Modern News

By Yinka Adegoke and Georgina Prodhan
NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) – Publishers are placing big bets that Apple Inc’s iPad will kick-start a commercially viable transition to digital magazines and newspapers — even though few executives have laid hands on the tablet ahead of launch.
In fact, many publishers likely will not announce their iPad applications until after the tablet hits U.S. stores on Saturday, due to the many constraints that Apple has placed on allowing its partners access to the device.
While media content is critical to the success of the iPad — a 9.7-inch tablet that looks like a large iPhone and aims to bridge the gap between a smartphone and a laptop — Apple has been typically secretive about its plans.
Media executives say they have had to test out the iPad in situ at Apple’s Cupertino, California office, or agree to extremely restrictive security measures to get one off-site.
“We were offered the opportunity to have an iPad in the building but the security implications were so high, it wasn’t worth it,” said one publisher who did not want to be identified ahead of the iPad launch.
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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is doubling the size of its fund for iPhone application developers, as it eyes new opportunities with the forthcoming launch of Apple’s iPad.
Kleiner Perkins said its so-called iFund investment pool now totals $200 million. The firm said the new money was not carved out from other funds, but instead represents fresh capital.
The iFund was originally launched in 2008 with a total of $100 million, which is now committed to 14 app development companies. Those companies have also raked in an additional $330 million from other investors, Kleiner Perkins said.
The iFund has invested in popular app companies such as game designer ngmoco, texting provider Pinger, and music discovery service Shazam.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China’s comprehensive Internet filtering regime for political, social or religious content is complex and opaque — creating precarious conditions for providers, the U.S. Trade Representative’s official said in its annual report to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday.
In a report compiled before Google Corp. moved its Chinese search portal to Hong Kong from China this month in a censorship dispute, the USTR said: “changes to Internet filtering can occur without warning or public explanation.”
“Chinese government authorities may issue lists of banned search terms or banned sites weekly, with little justification or means of appeal, putting Internet-enabled services in a precarious position, caught between complying with the law and implementing apparently arbitrary restrictions,” it said.
(Editing by Sandra Maler)

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – AMD chipped away at Intel Corp’s market share for computer microprocessors in the fourth quarter, as consumer and business spending rose on hopes for a strong tech sector recovery, according to the latest data from iSuppli.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s share of sales of microprocessor chips — the brains of a computer — amounted to 12.1 percent, a gain of 1.6 percentage points from the year-ago fourth quarter, the industry tracker said on Wednesday.
Intel’s market share fell by 1 percentage point over the same period, but the world’s largest chip maker remained the market leader by far with 80.6 percent of overall sales in the 2009 fourth quarter.
Smaller competitors, such as VIA Technologies Inc <2388.TW>, accounted for 7.3 percent of the market — a loss of 0.6 percentage points from the same time in 2008.
Neither Intel nor AMD saw much change in market share for full-year 2009, both gaining less than a percentage point to level out at 80.3 percent and 12.1 percent, respectively.
The numbers showed neither company was greatly affected by lower average selling prices for personal computers, iSuppli analyst Matthew Wilkins said. “It also indicates that neither was able to capitalize on the situation very effectively.”
Shares of Intel rose 0.36 percent to $22.42 on Nasdaq in early afternoon trading, while AMD gained 0.86 percent at $9.35 on the New York Stock Exchange.
(Reporting by Ian Sherr; Editing by Richard Chang)

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By Soyoung Kim
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ford Motor Co and Microsoft Corp on Wednesday announced an online application designed to help owners of Ford plug-in electric vehicles manage home electricity use while the vehicles recharge.
Microsoft Hohm will be offered to Ford car owners for free, the two companies said at the New York International Auto Show. Ford will introduce five electric vehicles by 2013, starting with a Transit Connect Electric later this year.
Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally said the goal is “to make the electric vehicle viable, charging affordable and interaction with the utility grid smarter.”
The application will help vehicle and home owners decide when to power up electric vehicle batteries, in the hope that consumers will draw power from the grid at night, when energy use and costs are low, said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, speaking from a video hookup to reporters in New York.
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By Robert Evans
GENEVA (Reuters) – Physicists at CERN, buoyed by their ground-breaking success in creating mini-Big Bangs giving them a glimpse of the dawn of time, began Wednesday to push closer toward the very birth of the universe.
Just a day after achieving the first megapower particle collisions at 50 per second, they set their sights on boosting that number up to 300 per second inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
“We are moving to ever new frontiers of science,” said CERN spokesman James Gillies as new bunches of particle beams were injected in opposite directions into the 27-km (16.8 mile) oval LHC under the borders of France and Switzerland near Geneva.
The aim is to increase in the coming months the flow of data on what happens when particles smash into each other at a total force of 7 million million electron volts, or 7TeV, and at a mini-fraction under the speed of light.
At those powers, the collisions came very close to simulating events just nano-parts of a second after the real Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago which led to the creation of galaxies, stars, life on Earth, and perhaps life elsewhere.
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STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Ericsson said on Wednesday it had won a $1.3 billion network expansion contract from top Indian operator Bharti Airtel, its third major order in three days, and its largest deal in eight months.
Ericsson said it will expand and upgrade Bharti Airtel’s GSM network in 15 of India’s 22 telecom circles during 2010-2011.
“In addition, Ericsson will ensure that Bharti Airtel’s core and transport network is 3G-ready in order to reduce time to market and enable the fast rollout of 3G services at a later date,” Ericsson said in a statement.
Nokia’s NSN unit in February won a $700 million deal for the remaining circles.
The deal boosted shares in Ericsson 0.8 percent to 74.70 crowns by 0810 GMT, outperforming slightly firmer European technology shares.
“It is clear the deal on the screen helps to create a positive sentiment,” said analyst Hakan Wranne from Swedbank.
The telecom equipment market has seen cut-throat competition for new business during the past few years, driven by Asian vendors, and the outlook remains tough.
Ericsson, the world’s top mobile telecoms gear firm on Monday signed two deals with China’s top operators — a $1 billion deal with China Mobile and an $800 million contract with China Unicom.
Ericsson’s last deal larger than $1.3 billion was an up to $5 billion services contract with Sprint, unveiled last July. [ID:nN09472369] (Reporting by Helena Soderpalm, Tarmo Virki and Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by David Holmes and Rupert Winchester)

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By John Ruwitch
HANOI (Reuters) – Google Inc has said it identified cyber attacks aimed at silencing opposition to a Vietnamese government-led bauxite mining project involving a major Chinese firm, and said they were similar to those at the heart of the company’s friction with Beijing.
The computer security firm McAfee Inc, which detected the malware, went a step further, saying its creators “may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”
The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry had no immediate comment.
The malware infected “potentially tens of thousands of users” who downloaded what they thought was Vietnamese keyboard software, and possibly other software, Neel Mehta of Google’s security team said in a post Tuesday on the firm’s online security blog (googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com).
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By Lucy Hornby and Alexei Oreskovic
BEIJING/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo email accounts of some journalists and activists whose work relates to China were compromised in an attack discovered this week, days after Google announced it would move its Chinese-language search services out of China due to censorship concerns.
Several journalists in China and Taiwan found they were unable to access their accounts beginning March 25, among them Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelance journalist in Beijing. Her access was restored Wednesday, she told Reuters.
The compromised accounts include those of the World Uyghur Congress, an exile group that China accuses of inciting separatism by ethnic Uighurs in the frontier region of Xinjiang.
“I suspect a lot of information in my Yahoo account was downloaded,” the group’s spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, told Reuters Wednesday. He said the email account, which was set up in Sweden, has been inaccessible for a month.
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By Emily Chasan
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A lender which claims it is owed millions by the Sex.com domain name operator is asking a U.S. bankruptcy court to dismiss an involuntary bankruptcy case against the company, so it can resume a foreclosure auction, according to new court documents.
The New Jersey lender, DOM Partners LLC, which said it loaned more than $4 million to Escom LLC to fund the website’s operations, said in court papers on Friday that Escom shouldn’t be in bankruptcy. DOM said it would be best able to recover the debt by holding a new auction for what may be the world’s most valuable domain name.
An earlier auction was set to take place March 18 in New York, but was halted when three of Escom’s other creditors, saying they are owed more than $10 million, filed an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding against the website owner in California.
The auctioneer hired by DOM Partners had already been contacted by “scores of potential bidders” ranging from U.S. and international investors to domain name industry executives, media companies and adult entertainment companies, according to the court papers.
Escom LLC reportedly paid $14 million to acquire the Sex.com domain name in 2006 and said at the time that it planned to create a “next-generation Web interaction” experience on the site. But the court documents filed by the lender painted a picture of a company with just one employee, little income, and little ability to achieve its intentions.
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