Modern News

By Sinead Carew

A man looks at his mobile next to a Cisco banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 17, 2010.REUTERS/Albert Gea

The router, Cisco’s first major upgrade in six years, is aimed at helping operators handle surging Internet use driven by driven by popular smartphones like Apple Inc’s iPhone and Web services like Google Inc’s YouTube.

The company boasted that 72 of the new CRS-3 routers connected together could deliver every movie ever made in four minutes over the Internet, or connect China’s entire population of 1.3 billion by video conference all at once.
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Looks like the iPad will have some competition for the tablet wars. HP’s Slate will be able to use Adobe Flash and AIR, which the iPad will not. This I think will make it more marketable and a much better choice than an iPad.

Here are some videos from Mashable.

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By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.

The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo.

The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world’s No.1 social networking site.

Earlier this month, Google Inc unveiled a new service dubbed Google Buzz that replicated many of the social networking features that have made services like Twitter and Facebook Internet success stories.

Facebook and Twitter – which said on Monday that users of its service generate more than 50 million Tweets every day – pose an increasing threat to established Internet giants like Yahoo and Google whose businesses depend on selling online ads to large audiences.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo said that beginning on Tuesday its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called “real time search” capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example.

“We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique,” Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

According to some media reports, Microsoft and Google paid a combined $25 million for the right to include Twitter data in their search results.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)

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(Reuters) – U.S. technology giant Intel Corp <INTC.O> is planning to set up a $2 billion fund to invest in U.S. companies, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The chipmaker, which has a unit that invests in many technology companies, is in talks with venture capital firms to seek investment ideas, the daily said.

The investment plan would not require raising additional capital, the business daily said, adding that the response to Intel’s proposal was not immediately known.

Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini is scheduled to give a speech Tuesday at the Brookings Institution, the paper said.

Brookings said in its invitation to the event that Otellin’s speech will focus partly on “the need to create a culture of investment in the United States,” according to the paper.

Intel could not be immediately reached by Reuters for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

(Reporting by Archana Shankar in Bangalore; Editing by Mike Nesbit)

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By Tarmo Virki, European technology correspondent

HELSINKI (Reuters) – The cellphone market will rebound more strongly strongly than expected this year as improving economies boost spending on new gadgets and handset vendors push cheap smartphones, research firm Gartner said on Tuesday.

The market fell 1 percent in 2009, the first decline in eight years as consumers cut spending amid recession.

But Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi said she now expects the market to grow 11-13 percent this year, compared with the firm’s December forecast for a 9-percent increase.

“The economy seems to be stabilizing more into a recovery trend than we forecast back in December,” Milanesi said.

“Sales will return to low-double-digit growth, but competition will continue to put a strain on vendors’ margins.”

Gartner is more optimistic than the top cellphone maker Nokia, which has forecast growth around 10 percent, and also slightly ahead of analysts consensus of 11 percent in a Reuters poll this month.

Gartner sees smartphone market volume growing a whopping 46 percent from 172.4 million sold last year, boosted by cheaper models. The most affordable now cost just over $100 excluding operator subsidies.

Gartner said it expects average sale prices in 2010 to fall more slowly than last year — when intense competition hurt pricing in markets such as China and India — helped by an improving economy and consumers upgrading to cheap smartphones.

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By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) – It’s been more than six years since then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates admitted that Apple caught the company “flat-footed” in the digital music market and directed his team to make up for lost ground, according to recently surfaced internal e-mails.

To date, Microsoft’s effort to address the digital music market has largely focused on its Zune player and Zune Pass subscription service, which have won favorable reviews but few customers. But with the recent unveiling of its Windows Phone 7 Series operating system at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft hopes to reboot its struggling digital music strategy.

Even the well-received Zune HD device, introduced last fall, hasn’t been enough to convince music fans to convert to the Zune Pass. The company says it has sold only 3.8 million players since 2006, and NPD Group estimated in November that it has a 2 percent share of the U.S. portable media player market, compared with 70 percent for Apple’s iPod.

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By Richard Baum

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A colleague I just met at work has invited me to be their friend on Facebook. I don’t want to offend them, but nor do I want to share my candid photos and lousy Scrabble scores with someone I hardly know.

Can I ignore their invite?

“Can I be your friend?” might work as an ice-breaker among small children, but it’s not a question you hear often between adults, at least not outside of Las Vegas.

Friendship, it is generally understood, is a relationship that evolves through shared interests, common experiences and a primeval need to share your neighbor’s power tools.

Yet for many people, Facebook permits a return to the simplicity of the schoolyard.

Rather than inviting someone to be our Facebook friend only after we’ve become friends in the real world, many of us are using Facebook as a short-cut around all that time-consuming relationship building.

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SHANGHAI (Reuters) – A prestigious Chinese university and a lesser-known vocational school have denied a report they were the source of recent cyber attacks on Internet giant Google and other U.S. corporations, Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

A representative of Shanghai Jiaotong University, considered one of China’s best, said the allegations in a New York Times report were baseless and even if the school’s computers appeared to be involved, it did not mean the hackers were based there.

“We were shocked and indignant to hear these baseless allegations which may harm the university’s reputation,” Xinhua quoted the unnamed Jiaotong University spokesperson saying.

“The report of the New York Times was based simply on an IP address. Given the highly developed network technology today, such a report is neither objective nor balanced.”

The Communist party boss at Lanxiang Vocational School, the other institution fingered in the report, also denied any role.

“Investigation in the staff found no trace the attacks originated from our school,” Li Zixiang, party chief at the school in coastal Shandong Province, was quoted as saying.

The New York Times said Lanxiang was established with support from the Chinese military and has trained computer scientists who later joined the military, but Li said there was no relationship with the military, Xinhua reported.

He also disputed the statement that investigators suspected a link to a computer science class taught by a Ukrainian professor.

“There is no Ukrainian teacher in the school and we have never employed any foreign staff,” Li told Xinhua. “The report was unfounded. Please show the evidence.”

Lanxiang, founded in 1984, has about 20,000 students learning vocational skills such as cooking, auto repair and hairdressing.

Google announced in January that it had faced a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack” in mid-December, allegedly from inside China, and declared that it was no longer willing to censor search results in the country as required by Beijing.

The attacks have been a source of friction in Sino-U.S. relations at an already tense time.

(Reporting by Edmund Klamann and Emma Graham-Harrison in BEIJING; Editing by Michael Roddy and Sanjeev Miglani)

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The U.S. International Trade Commission said on Friday it has agreed to investigate Apple Inc’s patent infringement complaint against Nokia Oyj, as the legal battle between the two technology heavyweights continues to play out.

The companies have been locked in a legal tussle since last October, when Nokia sued Apple and said the iPhone maker was using its patented technologies without paying for them.

Apple countersued Nokia, and both companies have turned to the ITC, filing complaints with the trade body.

Apple is asking the ITC to block Nokia from selling some mobile devices in the U.S. Apple contends the products infringe upon nine of its patents.

The case will be assigned to one of the ITC’s six administrative law judges, who will hold an hearing on the evidence. The trade body will set a target date for completing its probe with 45 days after beginning the investigation.

The ITC agreed last month to investigate Nokia’s complaint against Apple. Nokia alleges Apple infringed seven of its patents.

The legal dispute between Nokia and Apple potentially involves hundreds of millions of dollars in annual royalties.

Nokia is the world’s largest mobile phone maker but has had trouble in the fast-growing smartphone market. Apple entered the smartphone market in 2007 but has seen huge success with the iPhone.

(Reporting by Gabriel Madway, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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BEIJING (Reuters) – U.S. government analysts believe a Chinese man with government links wrote the key part of a spyware programme used in hacker attacks on Google last year, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

The man, a security consultant in his 30s, posted sections of the programme to a hacking forum where he described it as something he was “working on,” the paper said, quoting an unidentified researcher working for the U.S. government.

The spyware creator works as a freelancer and did not launch the attack, but Chinese officials had “special access” to his programing, the report said.
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