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Microsoft Sues Motorola Over Android

Microsoft Corp. launched a legal attack aimed at fighting the explosive growth of cellphones powered by Google Inc.'s Android software, as the technology giant struggles to find its own answer to the shift away from traditional computers in favor of mobile gadgets.

The software company sued Motorola Inc., one of the biggest backers of Google's software, claiming the cellphone maker is infringing nine patents in handsets powered by Android.

While Microsoft has struggled to win adoption of its Windows software for phones, Android, which Google gives away free, has been widely adopted by handset makers and software programmers.

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Microsoft plans to unveil a lineup of smartphones using the revamped version of its mobile operating system in early October. This launch is crucial for Microsoft, which has been battered by Apple's iPhone and Google's Android mobile software. Dow Jones Newswires' Roger Cheng reports.

The suit comes as Microsoft is poised to introduce its latest operating system for smartphones that can compete with Apple Inc.'s iPhone and devices running Android.

Motorola, which has stopped making phones running Microsoft's software, has bet its future on Android. The company is preparing to split itself apart, establishing an independent cellphone business.

Motorola said it hasn't received a copy of the complaint, which was filed in federal court in Seattle, but added: "The company will vigorously defend itself in this matter."

Google's mobile software is at the heart of other legal challenges. Apple has sued an Android phone maker, HTC Corp. for alleged patent infringement, while Oracle Corp. has sued Google directly. If they're successful, the lawsuits could help raise the costs for companies that use Android.

In a recent interview before it filed the Motorola lawsuit, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said there will still be a cost for using Android even if Google doesn't charge handset makers a traditional licensing fee for using it. "It's not like Android's free," he said. "You do have to license patents."

Microsoft's problems in the mobile business took a financial toll on Mr. Ballmer personally last year, according to a proxy report filed by Microsoft this week. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, Mr. Ballmer received a $670,000 cash bonus—only half of his total possible bonus.

Microsoft directors considered several factors in their decision, including the loss of market share for the company in the mobile-phone business and the failure of Kin, a Microsoft-designed phone for the youth market.

Any slowdown to Google's momentum could help Microsoft as it prepares to launch a new product next Monday called Windows Phone 7, an operating system that it has spent the last two years overhauling.

"We are disappointed that Microsoft prefers to compete over old patents rather than new products," a Google spokesman said. "While we are not a party to this lawsuit, we stand behind the Android platform and the partners who have helped us to develop it."

The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction. Microsoft also filed a complaint with International Trade Commission.

"It's clearly an aggressive posture. My gut feeling is Microsoft is losing the handheld wars and they're using their patent portfolio to get some of it back," said Mark Kesslen, a patent lawyer at Lowenstein Sandler, who isn't involved in the case.

"When you think about the marketplace, it's Apple and Android," he added. "They're using their patent portfolio to either slow down the growth or get some piece of the market share through some other means."

An early entrant in the fledgling market for smartphone software, Microsoft began to lose ground several years ago when Apple came out with the iPhone.

The Apple product dramatically raised the technical bar for smartphones with its touchscreen interface and mobile Web surfing. In comparison, Microsoft's software, called Windows Mobile at the time, seemed outdated and was difficult to use.

The stakes in the mobile business are huge for Microsoft. In comparison with the more mature PC business, smartphones are a high-growth category, one that's increasingly attracting the creative energy of software developers.

More than two years ago, Mr. Ballmer ushered in a group of new senior executives to lead the company's mobile team, which then set about rewriting the Windows Mobile operating system. The overhaul took longer than expected, which in turn led Microsoft's key handset partners, including Motorola, HTC and Samsung Electronics Co., to expand their use of Android in phones.

Microsoft's share of the world-wide smartphone market this year is expected to fall to 6.8% from 13% in 2008, while Google is forecast to jump to 16.3% from less than 1% two years ago, according to IDC.

Microsoft executives now believe they're on the verge of a turnaround in their business. Windows Phone 7 has gotten early praise from reviewers for its user interface, which relies on a grid of text and icons on a home screen. The company is relying heavily on existing assets like its Xbox games business to jumpstart its position in gaming on Windows Phones.

"The goal is to be in the game, to establish our reputation and credibility," said Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of Windows Phone Engineering. "That's not a unit-volume and revenue goal, but it's the foundation for a real business."

The financial opportunity in the mobile business for Microsoft remains unclear. While Microsoft still seeks a licensing fee for using Windows Phone, estimated to be less than $8 a handset. Google seeks to make money instead through advertising when users conduct searches and perform other activities on Android devices. Microsoft also plans to derive revenue from advertising on Windows Phones.

"If they give away something for free and they don't pay royalties, they ruin the economics of the business," Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates, said of Google. "They've been doing that in industry over industry."

Just as Apple sued HTC rather than Google, Microsoft has taken aim at Motorola because the cellphone maker derives revenue directly from selling Android-powered phones, making it easier to make a case for financial damages.

Microsoft's suit carries risks because it needs support from handset makers to be successful. But among the companies it has worked with in the past in the mobile business, Motorola is the biggest that hasn't signed on to use Windows Phone 7 in its products.

Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said there was no connection between Microsoft's decision to sue Motorola and the fact that the handset maker isn't making phones that use Windows Phone 7 software.

Earlier this year, Microsoft struck a patent licensing deal with another key partner for Windows Phone 7, HTC, that grants the Taiwanese handset maker rights to use Microsoft patents in HTC's popular Android phones.

In an interview before the Motorola suit was filed, HTC CEO Peter Chou said he believes the Microsoft still has an opportunity to become a player in mobile phone software, even after the troubles in its business.

"We went through a difficult time but this new thing is coming and we're all very excited," Mr. Chou said.

—Shayndi Raice contributed to this article.

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com

 

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Nine Inch Nails - The Hand That Feeds

 

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Google pushes WebP as new Image Format for the Web - I4U News

Good bye JPG and PNG?

Oct 1 2010, 2:33am CDT | by Luigi Lugmayr

 

Google pushes WebP as new Image Format for the Web

 

Google pushes a new image format called WebP that is supposed to make the web faster. Google is on a mission since while to make the web faster. They released tools like Page Speed to help webmasters optimize their site. Google identified that the majority of the latency on pages across the web are caused by images. Google wants to tackle this issue with the new WebP format that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Google focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, Google used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. Google ran a test on a million images from the web and achieved on average size savings of 39%. This is pretty impressive as they ran their tools on already compressed images.

The WebP tools are now available as a developer preview. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, Google is developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. So there is no hurry yet for webmasters to convert to WebP.

More details on WebP are available on Google.

 

 

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Sony Ericsson LiveView™

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Earth-Like Planet Can Sustain Life : Discovery News

A new member in a family of planets circling a red dwarf star 20 light-years away has just been found. It's called Gliese 581g, and the 'g' may very well stand for Goldilocks.

Gliese 581g is the first world discovered beyond Earth that's the right size and location for life.

"Personally, given the ubiquity and propensity of life to flourish wherever it can, I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it," Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of California Santa Cruz, told Discovery News.

The discovery caps an 11-year effort to tease out information from instruments on ground-based telescopes that measure minute variations in starlight caused by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

Planet G -- the sixth member in Gliese 581's family -- orbits right in the middle of that system's habitable region, where temperatures would be suitable for liquid water to pool on the planet's surface.

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"This is really the first 'Goldilocks' planet, the first planet that is roughly the right size and just at the right distance to have liquid water on the surface," astronomer Paul Butler, with the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., told reporters during a conference call Wednesday.

"Everything we know about life is that it absolutely requires liquid water," he added. "The planet has to be the right distance from the star so it's not too hot, not too cold...  and then it has to have surface gravity so that it can hold on to a substantial atmosphere and allow the water to pool."

With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. Plus, it has the gift of time.  Not only is its parent star especially long-lived, the planet is tidally locked to its sun -- similar to how the moon keeps the same side pointed at Earth -- so that half the world is in perpetual light and the other half in permanent darkness.  As a result, temperatures are extremely stable and diverse.

"This planet doesn't have days and nights. Wherever you are on this planet, the sun is in the same position all the time. You have very stable zones where the ecosystem stays the same temperature... basically forever," Vogt said. "If life can evolve, it's going to have billions and billions of years to adapt to the surface."

"Given the ubiquity of water, it seems probable that this thing actually has liquid water. On the surface of the Earth, everywhere you have liquid water you have life," Vogt added.

The question wouldn't be to defend that there is life at Gliese 581g, says Butler. "The question," he said, "would be to demonstrate that there isn't."

Current technologies won't allow scientists to study the planet's atmosphere for chemical signs of life, but astronomers expect many more similar life-friendly planets to be discovered soon. If one or more of those cross the face of their parent star, relative to our line of sight, then it's possible to gather atmospheric data.

"This system is not in an orientation such that this planet would ever transit, so unfortunately this is not a case where nature has thrown us a bone," Vogt noted. "That being said, it is so close and we have found this thing so soon that it suggests we will start finding a lot of these things in the future and eventually we will find systems that do transit. This is a harbinger of things to come."

The research appears in this week's issue of Astrophysical Journal.

I want to go there.

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BlackBerry PlayBook - Preview

Crackberry's tablet!

Official Specifications

  • 7” LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
  • BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
  • 1 GHz dual-core processor
  • 1 GB RAM
  • Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
  • Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
  • Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
  • HDMI video output
  • Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
  • Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
  • Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
  • Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
  • Ultra thin and portable:
    • Measures 5.1”x7.6”x0.4” (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
    • Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)
  • Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail outlets.
  • RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models in the future.
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World Robot Olympiad

I was at the World Robot Olympiad yesterday and it was ... boring. Most of them were just different variations of the LEGO Mindstorms kits.

Oo look at you, wannabe Robot Olympiad judge. If you're so smart (S-M-R-T), why don't you host your OWN Robot Olympiad?

I would if I could *shrugs*. I wasn't really expecting a laser shooting, chainsaw fighting, explosion fueled deathmatch between a classic T-800 or a Decepticon (Wall-E would judge the fight). We are 3 months away from 2011 and we should at least have a working humanoid/cyborg like Vicki from Small Wonder.

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Who doesn't remember that show? It used to be TMNT, na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na-na na-na-na-naBatman! and then Small Wonder on Star World. Life was so good back then.

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"This room looks like the one on that spaceship where I got probed."

ahaa...ahaha....aaahahahahahahA...AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

She's my favourite on that show.

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The Empathic Civilisation

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Foo Fighters - Best Of You

 

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