Yahoo’s Board REJECTS Microsoft takeover Offer!
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Yahoo Inc.’s board plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s bid to buy the Internet pioneer, The Wall Street Jornal reported on its Web site Saturday.
Board members concluded the unsolicited $44.6 billion offer massively undervalues the Web pioneer, a person familiar with the situation told the newspaper.
The bid was made public Feb. 1.
by breitbart
Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (?22.4bn) in cash and shares.
The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday.
Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company.
It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.
In a conference call, Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson said that the combination of the two companies would create an entity that could better compete with Google.
“Today the market [for online search and advertising] is increasingly dominated by one player,” he said.
Chairman quit
Yahoo confirmed that it has received an unsolicited offer and said that its board would evaluate the proposal, “carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”
If Yahoo accepted the offer, competition authorities both in the US and the European Union would be likely to investigate the tie-up.
Yahoo chief executive, Jerry Yang, announced on Tuesday that he intended to lay off 1,000 staff as part of a restructuring plan.
Terry Semel, who stepped down as chief executive last June, also quit as non-executive chairman on Thursday.
Microsoft said that Yahoo shareholders could choose to receive either cash or shares.
Yahoo shares have fallen 46% since reaching a year-high of $34.08 in October. On Friday they closed almost 48% higher.
Microsoft closed 6.6% lower while Google shares fell 8.6%.
“Ultimately this corporate marriage was forced by the rise of Google, which has grown into a serious competitor for both Microsoft as a software company and Yahoo as an internet portal,” said Tim Weber, business editor of the BBC News website.
“It is a shotgun marriage, but the person holding the shotgun is Google.”
‘Exorbitant premium’
According to its letter to Yahoo, Microsoft attempted to enter talks about a deal a year ago, but was rebuffed because Yahoo was confident about the “potential upside” presented by the reorganisation and operational activities that were being put in place at the time.
“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” Microsoft’s letter said.
But there has been some concern about the price that Microsoft is offering.
“To me, the premium seems exorbitant, for what is a dwindling business,” said Tim Smalls from the brokerage firm Execution LLC.
“I personally don’t see how the synergies of Microsoft-Yahoo is going to take on Google.”
Other analysts were more enthusiastic about the offer.
“It is a fantastic offer. It is game on,” said Colin Gillis from Canaccord Adams.
“This consolidates the marketplace down to Google versus Microsoft. These two companies will be going head to head.”
by bbc
Pirate Bay Says It Can’t Be Sunk, Servers Scattered Worldwide
The world’s most notorious BitTorrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, won’t be going to Davy Jones’ Locker, even if its four operators are convicted of facilitating copyright infringement, one of the defendants said in an interview Friday with THREAT LEVEL.
Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, one of the four Swedes charged in Sweden on Thursday, said in a telephone interview that the site has set up a clandestine, double-blind operation with its servers spread throughout the world — and out of reach of the Swedish authorities.
“The Pirate Bay is not in Sweden,” the 29-year-old Kolmisoppi said.
Where are the servers?
“It’s a distributed system. We don’t know where the servers are. We gave them to people we trust and they don’t know it’s The Pirate Bay,” Kolmisoppi said. “They then rent locations and space for them somewhere else. It could be three countries. It could be six countries. We don’t want to know because then you’ll have a problem shutting them down.”
The Pirate Bay allows users to search for and access indexed torrents, which contain the information needed to download data containing copyright-infringing content like movies, music, software and other material from users of the service. The Bay, he said, operates like the search engine Google, which also points the way to copyrighted works on the internet.
“We’re just a general-purpose search engine and torrent-tracking system. You can put whatever you want on the Pirate Bay,” Kolmisoppi said. “We don’t participate in how the people communicate with each other. We only participate in bringing the possibility to communicate and share files.”
The Bay has been on the entertainment industry’s and police authorities’ watchlists for years.
In June, 2006, a police raid shuttered it for three days after the authorities confiscated its servers, which were later moved. The raid sparked street protests in Sweden, and garnered the site an international presence after the mainstream media began reporting on it.
The four charged in Stockholm are Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstroem and Kolmisoppi. According to charges lodged in Stockholm, the four are accused of “promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws.”
“I think they’re lame,” he said of the charges.
Prosecutor Hakan Roswall was not immediately available for comment.
None of the defendants, Kolmisoppi said, have prior convictions, meaning even if they are convicted, they won’t likely be jailed for the two years the charges potentially carry.
“As a worse-case scenario for us, we get a fine,” Kolmisoppi said. “They can say we have to shut down the site, don’t host it in Sweden. But they can’t say it won’t be accessible in Sweden or anywhere. They can’t do anything about it, no matter what happens.”
He also disputes that the company is generating millions in profit, as the authorities allege.
“It’s so stupid to say we’re making a profit,” he said “We’re spending hours and hours of our own time to do this. If we were making millions, we wouldn’t have day jobs. And even if we did make millions, it would not change the fact that this is not illegal.”
Kolmissoppi said his day job is “developing a micro payment system.”
No court date has been set.
by wired
Reference: The Pirate Bay (often abbreviated TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” and also serves as an index for .torrent files that it tracks. ThePirateBay.org is ranked 154 (as of January 20, 2008) in the Alexa ranking list and ranked 258 (as of February 1, 2008) by Quantcast.
The Pirate Bay was started by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyr?n (’The Pirate Bureau’) in early 2004, but since October 2004 it has been a separate organization. The site is currently run by Gottfrid Svartholm (”anakata”), Fredrik Neij (”TiAMO”) and Peter Sunde (”brokep”).
On May 31, 2006, the site’s servers, located in Stockholm, were raided by Swedish police, causing it to be offline for three days. Later it came online with new hosting in the Netherlands – The Pirate Bay has since taken measures to ensure a restoration time of hours rather than days. On June 14, 2006 the Swedish newspaper SvD reported that The Pirate Bay was back in Sweden due to “pressure from the Department of Justice [in the Netherlands].” Upon reopening, the site’s number of visitors doubled, the increased popularity attributed to greater exposure through the recent media coverage. This has in turn increased the advertising revenues to the founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. According to speculations by Swedish newspaper SvD, the advertisements generated about 75,000 USD per month directly after the raid.
The raid, alleged to be politically motivated and under pressure from the MPAA, was reported as a success by the MPAA in the immediate aftermath, but with the site being restored within days and the raising of the debate in Swedish culture, The Pirate Bay and other commentators considered it “highly unsuccessful”.
Swedish prosecutors have announced that charges will be filed before the end of January 2008 against five individuals concerned.
On January 31, 2008, Swedish prosecutors filed charges against four of the individuals behind The Pirate Bay.
Torvalds: Linux ready to go green
The infrastructure and tools required to make Linux a green operating system are now in place, according to Linus Torvalds, who was in Melbourne this week attending Australia’s largest Linux conference.
In an interview at the linux.conf.au conference, Torvalds admitted that Linux was lagging behind on power-management and energy-diagnosis tools.
“It is an area we were pretty weak in a few years ago and just building up the infrastructure took a long time, but now we are at a point where we have most of it done,” said Torvalds.
“That doesn’t mean we are done. Now we have an infrastructure in place… we have the tools to measure power and notice when the power is higher and why that is, which is pretty important. Before, it used to be a black box,” said Torvalds.
Linux safe with or without Linus
Speaking about the future of Linux, Torvalds said he is pleased that there is no more pressure on the kernel due to its stability and the community of people helping to keep it maintained.
“We are still working on a lot of stuff, especially with new hardware. But I think, on the whole, a lot of the basics are there. What we work on is better maintainability, improving code so we can add features more easily,” Torvalds said.
When asked about retirement, Torvalds said he has no intention to move on and, even if he did, users would be “unlikely to notice”, as the operating system has such a strong support community.
“The question comes up but it is not something I really worry about. There are other people who could take over what I do. I would like to think that they would be worse at it, but it is not like [Linux] would go away or be in trouble,” said Torvalds.
Celebrating the death of DRM music
Torvalds also revealed he is glad to see the apparent demise of music protected by digital rights management (DRM). In an interview last year, Torvalds said he believed DRM was a “lot of hot air”, a comment that he said has now been proved right.
“I think I have been vindicated somewhat. DRM is so anti-consumer that I don’t see it really ever taking off,” said Torvalds.
Torvalds’ comments come just weeks after Sony BMG said it will begin selling music without any copy protection. EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal have also already begun dropping DRM in the US.
by zdnet
Reference: Linux is a a family of Unix-like computer operating systems that are based on the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel is implemented in so called Linux distributions that can be used on a personal computer or on a server. Examples of such distributions are Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS.
Linux is one of the most prominent examples of free software and open source development; typically all underlying source code can be freely modified, used, and redistributed by anyone.
The name “Linux” comes from the Linux kernel, started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds. The system’s utilities and libraries usually come from the GNU operating system, started in 1983 by Richard Stallman. The GNU contribution is the reason for the alternative name GNU/Linux.
A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google. It was disclosed in court that one partner that Google had was generating as much as $3 million dollars a month from the practice and that was after Google’s revenue share. Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.
The Good news is that the Quantity of advertising will be spread among fewer domains now and so those domain owners that actually own real full domains should receive more money if bid prices start to rise as a result of this. However some advocates of Domain Tasting say that perhaps no one will be able to serve the niche for some ads and no one will make money on the unserved ads.
I think this is a return of the “Be Good” motto Google had a few years ago. Google has been quietly enabling this practice for years now. This is a smart policy move on Google’s part to ward off impending litigation that might have hit them in the coming months. Trademark lawyers have been getting crafter at taking down Kiting by suing under other laws. The new weapon of choice is not using Trademark laws but Forgery laws. The penalty for forgery is much worse and cares a much higher fine per article that is forged. Dell, Yahoo, and BMW have all filed lawsuits in the last two months that ask for millions of dollars of damage from Google partners and I think Google sees the writing on the wall, they might be named next.
The question that remains, will Yahoo follow suit and block all advertising on domains less then 5 day old as well? I have a feeling Yahoo will because Yahoo was one of the groups that is suing Domain Tasters using the Forgery law tactic. Most of the big Domain Tasters are using Google ad syndication feeds to monetize the traffic right now and the money will come knocking on Yahoo’s door now.
by Domaintools
Reference: Domain tasting is the practice of a domain name registrant using the five-day “grace period” at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated generic top-level domain to test the marketability of the domain. During this period, when a registration must be fully refunded by the domain registry, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted by the registrant on the viability of deriving income from advertisements being placed on the domain’s web site.
Domains that are deemed “successes” and retained in registrant’s portfolio often represent domains that were previously used and have since expired, misspellings of other popular sites, or generic terms that may receive type-in traffic. These domains are usually still active in search engines and other hyperlinks and therefore receive enough traffic such that advertising revenue exceeds the cost of the registration. The registrant may also derive revenue from eventual sale of the domain, at a premium, to a third party.
Domain tasting should not be confused with domain kiting, which is the process of deleting a domain name during the five-day grace period and immediately re-registering it for another five-day period. This process is repeated any number of times with the end result of having the domain registered without ever actually paying for it.
Noca Targets Transaction Fees with New Online Payment System
If you sell anything online, whether physical goods or services, you’re probably keenly aware of the 2-3% (plus $0.30) lost through transactional fees every time someone makes a purchase with their credit card. This fee rears its ugly head whether you use PayPal, Google Checkout, or Amazon Flexible Payment Service since those companies are largely just passing on the fees imposed on them by credit card companies.
Noca, a startup founded by ex-Visa employees, is attempting to virtually eliminate transaction feeds by bypassing the credit card companies altogether with its own online payment service. Since $5 billion goes towards online transaction fees every year in the United States alone, and since online vendors have particularly slim profit margins, the company thinks that the near elimination of transaction feeds would be a huge boon for online vendors. Concurrently, Noca seeks to provide consumers with a more rewarding and more secure purchasing experience, thereby making its service appealing to both actors involved in a transaction.
While Noca aims to eventually facilitate online payments for purchases of all sizes, it begins with a focus on micro-payments, and on micro-payments made through Facebook in particular. It has launched two Facebook applications to test its payments system out: OneClick Pay and HelpYourWorld.
The former provides a simple way to send money to friends. As you can see in the screenshot to the left, the idea is to send someone a digital check; you actually enter your routing and account numbers into the application instead of using a credit card. This poses a significant obstacle to adoption (who remembers these numbers or carries around a check in their pocket?). But the company insists that using checking information rather than credit card information increases security and reduces the chances of identity theft. Plus, Noca is working to provide functionality that would allow you to enter your online banking credentials in lieu of your checking information.
The latter Facebook application, HelpYourWorld, provides a good use case for Noca’s micro-payment system. Since the application solicits $1-at-a-time donations for a series of causes, it benefits greatly from Noca’s lack of transaction fees (especially the standard fixed one of $0.30). Noca hopes that many other Facebook applications with similar micro-payment needs will use its APIs to implement its payment service.
As for the benefits to the consumer, Noca promises to provide strong and flexible incentives through cash back schemes, frequent flier miles, and the ability to designate a part of your payment to a charity of choice. The company also insists that its service will be substantially easier to use than others like PayPal, and that consumers will gain access to a much more comprehensive transaction history than they would get elsewhere.
In the longer term, Noca will become much more like a credit card company itself, providing credit to users through direct partnerships with banks. In doing so, it will be able to provide users with the same benefits of buying things on credit without charging vendors standard transaction fees, which it considers mostly oligopolistic fat. To make money, Noca will also attempt to leverage its user data to target them with tailored advertising and product deals.
by techcrunch
Reference: Noca is building a new online payment system to provide significantly reduced transaction processing rates for online shopping enabling efficient processing of micro-transactions for digital goods. Current payment systems have high fixed as well as variable costs and do not scale for online transactions. Noca’s system offers merchants virtually free transaction processing. In addition Noca is building a “consumer experience” and incentivization strategy which will allow consumers unprecedented choice in incentives.
The founding team is currently led by people from the financial services industry who have first hand experience about the pain merchants are suffering as a result of high processing costs for accepting credit cards online.
Music Industry Got An Injunction Against Rapidshare in 2007, Site Not Shut Down
In March 2007, a court ruled that Rapidshare could be held responsible for copyright violations committed by users who uploaded copyrighted material to their servers. Now, rumors are circulating that Rapidshare has been shutdown - this does not seem to be the case.
Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites, with a claimed data storage capability in excess of 4 petabytes and offering at least 110 gigabits of bandwidth.
Almost exactly 1 year ago, P2PBlog reported that the German rights organization GEMA had gained a preliminary injunction against Rapidshare which ordered the company to stop hosting and distributing titles which GEMA represent.
Rapidshare made an appeal - but lost. The court decided that Rapidshare should be forced to monitor all uploads which infringed on GEMA’s copyright - a feat which the company said was impossible.
At the time, GEMA boss Dr. Harald Heker said that the Court’s decision shows that it’s not down to the rights holders to police commercial outfits such as Rapidshare for their copyright works. He went on to say that he felt that the decision would send a major signal to all file-hosting sites where copyright works are used to generate revenue for themselves.
Then in April 2007 it was reported that Rapidshare was fighting back, suing GEMA in response - with the aim of clarifying the legal position for file-hosting sites.
Now, rumors circulating on the web indicate that Rapidshare was shut down. Quite a few sites reported the news but this situation does not appear to be true. Rapidshare’s Wiki page is now closed due to vandalism which is believed to have carried erroneous information which contributed to the confusion.
According to a report, a Rapidshare technician said: “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”
There is no doubt that Rapidshare stores millions of files - including lots of music. The operators of Rapidshare claim they have no idea what material they store on their servers and are in no postion (much like a regular ISP) to monitor or police the content. The users upload the content, they say, and as such, it’s out of their control.
However, the injunctions issued by the District Court in Cologne indicate that Rapidshare’s liability for such infringements still exist as they were carried out during the course of Rapidshare’s business. GEMA head, Harald Heker said at the time: “The mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator’s website(s).”
In the meantime, Rapidshare.com and Rapidshare.de continue to operate.
by Torrentfreak
RapidShare is a German owned one-click hosting pay- and free-service (with limitations) website that operates from Switzerland and is financed by the subscriptions of paying users. RapidShare has two different websites, but both sites claim to be entirely different organizations and entities. The original site is RapidShare.de, which uses the German top-level domain “.de”.
On October 19, 2006, RapidShare announced that “Unfortunately all drives of RapidShare.de are full right now”. A new website, RapidShare.com was set up in an attempt to transfer usage from RapidShare.de to RapidShare.com.[citation needed] When the new Rapidshare.com was launched, holders of “Premium” accounts at the time on RapidShare.de were able to use both the RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com, until their account expired. It is not possible, however, to use a RapidShare.com account on the German site.
Microsoft offers to buy FAST for $1.2 billion
Microsoft said Tuesday that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market.
The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made some inroads, but for the most part the market is the realm of niche players. Microsoft is about to change that with FAST. You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects.
In a statement, Microsoft said its offer is a 42 percent premium to where FAST shares trade in Norway. FAST’s board of directors has recommended that shareholders take the offer and the company’s two largest shareholders–Orkla ASA and Hermes Focus Asset Management Europe–are on board with the deal. The transaction should be completed in the second quarter.
FAST counts Comcast, Disney, Microsoft, Pfizer, UBS and others as customers. In its most recent third quarter, FAST had revenue of $35.6 million, up 4 percent from the second quarter. Third quarter recurring revenue was up 65 percent from a year ago. Fiscal 2006 revenue topped $162 million, according to FAST’s annual report. The company is profitable and had $137.9 million in cash at the end of its third quarter.
Microsoft is likely to raise a ruckus in enterprise search and force consolidation among FAST’s rivals. Microsoft can bundle FAST with its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and probably poach some features for its consumer search if warranted. And Microsoft will gladly take FAST’s search engineering talent. I did an overview of enterprise search last year and highlighted how long it takes to deploy. In a nutshell, enterprise search is more complicated than slapping in a search appliance because you have unstructured data.
by ZDNet
Microsoft Buys Search Engine FAST, Won’t Fix Microsoft Live
FAST is a profitable enterprise search company based in Norway with about $400 million in revenue ($333 million in 2006). Microsoft offered $1.2 billion for the company, approximately 42% more than the share price.
The acquisition plays to Microsoft’s core strength–the enterprise–and therefore makes sense. However, it will not directly help improve Microsoft’s position in consumer search. FAST does provide OEM search to LookSmart and others, but Microsoft’s problem in consumer search is not technology–it is habit and brand. So even if FAST’s technology represents a major improvement, this will not likely result in search-share gains.
by AlleyInsider
Microsoft acquires corporate search engine firm
Microsoft Corp. is spending $1.2-billion (U.S.) to take over a key player in an expanding search engine niche: helping companies sort out and retrieve internal corporate data.
The software giant has agreed to buy Norway-based Fast Search and Transfer ASA, a company that specializes in “enterprise search” software that helps workers in large corporations find crucial internal information.
The Fast software will complement Microsoft’s existing SharePoint products, which organize corporate data, documents and websites.
While enterprise search has a far lower profile than other retrieval software technology - such as Google’s ubiquitous Internet search engine - it is a huge and growing business.
Enterprise search “will be for workers tomorrow what Internet search is for consumers today,” Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft’s business division, told analysts on a conference call.
This software will be an “indispensable tool that will help [employees] find the information they need,” he said, citing studies that suggest as much as 70 per cent of any company’s information is inaccessible, because its locked up in some kind of corporate repository.
A company that employs 1,000 workers who deal with information can expect to waste $5-million a year in salary costs, because of unproductive time used to look for data that’s hard to find, he said.
“Today you can find football scores online in five seconds, but inside somebody’s company it can take five hours to track down last year’s business plan.”
Solving this problem is potentially lucrative, analysts say.
“There may be just as much money in the enterprise search market as there is in the Web search market,” said Ken Poore, a senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
Fast was the second-largest player in this business, after Britain’s Autonomy Corp. PLC.
Now that Microsoft has picked up Fast, Mr. Poore said, Autonomy and other players such as U.S.-based Endeca Technologies Inc. may also be in play, because companies such as IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Google Inc. are trying to expand their enterprise search businesses.
While Fast usually deals with big corporate customers, its software does sometimes come into contact with individual consumers.
That’s because Fast search engines are used to operate the websites of some major retail organizations such as AutoTrader.com, TVGuide.com or WeightWatchers.com. When consumers enter those firm’s websites to search for a car, television show or recipe, they are using Fast software to find what they are looking for.
Still, enterprise search occupies a very different niche from that of general consumer search engines such as Google.
On the consumer side, players have had a very tough time carving out specific markets for “vertical” search engines that do one thing very well, said Jeffrey Lindsay, senior Internet analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.
That’s partly because Google itself has managed to create an “all-appealing branded search that people have got used to and developed a level of comfort with,” Mr. Lindsay said.
Because Google incorporates clever vertical-market software behind the scenes, consumers don’t need to use specialty search engines, he said.
“A lot of scientists use Google to do research on really hard subjects, kids use it for their homework, and people use it socially to look up facts and figures or to find restaurants.”
Still, that hasn’t stopped developers from trying to displace Google from some markets.
Wikia Inc. for example, recently launched a new search engine called Wikia Search, which is supposed to use social networking tools to rank results in a more usable way.
by TheGlobeAndMail
Napster goes back to MP3s
Napster, the brand that dragged the entire world kicking and screaming into the digital music revolution and then became a casualty of RIAA litigation, will soon be returning to its roots in the DRM-free music world. The P2P-turned-legit subscription service announced this morning that it will begin selling unprotected copies of its entire catalog in MP3 format beginning in the second quarter of 2008. Users of the service will be able to buy individual DRM-free tracks and albums, but Napster’s subscription service will remain unchanged. The company hailed the announcement as the first subscription service “featuring major label content” to announce plans to sell unprotected MP3s.
Of course, since the conversion won’t be happening for another few months, the company was very short on details. This morning’s statement revealed only that users of Napster’s online service and its mobile subscription service, Napster and Napster To Go, would be able to buy the MP3 files and use them on any number of devices that support the ubiquitous format. The announcement didn’t mention pricing, although it’s not unreasonable to expect that it will be similar to current track pricing.
Another big omission in the announcement was a list of which major labels will offer DRM-free tracks via Napster. EMI, Universal, and Warner Music Group have already begun selling DRM-free music through other outlets, and Sony BMG is rumored to be joining the party very soon. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve all signed on with Napster yet, and Napster CEO Chris Gorog admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the company is still finalizing agreements with “at least some” of the four.
Speaking of Sony BMG, the music label confirmed today that it is, indeed, planning to dip its toes into DRM-free waters, albeit via carefully-controlled experimentation. The label told USA Today that it will begin selling gift cards in select brick-and-mortar stores on January 15 for $12.99 that will be redeemable at its planned online music store, MusicPass. Through the “Platinum MusicPass” part of the service customers will be able to select from 37 albums available without DRM. Sony’s move isn’t exactly the nail in the coffin for DRM just yet (especially since users will have to go to a B&M store first before going back home to get the DRM-free content, which seems oddly backwards), but it’s only a matter of time before Sony BMG drops its experiment and joins the rest of the Big Four in a more straightforward way.
As for Napster, the move to DRM-free sales is the latest in a long line of attempts to gain a larger share of the digital music market, after trying a number of other initiatives. The service has remained one of the most popular when it comes to online music subscriptions, but is still battling against larger stores—namely, the market-leading iTunes Store. From that perspective, it comes as no surprise that going DRM-free has been popular among music retailers—iTunes still only offers DRM-free tracks from EMI artists and some independent labels. A different and wider mix of DRM-free artists could give an edge to an iTunes alternative, and that’s what Napster is going for.
“The ubiquity and cross-platform compatibility of MP3s should create a more level playing field for music services and hardware providers and result in greater ease of use and broader adoption of digital music,” Gorog said in a statement. Translation: Down with Apple!
by Arstechnica
Reference: Napster was a file sharing service that paved the way for decentralized P2P file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, iMesh, Morpheus, and BearShare, which are now used for many of the same reasons and can download music, pictures, and other files. The popularity and repercussions of the first Napster have made it a legendary icon in the computer and entertainment fields.
Napster’s brand and logo continue to be used by a pay service, having been acquired by Roxio.
KDE 4.0 to be Released in January
The KDE Release Team has decided to release KDE 4.0 this coming January. The release was originally planned for mid-December. The KDE developers want to solve a couple of essential issues before releasing. Having solved some of those issues, among which were glitches in the visual appearance, and in Konqueror, the KDE community hopes to have a KDE 4.0 that will live up to the high expectations for it. Read on for more details.
Meanwhile, the progress towards KDE 4.0 is astonishing. Most parts, such as the KDE Development Platform and a lot of applications are considered stable and well-usable.
Some parts of the desktop experience do not yet meet the KDE community’s quality standards and expectations for a stable release. There are also some issues which need to be addressed upstream, for example a bug in certain codecs of xine that cut off audio fragments prematurely. The developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE 4.0 desktop in January. The changed plans involve releasing on January 11th, 2008.
At the same time, the release team’s call for participation is repeated. To make KDE 4.0 a success, your effort is needed. An overview of current showstoppers can be found on Techbase, KDE’s knowledge platform.
This is also a call to the wider Free Software community, and also to companies working with KDE. If you have the resources to contribute, assistance in fixing the remaining bugs is most welcome.
KDE Reference: KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free software project which aims to be a powerful system for an easy-to-use desktop environment. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system. In this regard the KDE project serves as an umbrella project for many standalone applications and smaller projects that are based on KDE technology, such as KOffice, KDevelop, Amarok, K3b and many more.
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the Eberhard Karls University of T?bingen. At the time, he was troubled by certain aspects of the UNIX desktop. Among his qualms were that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use; one of his complaints with desktop applications of the time was that his girlfriend could not use them. His initial Usenet post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born. The name KDE was intended as a word play on the existing Common Desktop Environment, available for Unix systems. CDE was an X11-based user environment jointly developed by HP, IBM, and Sun, through the X/Open Company, with an interface and productivity tools based on the Motif graphical widget toolkit. It was supposed to be an intuitively easy-to-use desktop computer environment. The K was originally suggested to stand for “Kool”, but it was quickly decided that the K should stand for nothing in particular. Additionally, one of the tips in certain versions of KDE 3 incorrectly states that the K currently is just meant to be the letter before L in the Latin alphabet, the first letter in the word Linux (which is where KDE is usually run).
Matthias chose to use the Qt toolkit for the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, large and complex applications were being released. At the time, Qt did not use a free software license and members of the GNU project became concerned about the use of such a toolkit for building a free software desktop and applications. Notably, KDE was removed from Debian because the project interpreted the GPL as not allowing KDE to be linked to Qt. Two projects were started: “Harmony”, to create a Free replacement for the Qt libraries, and the GNOME project to create a new desktop without Qt and built entirely on top of free software.
In November 1998, the Qt toolkit was licensed under the free/open source Q Public License (QPL). This same year the KDE Free Qt foundation was created which guarantees that Qt would fall under a variant of the very liberal BSD license should Trolltech cease to exist or no free/open source version of Qt be released during 12 months. But debate continued about compatibility with the GNU General Public License (GPL). In September 2000, Trolltech made the Unix version of the Qt libraries available under the GPL, in addition to the QPL, which has eliminated the concerns of the Free Software Foundation. Starting with the release of Qt 4.0, it is available as free software for the Unix, Mac and Windows platforms, indicating that the next major version of KDE applications and libraries will have native support on these platforms.
Both KDE and GNOME now participate in freedesktop.org, an effort to standardize Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some competition between them.
Comcast Corporation , the nation’s leading provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services, and Microsoft Corp. , the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions, have launched a new Internet-based communications product for small and medium- sized businesses (SMBs), giving SMBs access to services that have traditionally only been available to larger companies with IT staffs. Comcast’s SMB customers will be the first in the country to receive Microsoft Communication Services from Comcast, which will provide them with corporate- class e-mail, calendaring and document sharing. This product is Internet- based, so SMBs do not need additional server capacity and is backed by 24×7 Business Class customer support from Comcast, which will serve as an SMB’s “help desk.”
Comcast is the only major U.S. Internet service provider to make this product available at no additional cost with its broadband services. Microsoft Communication Services lets small-business owners focus on running their businesses rather than worrying about IT issues by:
- Enabling SMB teams to share documents and access calendars, track
tasks, and use e-mail efficiently and effectively through corporate-
class productivity and collaboration solutions based on Microsoft
Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Removing barriers of up-front costs, help desk support and ongoing
system maintenance, which often prevent SMBs from experiencing the
benefits of corporate-grade IT services
- Extending the boundaries of the “office” to anywhere there’s Internet
access
- Improving communication by letting SMBs extend access to these
collaboration tools, such as document sharing, to important business
partners or suppliers
- Providing full integration with Comcast’s network and around-the-clock
support
Microsoft Communication Services is the first major product to be launched in conjunction with Comcast’s introduction of high-speed Internet, phone and video services for small businesses across the country. Comcast is providing SMBs with the first real alternative to the local phone company for these services.
“Working with Microsoft to enhance our Comcast Business Class Internet demonstrates our commitment to bringing simple, time-saving tools to small businesses,” said Bill Stemper, president of Comcast Business Services. “Many of our small-business customers use stand-alone Microsoft products on their own PCs, which benefits individual employees. Now, as part of their Comcast high-speed Internet service, they can quickly schedule meetings, share a common address book, or easily share or review important documents, which benefits the entire business.”
Added Michael O’Hara, general manager for the Communications Sector at Microsoft, “The alliance announced today is particularly exciting because it serves to deliver new levels of productivity and flexibility to small and medium-sized businesses across the U.S. We can now offer SMBs the business- building communication and collaboration tools they need, and Comcast is helping remove the traditional barriers that have kept SMBs from adopting these tools in a meaningful way.”
“Small businesses present a significant opportunity for service providers offering integrated service packages. Despite advances in network infrastructure over the past decade that have improved reliability and decreased costs, businesses that don’t have an extensive IT capability lack many of the tools utilized by corporate-class establishments,” said Matt Davis, director of Consumer & Business Multiplay Services at IDC. “Service provider offerings that provide compelling applications along with affordable pricing as part of a bundled broadband and voice solution are well positioned to garner share in the marketplace.”
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
About Comcast
Comcast Corporation (http://www.comcast.com) is the nation’s leading provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services. With 24.2 million cable customers, 12.9 million high-speed Internet customers, and 4.1 million voice customers, Comcast is principally involved in the development, management and operation of broadband cable systems and in the delivery of programming content.
Comcast’s content networks and investments include E! Entertainment Television, Style Network, The Golf Channel, VERSUS, G4, AZN Television, PBS KIDS Sprout, TV One, Comcast SportsNet and Comcast Interactive Media, which develops and operates Comcast’s Internet business. Comcast also has a majority ownership in Comcast-Spectacor, whose major holdings include the Philadelphia Flyers NHL hockey team, the Philadelphia 76ers NBA basketball team and two large multipurpose arenas in Philadelphia.
Comcast
Comcast was founded in 1963 by Ralph J. Roberts, Daniel Aaron, and Julian A. Brodsky based on a recommendation from Warren “Pete” Musser, of Harrisburg, who brought the deal to Ralph Roberts to buy his first cable system in Tupelo, Mississippi. The company was incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1969, under the name Comcast Corporation from American Cable Systems, though a former insider says that “Comcast” is a derivation of the name “Communications and Broadcasting”. Moving into the area of programming content, Comcast became majority owner of Comcast-Spectacor, Comcast SportsNet (in Chicago, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington DC/Baltimore, MD, metro Sacramento, Detroit, and Houston ), E! Entertainment Television, Style Network, G4, The Golf Channel and Versus (formerly known as Outdoor Life Network) over a period of years. In 2006, Comcast started a new sports channel in cooperation with Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, SportsNet New York in the greater New York City region.
Comcast also has a variety network known as CN8, or the Comcast Network, available exclusively to Comcast and Cablevision subscribers. The channel shows news, sports, and entertainment and places emphasis in Philadelphia, New England, and the Baltimore/Washington, D.C. areas, though the channel is also available in New York, Pittsburgh, and Richmond. In August 2004, Comcast started a channel called CET (Comcast Entertainment Television). It is only available to Colorado Comcast subscribers. It focuses on Life in Colorado. It also carries some NHL & NBA Games when Altitude Sports & Entertainment is carrying the NBA or NHL. In January 2006, CET became the primary channel for Colorado’s Emergency Alert System in the Denver Metro Area.
The UK division was sold to NTL in 1998. After the sale of their cellular division to SBC Communications of San Antonio and the acquisition of Greater Philadelphia Cablevision in 1999, Comcast and MediaOne announced a $60 billion merger which did not occur until three years later (as AT&T Broadband).
In 2002, Comcast paid the University of Maryland $25 million for naming rights to the new basketball arena built on the College Park campus, named Comcast Center.
On January 3, 2005, Comcast announced that it would become the anchor tenant in a new skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, to be named the Comcast Center, not to be confused with the Maryland arena mentioned above. The 975 ft skyscraper, while still under construction, has topped off and is officially the tallest building in Pennsylvania.
In December 2005, Comcast announced the creation of Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a new division focused on online media.
Presently, Comcast serves a total of 24.1 million cable customers, 14.1 million digital cable customers, 12.4 million high-speed internet customers, and 3.5 million voice customers. The company employs over 90,000 people. Comcast is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and also has corporate offices in Houston, Detroit, and Denver.
