wireless communication system. Recently uncovered by EETimes, the application describes a number of mechanisms for allowing users to wirelessly order products or services when approaching a store. The user could then enter the store and pick up waiting items, possibly skipping any lines or, at the least, cutting down on the amount of time needed to stand in a line. EETimes imagines this kind of a system in cafes and restaurants. Users could place an order and pay, say, from an iPhone while en route to a Starbucks. They could then walk straight to the bar, past the line in the store, and pick up the finished drink. Customers could receive an order confirmation via any number of methods, which could then be used for verifying the order at time of pickup and tracking the order in case something is wrong. (Source: http://arstechnica.com ) ________________________________________________________ Technology *SanDisk Flash Drive to Offer Automatic Web Storage SanDisk Corp. introduced a new flash storage drive on Wednesday that also automatically backs up data to the Internet. When consumers store documents, photos and music onto SanDisk's new Cruzer Titanium Plus USB flash drive, it will back up that digital information to a Web service offered by a start-up company called BeInSync, which stores data onto Amazon.com Inc's computers. The new storage drive, which SanDisk believes is the first of its kind, is the latest in a wave of devices that link up with the Internet to offer new features to products that were previously considered stand-alone, or offline, devices. For example, Amazon's new electronic book reader, Kindle, comes with wireless access, allowing users to directly download books, newspapers and blogs. Sony Corp's competing reader does not have a wireless connection and requires users to link to a computer to upload books onto the device. The Cruzer, which retails for $59.99 and goes on sale in March, will come with four gigabytes of storage and provide six months of free online backup, After that period, a user pays $29.99 a year to continue the online storage service. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) *IBM Jolts Storage Strategy With XIV Buy IBM's storage division started the new year off with a bang, purchasing XIV, an Israel-based company with innovative technology designed for enterprise and other high end storage. The deal actually closed Dec. 31, but IBM made the deal public today. Financial details were not disclosed; the Reuters news service quoted Israeli media sources as saying IBM paid between $300 and $350 million for XIV, which was founded in 2002. IBM said the purchase is aimed at addressing the demanding storage requirements of Web 2.0 applications and digital media. "What the XIV architecture does is scale performance with capacity," David Vaughn, IBM's worldwide marketing manager for system storage, told InternetNews.com. "When you're posting things -- video, audio and other media types -- you need to make sure that as your storage capacity grows you have predictable performance." "For example, you can't have users waiting three minutes to start a video," he said. "You have to deliver it quickly." Vaughn said XIV's Nextra architecture is relatively low-cost, since it uses off-the-shelf hardware -- Intel-based servers, standard gigabit switches and serial ATA drives. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) *Lenovo Launches Entertainment Notebooks Lenovo on Thursday officially entered the U.S. consumer notebook market with three products for people willing to spend more than the basic-notebook price in order to get better entertainment features. The notebooks fall under the new IdeaPad brand, which will be the consumer side of Lenovo's mobile PC business. The Chinese company is best known in the United States for its ThinkPad line of business notebooks. Lenovo's new laptops have five Dolby Home Theatre speakers and use facial recognition technology for security. The IdeaPad Y510, Y710, and U110 models are powered by Intel's dual-core Centrino mobile platform, use facial-recognition technology in combination with a 1.3-megapixel embedded camera for security, and have five Dolby Home Theater speakers. In addition, the notebooks have Wi-Fi support, DVD/CD recordable combo drives, touch-sensitive control surfaces, textured outer cases, and frameless screens. "They look very smooth, sleek, and clean," Craig Merrigan, VP of global consumer marketing for Lenovo, said of the screens. As the PC evolves from a business machine to an entertainment device, design has become increasingly important to consumers. In the case of notebooks, style has become an attraction for people who carry their machines with them to coffee shops or other public places. (Source: http://www.informationweek.com ) ________________________________________________________ You Tube *The Kids are Alright and Watching iFanboy 2007 was very good to Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, who parlayed Digg's fame and fortune into Revision3's on-demand Net video programming model. Over 103 million clips traveled to web browsers from Revision3 during 2007, the company announced today. Even better, the website reached the people advertisers want to find: 18-34 year old males. "Our programming delivers an unprecedented 100 percent unaided sponsor recall, and 4 out of every 10 viewers have purchased product or services from our sponsors," said Brad Murphy, VP of Advertising Sales for Revision3, said in a statement. "That's a phenomenal return on their investment." Revision3 has a following among the bleeding-edge techies out there. The popular Diggnation videos, The GigaOM Show, and Tekzilla all appear in the Revision3 lineup. They have secured deals with brand names like Sony, H-P, and Virgin America in building up the Revision3 portfolio. The company has several outlets for syndicating its work, including iTunes and YouTube. (Source: http://www.webpronews.com ) Revision 3 http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/ *Truveo Aims For A Billion Indexed Videos The video search site has 100 million videos in its index, a number they would like to increase tenfold by next year. Truveo's Tim Tuttle has a heck of a New Year's resolution to live up to in 2008. To make it, Truveo will need to tack on another zero to the end of the number of videos they have indexed currently. "2007 was an amazing year for online video in terms of available content, viewership and industry interest. 2008 looks to be even stronger," Tuttle, CEO and co-founder of Truveo and Senior VP of AOL Video, said in a statement. "As we move to the era of one billion videos, search will be critical for anyone who wants to find something to watch." The tenfold increase Tuttle wants for 2008 would follow a twentyfold rise in indexed content during 2007. Truveo started last year with five million videos in its index, and grew to 100 million. International expansion has been the key to Truveo's climb. 70 percent of its visits come from outside the United States, according to their statistics. Across all the sites Truveo backs, more than 50 million unique visitors hit Truveo each month. (Source: http://www.webpronews.com ) Truveo http://www.truveo.com/ *China To Release Online Video Policy China says it will release a policy on online video sharing and broadcasting next year, Wang Xudong, Minister of Information Industry, told local media at an annual national information conference. The policy will be the first to be jointly issued by the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT). Currently, SARFT regulates TV and online video broadcasting, while the MII regulates Internet content providers. An official from MII's regulation department said that it is difficult to decide which businesses should be regulated by SARFT and which by MII in the online video sector. He said the responsibilities of the ministries will be spelled out in the new regulations, which are still being discussed, according to Interfax China online. Mr. Wang said that companies in the online video business should first apply for certification from SARFT, and then apply for further certification from MII once the new regulations have been released. (Source: http://www.webpronews.com ) ________________________________________________________ Security *Hacker Break-ins Reach Record Levels The loss or theft of personal data such as credit card and Social Security numbers soared to unprecedented levels in 2007, and the trend isn't expected to turn around anytime soon as hackers stay a step ahead of security and laptops disappear with sensitive information. And while companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late. "More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they're responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company's security and seeing where the holes might be," said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim herself. Foley's group lists more than 79 million records reported compromised in the United States through December 18. That's a nearly fourfold increase from the nearly 20 million records reported in all of 2006. Another group, Attrition.org, estimates more than 162 million records compromised through December 21 - both in the US and overseas, unlike the other group's US -only list. Attrition reported 49 million last year. (Source: http://www.smh.com.au ) *Virtual PCs That Conjure New Security Worried about people accessing your private information whenever you use a public computer? There is a way to protect yourself: Devices as small as a keychain allow you to use any computer without leaving a trail of evidence. A new computer program known as MojoPac can turn most flash memory sticks, hard drives or iPods into "virtual" PCs that can run most programs that work on Windows XP. The devices draw on the host computer's resources -- including its electricity, Windows XP software and DVD drive. Yet they retain their independence as they move from machine to machine. This independence allows people to use public computers without a trace of their session being left behind. PCs typically store a record of activity long after the computer has been turned off. "It's a slick way to move from machine to machine," says Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group, a research firm that follows the PC industry. "It's about as safe as you can get." MojoPac is available for free on the company's Web site. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) MojoPac http://www.mojopac.com/ *Fraudsters Target Facebook With Phishing Scam Hackers for the first time are targeting the popular social networking site Facebook with a phishing scam that harvests users' login details and passwords. Some Facebook users checking their accounts Wednesday found odd postings of messages on their "wall" from one of their friends, saying: "lol i can't believe these pics got posted.... it's going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these," followed by what looks like a genuine Facebook link. But the link leads to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and passwords. Soon after, the hackers post messages containing the same URL on the public "walls" of the users' friends. The technique is a powerful phishing scam, because the link seems to be coming from a trusted friend. "A lot of phishing is moving out of financial services and going to online web sites that have not installed stronger authentication, sites that are not as close to the money," said Marc Gaffan, who heads product marketing for security firm RSA's Identity and Access Assurance Group. Thanks to the exploding popularity of social networking services -- and tightened security at financial websites -- fraudsters are targeting networking sites to make money in a number of ways, according to security experts. (Source: http://www.wired.com) ________________________________________________________ Legal *IBM Sued Over Ground, Water Contamination IBM is being sued over environmental concerns in two New York towns where the company opened some of its first factories. The suit, filed Thursday in Broome County, N.Y., contends that tons of chemicals released into the soil, air and groundwater over the years is now causing high rates of cancer, birth defects and other diseases. Six law firms, including Masry & Vititoe, made famous in the film "Erin Brockovitch," filed the lawsuit on behalf of about 90 plaintiffs in the towns of Endicott and Union. IBM was first incorporated in Endicott, N.Y, in 1911 under the name Computing Tabulating Recording. It changed its name to International Business Machines in 1924. Endicott, which is in Broome County, was the site of some very early facilities where devices like typewriters were made. The complaint alleges that due to such contamination, home and business owners in Endicott have had to be install "vapor remediation systems" to reduce the toxic compounds building up in their homes and businesses. This, they said, cuts into business and reduces land values, while increasing health risks. (Source: http://www.internetnews.com ) *US Indicts 11 Over Pump-and-Dump Stock Spam Eleven people, including one of the top spammers in the world, were indicted on Thursday for allegedly sending millions of unsolicited e-mails intended to inflate the price of Chinese penny stocks. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) called the scheme one of the largest spamming and fraud operations in the U.S. The 41-count indictment charges the defendants with conspiracy, several types of fraud, and money laundering. The indictment alleges the group sent spam via botnets, or networks of hacked computers. A three-year investigation revealed the e-mails, which implored investors to buy cheap stocks, contained fake headers and other misleading information, the DOJ said. After the price of a stock increased, the defendants sold at the artificially inflated price, a practice known as a pump-and-dump scam, according to the indictment. In mid-2005, the stock spam netted the defendants around US$3 million, the DOJ said. (Source: http://news.yahoo.com ) *Apple Antitrust Suit Alleges Monopoly Over Music, Players Apple has been sued once again for its iPod/iTunes tie-in, with the plaintiff alleging that the company has an illegal monopoly over the online music and video markets. The suit was filed earlier this week by California resident Stacie Somers, who points out numerous limitations to Apple's iTunes Store and the music purchased from it. She alleges that these limits violate the Clayton Act, Cartwright Act, California's Unfair Competition Law, and the Sherman Antitrust Act, among others. The complaint begins by saying that the iTunes Store is limited to Apple's proprietary software, "unlike most Internet sites." Apple's clear dominance in the digital music player, music, and video markets-90 percent, 83 percent, and 75 percent respectively, according to the complaint-make it clear that Apple has no interest in making its hardware or music compatible with competing technologies (most notably, Microsoft's). For example, AOL, Best Buy, FYE, MusicMatch, Napster, Yahoo! Music, and Virgin Digital all sell music in WMA format, whereas Apple "refuses" to do so, and also refuses to make its protected AAC files compatible with other players. (Source: http://arstechnica.com ) *Saudis Confirm Detention of Blogger An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for "purposes of interrogation," the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, an Interior Ministry spokesman reached by telephone, said the blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, was "being questioned about specific violations of nonsecurity laws." Mr. Farhan's blog, which discusses social issues, had become one of the most widely read in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Farhan, 32, of Jidda, was arrested Dec. 10 at his office, local news sources reported. Two weeks before his arrest, he wrote a letter to friends warning them that it was imminent. "I was told that there is an official order from a high-ranking official in the Ministry of the Interior to investigate me," read the letter, which is now posted in English and Arabic on Mr. Farhan's blog. Since his arrest, friends have continued to post entries on his Web log (www.alfarhan.org) on his behalf under a banner that reads "Free Fouad" and features his picture. (Source: http://www.nytimes.com ) ________________________________________________________ Gadget of the Week *CES Preview: Phonemakers, Carriers Take Aim at iPhone Magic When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at MacWord 2007, journalists already numbed by Michael Dell's keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas realized they'd attended the wrong conference. Apple's single note of originality not only rendered CES 2007 nearly irrelevant, it sent shockwaves through a cellular industry accustomed to rationing out innovation at a stately pace. Fortunately, the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas from Jan. 7 to 10, offers handset manufacturers and carriers a new start -- or, at least, a chance to show what they've learned in the year since Palm CEO Ed Colligan mocked Apple as "PC guys" with no hope of being able to "walk in" on his company's turf. At CES 2008, new phones sporting iPhone-like features will be in abundance. Among the challengers are Samsung's unlocked, $800 F700, and the LG Voyager, available on Verizon. Expect many other announcements of touchscreen-enabled, feature-rich models at the show itself, all seeking to steal their own echoes of the iPhone's thunder. (Source: http://www.wired.com ) Samsung Ultra Smart F700 http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/mobilephones/0,39051199,40137400p,00.htm LG Voyager - VX10000 (Verizon Wireless) http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/lg-voyager-vx10000-verizon/4505-6454_7-32640927.html _______________________________________________________ Tech Terms faceslam To ignore or deny a friendship request on Facebook or any other social networking site. While faceslamming is an effective way to keep so-called trophy friendships in check, the related practice of defriending - removing somebody from an established list of acquaintances - is the ultimate snub. _________________________________________________________ On the Web Governments worldwide are preparing for an increase in attacks on crucial services. "Cyber cold war a threat to all" http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/cyber-cold-war-a-threat-to-all/2007/12/23/1198344874193.html Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set. "Web Playgrounds of the Very Young" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/business/31virtual.html?ref=technology IBM's Atlas tool aims to help businesses visualize connections between colleagues. "Mapping Professional Networks" http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19985/?nlid=779 _________________________________________________________ Wired Index October 11, 2008 $20.28 Last Week -1.40 Year to Date -6.46% 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 ___________________________________________________________ -- Mircea Balaceanu ***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! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
