AOL, which is owned by Time Warner, said it sees opportunities to make money from advertising on Bebo, which has about 40 million unique users worldwide.
AOL is the latest of the major online players to grab a piece of the social networking pie.
San Francisco - IBM, Google, Microsoft, Verisign, and Yahoo have joined the corporate board of the OpenID Foundation, giving a boost to the group's efforts to simplify the process of signing into Web sites.
The OpenID framework allows people to use a single user name and password to sign into sites that support it.
More than 10,000 Web sites now support OpenID log-ins, according to the foundation. Last month, Yahoo announced its 248 million active registered users could begin using their handle and password to login to non-Yahoo Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 framework.
The closer links between OpenID and these major vendors is sure to help the foundation's effort, according to its executive director, Bill Washburn. “The community has clearly expanded since the inception of the Foundation and these companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets,” he said in a statement.
Another statement on the foundation's Web site went into further detail on what the new alliances could mean.
“In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe,” it read.
“We think this is one of the largest efforts put into identity management as far as the Internet is concerned,” said Anthony Nadalin, an IBM distinguished engineer and chief security architect for Tivoli software, in an interview Thursday.
Nadalin couldn't pinpoint when the vendors' new level of involvement with OpenID will produce tangible results. “This takes a little bit of time, understanding and agreeing on the issues and where we need to drive this set of technology,” he said.
“IBM is well-known for its ability to produce secure protocols,” he added. “We have quite a bit of talent to bring to this foundation.”
He noted that Version 2.0 of the OpenID framework is still fairly new.
“You can't confuse the industry by coming in and throwing out a brand-new framework,” Nadalin said, “I think it's coming down to that on the 2.0 level, we get the kind of interoperability we need.”
Beyond sign-on, various efforts are underway to standardize how personal data can be moved around the Web. The Dataportability Workgroup wants to broaden the scope of portable data to things like user-created photos and videos.
San Francisco - Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for around $44.6 billion in cash and shares, to better compete with Google in the market for online services.
CEO Steve Ballmer made the offer in a letter to Yahoo's board of directors on Thursday, telling the board that he would release the letter Friday morning.
On a conference call Friday, Ballmer called a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo a more “credible” alternative to Google in the online advertising and services market.
“By combining the assets of Microsoft and Yahoo we can offer a more competitive choice for consumers, advertisers and publishers,” he said.
It was Yahoo's board that first approached Microsoft, in February 2007, Microsoft said.
Yahoo, in a statement, said its board will carefully evaluate Microsoft's proposal, which it described as unsolicited.
Microsoft expects the market for online advertising to almost double in size over the next three years, from $40 billion in 2007 to $80 billion by 2010. A merger will allow it to realize economies of scale and reduce capital costs as it addresses this market, it said.
“The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own,” said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, in a statement.
Microsoft expects to cut costs by $1 billion a year by realizing synergies with Yahoo in four areas: obtaining economies of scale as its audience increases; combining its research and development efforts with Yahoo's to innovate faster; eliminating operational redundancy to cut costs, and pooling expertise to innovate in video and mobile.
The companies will work together to develop the merger plan, Microsoft said.
It intends to pay key Yahoo engineers and other staff to stay following the merger.
The offer represents a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's closing price on Thursday. Microsoft expects to receive all necessary approvals in the second half of this year.
Despite the potential for short-term gain, Yahoo, in its statement, said its goal will be to maximize long-term value for shareholders.
At this premium, even if Yahoo's top managers were opposed to the acquisition, Yahoo's board of directors has an obligation to consider the offer on behalf of shareholders, said industry analyst Greg Sterling from Sterling Market Intelligence.
At the same time, now that Microsoft has made its move, it wouldn't be surprising to see other suitors jump in and make competing bids for Yahoo, Sterling said.
Unless Microsoft were to run Yahoo like an independent unit, there will be significant areas of overlap that would need to be integrated.
“If Microsoft were to seek a more integrated company [with Yahoo], certain products or brands would be favored and others discontinued,” Sterling said.
Still, a joint Microsoft-Yahoo would from day one be a formidable player in display advertising and mobile Internet services, he said.
Ever since the first rumblings about a possible acquisition of Yahoo by Microsoft, things have gone downhill for Yahoo, including several reorganizations and management shakeups, so the deal appears more plausible today, Sterling said.
At the same time, despite considerable investments, Microsoft hasn't made as much progress in search engine advertising and usage as it had hoped, he said.
A combined Microsoft-Yahoo would improve their respective positions in the search market, but still wouldn't top Google, which has a dominant lead both in search engine usage and advertising, he said.
Yahoo didn't immediately reply to requests for comment.
(Elizabeth Montalbano in New York contributed to this story.)
San Francisco - The high bids totalled $3.2 billion in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's auction of wireless spectrum licenses in the 700MHz band after three rounds and a day and a half of bidding.
That figure is far short of the $10 billion Congress and the FCC expect to raise in the auction, which opened Thursday, but bidding could continue for weeks. In most cases, the high bids don't yet meet the FCC's reserve price set for minimum winning bids.
A fourth round of bidding will happen Friday afternoon.
The 700MHz auctions represent the last large chunk of spectrum available for the FCC to auction in the foreseeable future. The spectrum, now used to carry over-the-air television signals, can be used to carry long-range wireless broadband traffic. Consumer groups have said the spectrum represents the “last, best hope” for a nationwide wireless broadband network that competes with cable and telecom broadband services.
For sale is 62MHz of spectrum in the 700MHz band. In late 2005, after a decade of debate, Congress passed a law requiring U.S. TV stations to move to all-digital broadcasts and abandon analog spectrum between channels 52 and 69. The deadline for TV stations to end broadcasts in the 700MHz band is February 2009.
After three rounds, 906 of the 1,099 available spectrum licenses had bids, with four more licenses receiving bids than at the end of round two late Thursday. High bids had totalled just under $2.8 billion after round 2, and just over $2.4 billion after round one Thursday morning.
The top bid after the third round was $1.49 billion for eight of 12 regional licenses in the C block, a 22MHz block of spectrum covering all 50 states. The bidding for those C block licenses was up from $1.24 billion at the end of the second round. The FCC's reserve price for the C block is $4.6 billion, and the winning bidders of C block spectrum must allow any legal devices to connect to their network, including mobile phones purchased from other carriers.
The second highest bid remained $472 million for the D block, a nationwide 10MHz chunk of spectrum to be paired with another 10MHz set aside for public safety agencies. The bidder of the D block would be required to build a national network to be jointly used by public safety agencies and commercial customers. The high bid for the D block has remained unchanged since round one.
Bidding in the auction is anonymous.
The A block, a 12MHz piece of spectrum covering parts of New York and the northeastern U.S., also generated interest. The high bid was $119.8 million after the third round, up from $100 million after the second round and $83.2 million after the first round. A similar chunk of spectrum in the E block, also covering the same area, has generated a high bid of $59.9 million after the third round.
The high bid for a 12MHz block called the B block, for a local New York City license, stood at $85.6 million after rounds two and three.
High bids for five blocks in the Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., areas were between $28 million and $55 million after round three.
San Francisco - Thirty thousand people have now signed InfoWorld's “Save XP” petition, which was launched four days ago. Roughly half were from the U.S. and the rest from other countries.
The petition asks Microsoft not to discontinue Windows XP as planned on June 30, but to instead keep it available alongside the newer Windows Vista indefinitely. InfoWorld will deliver the petitions to Microsoft later this spring
More than 100 people have added their own comments to InfoWorld's Save XP blog, and many external sites have promoted the campaign by adding InfoWorld's countdown clock to their sites. The vast majority of comments supported the petition drive, providing a variety of reasons that both individuals and companies do not want to lose the option to obtain new XP licenses available after June 30. Lack of compelling benefits in Vista, coupled with the training, support, and other costs of upgrading was the most cited reason. Some cited compatibility concerns.
Some commenters thought the campaign was silly, arguing that change is a fact of life in technology and that there's no sense in sticking with older technology. This argument drew retorts that change for its own sake was not a worthwhile approach.
In an interview, Burton Group executive strategist Ken Anderson suggested that the strong emotional support shown in the comments indicated a fundamental shift in how people, including IT staff, now think of operating systems. They have become a familiar extension of what we do and how we work, thus not something want to change often. “When technology becomes part of you, you don't want people to mess with it,” he said.
Anderson likened the reaction to XP's impending demise to what happened in the 1980s when Coca-Cola replaced its classic Coke soda formula with New Coke, causing massive protests and forcing the company to bring back the now-rechristened Coke Classic. “XP has come to the point of being Coke Classic,” he said.
Related Stories:
- Stories, podcasts, and other stories about the campaign
- InfoWorld's analyses on Windows Vista and XP
San Francisco - Opera Software has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing it of stifling competition by tying its Internet Explorer Web browser to Windows, the Norwegian company said Thursday.
The complaint, which was filed with the European Commission on Wednesday, says Microsoft is abusing its dominant position in the desktop PC market by offering only Internet Explorer as a standard part of Windows, and hindering interoperability by not following accepted standards with IE.
Opera is asking the Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, to force Microsoft to unbundle IE from Windows, or include other browsers as a standard part of its operating system. It also wants it to require Microsoft to adhere to industry standards with its Web browser.
The issue of standards is seen as important because if all Web browsers do not use the same standards, Web site developers are likely to design their Web sites to work with the most widely-used browser, which is Internet Explorer. That gives people a disincentive to use other browsers.
Microsoft's spokesman in Brussels did not immediately have a comment on the lawsuit. The company has argued in the past that consumers benefit from its tight integration of IE and Windows.
Opera said it filed the complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them.
The Commission is expected to comment at its daily midday briefing Thursday.
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a Brussels-based trade group that counts Opera among its members, said it strongly endorses Opera's move.
“By tying its Internet Explorer product to its monopoly Windows operating system and refusing to faithfully implement industry accepted open standards, Microsoft deprives consumers of a real choice in internet browsers. Browsers are the gateway to the internet. Microsoft seeks to control this gateway,” said Thomas Vinje, speaking for ECIS.
Opera's complaint signals a potentially new front in Microsoft's long-running battle with the European authorities, and comes three months after the Court of First Instance (CFI) — Europe's second highest court – threw out Microsoft's appeal of a 2004 European Commission antitrust ruling against it.
The CFI endorsed the Commission's finding that Microsoft had illegally bundled its media playing software, Media Player, into Windows, exploiting its monopoly in the desktop operating system market to gain influence in the market for desktop media player software.
Opera's complaint against the bundling of IE into Windows uses the same legal argument.
However, the Commission's remedy against Microsoft's bundling has proved useless, which may weaken the value of the 2004 ruling as a legal precedent.
The Commission ordered Microsoft to sell a second version of Windows that has Media Player stripped out. Microsoft christened the second version Edition N, and put it on the market in 2005, at the same price as the fully bundled Windows. Not surprisingly, no one bought it.
San Francisco (IDGNS) -
Alcatel-Lucent's head of enterprise systems, Hubert de Pesquidoux, will take on the role of chief financial officer as part of a management shake-up intended to streamline decision-making. The company has suffered from lackluster performance since its formation from the merger of Alcatel and Lucent Technologies last December.
CEO Patricia Russo announced the changes Wednesday, at the same time outlining a three-point plan for restoring the company to profitability. The company also reported a third-quarter loss of €345 million ($492 million) on revenue of €4.35 billion.
Russo will in future be advised by panel of seven senior executives, down from 11 before. Just two of them are former Lucent employees: Cindy Christy, who will add Central and Latin America to her existing responsibility for North American sales, and John Meyer, head of services, a role he held at Lucent.
The merging of North America with Central and Latin America in Alcatel-Lucent's sales structure is part of a broader move to simplify the way the company sees the world, splitting it into just two regions: the Americas, and the rest.
Former CFO Jean-Pascal Beaufret is “leaving the company to pursue other opportunities,” but will remain for a short period as he hands over to de Pesquidoux. It wasn't immediately clear if de Pesquidoux would also remain head of the enterprise systems group or if Alcatel Lucent would seek someone else.
De Pesquidoux, a former merchant banker, is also part of the new management team. He used to run Alcatel's North American operations before taking over the merged company's enterprise systems division. Although enterprise systems is the smallest of the company's business units, contributing just €380 million of its €4.35 billion revenue last quarter, it is the best performing, with an operating profit margin of 7.6 percent.
The remaining members of the management team are Chief Technology Officer Etienne Fouques, head of human resources and communications Claire Pedini, carrier business group head Michel Rahier, and Frederic Rose, who heads up the company's business in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific.
Rahier will oversee one of the biggest changes in the company's product structure, as it eliminates the layer of management that divided the carrier business group into separate wireless, wireline and convergence teams.
Other changes ahead for the company include a tighter focus on products to help carriers transform their networks to an all-IP (Internet Protocol) infrastructure, a move from products to value-added services, and a more streamlined organization with fewer staff in support functions to eliminate post-merger duplication.
Pedini's role in human resources is particularly significant as the company prepares to shed a further 4,000 jobs by 2009, having already cut 3,800 in the first half of this year. Her approach is likely to focus on the numbers — the company hopes the job cuts will save it a further €400 million — rather than the people, as she worked for four years as Alcatel's deputy CFO, only taking on the role of vice president of human resources and communications in January 2006.
This article was updated with new information on October 31, 2007.
San Francisco (IDGNS) - Two years after its acquisition of enterprise software vendor Veritas, Symantec's consumer division remains the company's fastest-growing product line.
Consumer business grew by about 10 percent year-over-year and represents about 30 percent of Symantec's overall business, the company said Wednesday, as it announced financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2008, ended Sept. 28.
Excluding an $87 million write-down of assets, revenue was $1.44 billion for the quarter, up 13 percent from the year-ago period. Quarterly earnings were $0.29 per share. Analysts had been expecting earnings of $0.26 per share on $1.39 billion in revenue, according to estimates compiled by Thomson Financial.
During a conference call with analysts, Symantec Chairman and CEO John Thompson said the company's North American business had missed expectations, and he offered cautious guidance for the next three months. “Our North America operating business experienced weak new business,” he said. “This, coupled with the uncertain economic environment, caused us to take a more conservative view of the December quarter.”
“New license sales for a number of the data center management products was a little bit weaker than our forecast,” he added.
Symantec now expects revenue for the next quarter to fall in the range of $1.43 billion to $1.47 billion with earnings per share between $0.25 and $0.30. Analysts' consensus had been $1.47 billion, with earnings of $0.31, according to Thomson Financial.
After-hours traders dumped Symantec stock on the lowered expectations. The company's stock was trading at $18.45 late Wednesday, down more than 12 percent from Tuesday's close.
Symantec's consumer business got a boost from the introduction of the much-anticipated Norton 360 software, released in late February.
Consumer revenue totaled $434 million for the quarter, 61 percent of this coming from the company's flagship Norton Internet Security suite. According to Thompson, 72 percent of consumer purchases are online now, as opposed to shrink-wrapped products.
The company's Windows-based backup products, which include Backup Exec, also posted strong results the company said in a statement.
On the enterprise side, the company's security and data center management products, including the Veritas software, grew by 7 percent. These products now account for 58 percent of the company's revenue.
Symantec's much smaller services business — totaling 6 percent of revenue — grew by 30 percent.
This story was updated on October 24, 2007
San Francisco (IDGNS) - Apple reported strong earnings for its fourth quarter on Monday, boosted by record Macintosh computer sales and the shipment of 1.12 million iPhones.
The company beat analyst estimates with net income of $904 million, or $1.01 per share, compared with $542 million, or $0.62 per share, in net income reported in last year's fourth quarter. Analysts polled by Thomson Financial estimated a consensus of $760.45 million in net income and earnings of $0.84 per share for the quarter ended Sept. 29.
The company reported $6.22 billion in revenue, up from $4.84 billion in the fourth quarter last year. The revenue consensus from analysts polled by Thomson was for $6.07 billion.
For fiscal 2007, Apple reported net revenue of $24 billion and net income of $3.5 billion, said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO, in a conference call with financial analysts.
Looking ahead, the company estimates that revenue will hit $9.2 billion with earnings per share of $1.42 for the first fiscal quarter of 2008, Oppenheimer said.
The company shipped 2.16 million Macs during the quarter, a 34 percent growth over the year-ago period, Apple said in a news release.
Mac sales increased worldwide, spurred by back-to-school promotions, said Tim Cook, Apple's COO, on the call. In addition to rapid growth in the U.S. and Europe, Mac unit shipments also increased in Japan, a major market where Apple has traditionally struggled to grow, Cook said.
Shipment of Mac notebooks, including MacBook and MacBook Pro, grew 31 percent year-over-year and accounted for 62 percent of all Macs sold, Oppenheimer said.
Given the success of this back-to-school period, Mac sales could be flat in the upcoming quarter, Cook warned.
Sales of the iPhone are outpacing those of the iPod during the first few months after its 2001 introduction, Cook said. The company shipped 1.39 million iPhones during the year and saw a spike in sales after a $200 price drop of the 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399 in September.
Apple is confident it will sell 10 million iPhones in the next calendar year, Cook said.
Apple sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, a 17 percent year-over-year growth. iPod has sold 120 million units to date, Oppenheimer said. The upcoming holiday shopping season will be a big quarter for iPod sales, Oppenheimer said.
Apple had a busy quarter with multiple product announcements.
Last month, it unveiled the iPod Touch, a portable multimedia player with a touchscreen user interface and Wi-Fi capabilities. It also announced availability of the iPhone in Europe, with U.K. network operator O2 (UK) Ltd. slated to start shipping the device in November.
The company is excited about entering the Europe market, and plans to enter the Asia-Pacific market in 2008, Cook said.
On the software front, Apple announced iWork '08, its office applications suite, in August. Mac OS X Leopard, Apple's latest operating system, will begin shipping later this week.
This story was updated on October 22, 2007
San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Security software giant Symantec is preparing to announce an acquisition of Vontu, one the largest remaining independent providers of data leakage prevention software, which is used to control the flow of sensitive information across corporate networks.
Multiple industry sources have confirmed to InfoWorld that Symantec will soon announce a buyout of Vontu, perhaps as early as next week, which will significantly further the trend of consolidation that has played-out in the red-hot DLP (data leakage prevention) space over the last year.
The deal also gives Symantec a foothold in the burgeoning DLP segment, also referred by some as the ILP (information leakage prevention) space.
The two companies already maintain an OEM business partnership, through which Symantec markets Vontu's DLP technologies to its customers.
Sources said that the proposed deal will have Symantec paying $300-$350 million for privately-held Vontu, whose revenues are estimated at roughly $30 million per year by some industry analysts.
Symantec and Vontu representatives declined to comment on the reported acquisition.
DLP has become an increasingly popular sector in the larger IT security market as companies of all sizes look for methods to prevent malicious or unintentional distribution of sensitive data from their networks.
The technology has been pitched by its proponents as one of the few available tools for protecting against so-called “insider threats,” through which companies fear the loss of data like customer records or closely-protected intellectual property at the hands of employees, business partners, or hidden malware infections.
Driven by a range of market forces, including compliance regulations and high-profile data exposure incidents, the niche has attracted the interest of nearly 40 different vendors seeking to cash in on growing demand among buyers, particularly large enterprises in highly-regulated industries, such as the financial services space.
Among the deals that have already occurred in the DLP market are WebSense's acquisition