Technology latest news

NEW YORK - The Web site of The New York Times suffered substantial delays Monday as traffic spiked following its reports linking Gov. Eliot Spitzer to a prostitution ring.

Normally, the Times site takes about three seconds to load. Just minutes after the Times posted its first article on Spitzer at about 1:57 p.m., average load times increased to more than 20 seconds, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a company that measures Web site performance. Keynote checked the Times site using automated probes in 10 U.S. cities.

Performance returned to normal by 4 p.m., Keynote said.

Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty said the site saw 60 percent more traffic between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. than it did a week earlier, forcing its information technology staff to juggle Web servers to keep up.

After the Times posted its report that Spitzer has told senior advisers he had been involved in a prostitution ring, Spitzer held a news conference during which he apologized to his family and the people of New York.

The governor gave no details about what he was apologizing for and has not been charged.

LOS ANGELES - The Walt Disney Co. expects to collect $1 billion in revenue from online content this fiscal year, a significant rise from estimates for fiscal 2007, CEO Robert Iger said Monday.

Iger told analysts the company has been “fairly aggressive” in expanding onto the Internet to extend consumer contact with its most popular franchises and create new revenue streams.

“If we’re not there, (people) will just access someone else’s content,” he said in comments Webcast from Bear Stearns’ 21st Annual Media Conference in Palm Beach, Fla.

Disney’s online revenue came from advertising during its ABC network hits such as “Lost” and “Grey’s Anatomy” that are rerun on ABC.com; ads on sites such as ESPN.com; subscriptions to online games; downloads of movies and music; and e-commerce that is not related to its theme parks.

Online sources account for less than 3 percent of company revenue. Disney posted total net income of $4.7 billion on $35.5 billion in revenue last year.

The last time the company estimated digital revenue was in June 2007, when chief financial officer Tom Staggs said he expected the company to post more than $700 million for fiscal 2007, which ended in September.

The company does not break out online revenue in its quarterly earnings releases.

Last month, Disney announced it had created a special studio to develop short-form dramatic and comedy series exclusively for broadcast on ABC.com and Google Inc.’s YouTube.

___

On the Net:

The Walt Disney Co., http://www.disney.com

The European Commission has agreed to look into a complaint filed with it last year by a London gambling trade group that claims the U.S. is unfairly discriminating against European online gambling companies.

The U.S. is enforcing its laws against online gambling selectively against foreign suppliers, the Remote Gambling Association (RGA) claimed. The organization is objecting to what it says are prosecutions of its members for their actions prior to the passage of the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. It also objects to its members being shut out of the market while the U.S. permits domestic Internet companies to offer remote online betting on horse and dog racing.

The Commission will examine the issues raised by the RGA's complaint over the next five to seven months and issue a report, which might lead to World Trade Organization (WTO) proceedings against the U.S.

The U.S. is seeking to withdraw from its commitments to provide open access to its online gambling market under the General Agreement on Trade in Services it is a signatory to as a member of the WTO.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative's office in Washington said that it reached an agreement with the European Union in December to compensate it for the U.S. withdrawing from its international trade commitments as they relate to gambling services. She said that the USTR had been assured by the Commission that Monday's action is unrelated to that settlement.

The U.S. Department of Justice, which the RGA claims is selectively targeting European companies for prosecutions, had not responded to a request for comment by mid-afternoon on Monday.

San Francisco - IBM has committed to investing $1 billion in its unified communications strategy in the next three years as it sharpens its sword to do battle with Microsoft in a fast-growing market.

Speaking Monday at IBM's Somers, New York, campus, executives including Steve Mills, the senior vice president of IBM's software group, said IBM is ramping up its investment in products like Lotus Sametime to provide unified communications to the largest business customers, which the company defines as having 1,000 or more employees. This is also the sweet spot for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software, the latest version of which includes the Sametime unified communications client.

Unified communications refers to the combination of instant messaging, Web presence, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol), videoconferencing, and other ways workers can collaborate and communicate in real time through one user interface. According to IDC, the market will grow to $17 billion in annual revenue by 2011.

Microsoft recently unveiled its competitor to Sametime, Office Communications Server, offering it as a hub for unified communications built on a Windows infrastructure. That move has brought IBM out of the woodwork touting its competitive offerings.

IBM differentiates itself from Microsoft in several ways, including its 10-year experience with the Sametime product and its ability to support heterogeneous IT environments.

Sametime is historically a corporate instant-messaging client; IBM claims to have 20 million standalone Sametime users. Two years ago, it rearchitected the software on the Eclipse open-source framework to make it easier for third parties to build add-on applications. It also added VoIP and video functionality.

On Monday, IBM demonstrated some new functionality that will be part of Sametime by the end of the year. Called Unified Telephony, it helps users manage telephone calls from within Sametime by routing calls to various devices and setting rules on how to handle calls based on status. For example, a user can set Sametime to direct calls to a mobile phone if they are working remotely.

IBM has built the basic functionality of Sametime into Lotus Notes to link unified communications to its collaboration software in a similar way that Microsoft is linking Office Communications Server to its Office productivity and Exchange Server messaging software. Executives also linked collaboration and unified communications in the messaging about their strategy.

Though Microsoft constantly touts customer wins for Outlook/Exchange over Lotus Notes, in an interview Monday, Mills said Lotus is gaining share in the “market where we compete with Microsoft,” which is among the largest business customers. He acknowledged that Microsoft is winning market share among businesses in general, but not in the target high-end business market.

“Microsoft makes a bunch of statements that are somewhat misleading in terms of what is happening,” he said.

Mills also said during the interview that IBM expects to increase its unified communications revenue by 10 percent or more, year over year, for at least the next five years.

In its quiver of arrows against Microsoft, which Mills acknowledged is the company's chief competitor in this space, IBM also has the not-so-secret weapon of its massive IBM Global Services (IGS) organization to bring its unified communications infrastructure to customers.

Not only can IGS expose its customers to IBM's products, but it also will come in handy for integrating IBM's software with offerings from third parties, which executives said can be a complex task. IBM stressed the importance of third-party applications as part of its overall unified communications strategy and its competition with Microsoft.

San Francisco - Serena Software is licensing its Business Mashups software under Creative Commons licenses and encourages other software companies to do the same, Serena said on Monday.

Under the program, Serena will license 13 pre-built Business Mashups and will do so with others that the company builds in the future. Business Mashups serve as graphical representations of simple business processes, such as vacation requests and sales discount approvals. Creative Commons permits users to share and remix each other's work, which will spark innovation, according to Serena.

The company said Creative Commons has been primarily used with traditional forms of content, such as art, literature, and movies. By extending this licensing to Business Mashups, Serena said it is making it clear that Business Mashups are not based on source code but are unique graphical expressions of a process. This makes these Mashups suited to Creative Commons licensing, especially in situations where users combine the mashups to create new derivative works, said Serena.

“When we looked at it, the actual mashups themselves are actually graphical representations of a workflow, and because they're graphics, you can't use traditional software licensing rules,” said Kyle Arteaga, Serena spokesman. “You're licensing a picture. We had to actually look to the art world to find appropriate licensing.”

In offering free use of the pre-built mashups, Serena hopes to spur adoption of its commercially hosted service for Business Mashups, which will be called Serena Business Mashups and debuts in June.

Creative Commons opens up licensing possibilities so users can copy, adapt, and distribute work, Serena said. The company said this is the first time this model has been applied to business process diagrams or graphical representations.

Serena believes Creative Commons provides an excellent way to encourage innovative use of software; users can take someone's software, give attribution, and build upon it, Arteaga said.

Serena also will provide an online marketplace where “mashers” can find, buy, and sell pre-built Mashups, Web services, and professional services. Called Serena Mashup Exchange, partners and users can collaborate on projects that are individually too small to warrant dedicated IT support but represent opportunity, Serena said.

NEW YORK - Computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows didn’t attract enough attention from Wal-Mart customers, and the chain has stopped selling them in stores, a spokeswoman said Monday.

“This really wasn’t what our customers were looking for,” said Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman Melissa O’Brien.

To test demand for systems with the open-source operating system, Wal-Mart stocked the $199 “Green gPC,” made by Everex of Taiwan, in about 600 stores starting late in October.

Walmart.com, the chain’s e-commerce site, had sold Linux-based computers before and will continue selling the gPC.

This was the first time they appeared on retail shelves.

Paul Kim, brand manager for Everex, said selling the gPC online was “significantly more effective” than selling it in stores.

Wal-Mart sold out the in-store gPC inventory but decided not to restock, O’Brien said. The company does not reveal sales figures for individual items.

Walmart.com now carries an updated version, the gPC2, also for $199, without a monitor. The site also sells a tiny Linux-driven laptop, the Everex CloudBook, for $399.

Linux software is maintained and developed by individuals and companies around the world on an “open source” basis, meaning that everyone has access to the software’s blueprints and can modify them.

There is no licensing fee for Linux, which helps keeps the cost of the Everex PC low. Manufacturers have to pay Microsoft to sell computers with Windows preloaded.

Linux is in widespread use in server computers, but it hasn’t made a dent in the desktop market. Surveys usually put its share of that market around 1 percent, far behind Windows and Apple Inc.’s OS X.

Smaller laptops like the CloudBook could provide an entree for Linux, since it runs well on systems with modest memory and hard drive capacity.

___

On the Net:

http://www.walmart.com

http://www.everex.com

DALLAS - Texas Instruments Inc., which makes chips used in about half the world’s cell phones, lowered its range of expected profits and sales in the first quarter.

The company said Monday it expected to earn between 41 cents and 45 cents per share in the quarter ending March 31, 3 cents lower than the midpoint of a January forecast.

Analysts expected 46 cents per share, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.

Texas Instruments also said sales would total between $3.21 billion and $3.35 billion, or about $130 million below the midpoint of the January estimate. Analysts had forecast $3.40 billion.

Back in January, the company said it would earn 43 cents to 49 cents per share on sales of $3.27 billion to $3.55 billion in the first quarter.

Texas Instruments shares had risen 35 cents, or 1.2 percent, to $29.65 before the first-quarter update. In the first few minutes of extended trading, the shares fell $1.40, or 4.7 percent.

The Dallas-based company had suffered setbacks last year when Nokia Corp., its largest customer, and Sony Ericsson decided to seek other suppliers of chips used in their phones.

Chief Executive Richard Templeton said Friday that the company expected to remain the largest supplier to Nokia.

Texas Instruments sells chips both for low-end mobile phones used in emerging markets such as China and India and for advanced, feature-laden models used in developed countries. The latter are more profitable, although emerging markets offer the potential for heavy sales volumes and trade-up consumers in coming years.

The company also said Monday that its educational unit, which makes the calculators for which the company was once known, would generate first-quarter sales between $70 million and $90 million, unchanged from an earlier forecast.

Texas Instruments also makes chips for digital cameras, televisions and other electronic gadgets.

NEW YORK - How wireless carriers treat data traffic, the big growth driver in their industry, may change with a device Alcatel-Lucent announced Monday.

The Alcatel-Lucent “9900 Wireless Network Guardian” tells carriers how different kinds of traffic tax their networks, according to Michael Schabel, general manager at Alcatel-Lucent Ventures in Murray Hill, N.J.

So far, carriers have focused on the amount of data their subscribers download, and priced plans accordingly. They generally charge by the kilobyte or let subscribers download a certain number of gigabytes in a month. They’ve also prohibited some data-intensive applications.

“These pricing plans are a reflection of the fact that they don’t have an insight into what’s happening on the network,” Schabel said.

That’s because the strains data subscribers place on the wireless network don’t match the amount of data they download, Schabel said.

The new device will tell carriers that some types of traffic, like e-mail and instant messaging, consume up to 1,000 times as much air time as file downloads.

“If I look at mobile e-mail, one megabyte takes two hours of air time,” he said, because the mobile network needs to repeatedly set up and tear down the connection.

In contrast, a 1-megabyte file from a peer-to-peer file-sharing network takes about 30 seconds to download, he estimated.

Workers on the go who connect to their company intranets via so-called virtual private networking consume large amounts of air time, even if they aren’t sending or receiving any data, because the VPN software maintains a “heartbeat” that keeps the connection open, Schabel said.

The new device isn’t set up to connect to billing systems. Alcatel-Lucent sees it primarily as a tool to help carriers to figure out how to deal with data usage — and to build on existing technologies that prioritize data traffic to avoid congestion.

Nadine Manjaro, an analyst at ABI Research, said the new product could take carriers’ understanding of their traffic to a new level.

Peter Jarich, research director at Current Analysis, said it could prove critical for carriers dealing with as-yet-unknown “killer” applications that may create very different traffic patterns from current ones.

The device is the product of three years of research at Bell Labs, the invention engine of the Bell System monopoly phone network and the birthplace of the transistor.

France-based Alcatel took over the New Jersey-based research center with the 2006 acquisition of Lucent Technologies Inc., a successor to AT&T’s equipment-making arm.

Bell Mobility Inc., one of the top carriers in Canada, is trying out the system, with a focus on seeing it can help smooth traffic flows, spokesman Jason Laszlo said.

___

On the Net:

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/WNG

San Francisco - Sun and Microsoft announced two “milestones” Monday in their ongoing alliance, including the official opening of a Sun/Microsoft Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus.

The center is intended to optimize use of Microsoft applications with Sun Fire x64 servers and storage. Also, the companies are announcing availability of Sun Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

The center will provide a setting for hands-on testing and tuning of Sun/Microsoft solutions and help joint customers achieve performance results, Microsoft said. Customers can run key Microsoft applications on Sun x64 servers.

“Additionally, with the new Infrastructure Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Sun's expertise in x64 servers, storage and 64-bit database architectures will enable customers to significantly reduce e-mail TCO and ease the transition to the new 64-bit product,” said Lisa Sieker, Sun vice president of systems marketing, in a statement released by the companies.

The Exchange Server solution is intended to help customers better manage e-mail growth and realize benefits of Exchange Server 2007, the companies said. Pre-tested and end-to-end system and storage configurations allow customers to migrate to Exchange Server 2007 and save as much as 85 percent in rack space. Savings also would be achieved in power and cooling.

Other objectives of the center include promotion of interoperability in such areas as virtualization, Java, systems management and identity, and collaboration. The center will collaborate with authorized Sun Solution Centers.

The Sun/Microsoft center will certify Java Platform Enterprise Edition and Java Platform Standard Edition, including the Java Runtime Environment software for and with Microsoft operating environments and applications. Also, joint work will be done to enable cross-platform server virtualization, including Windows Hyper-V and Sun xVM software.

Cross-company collaboration also will be done to allow Sun Ray thin client software to provide a virtual desktop for Windows.

After years of disputes, Sun and Microsoft announced a broad-based collaboration agreement in 2004.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, the New York Times reported on its Web site on Monday, citing an administration official.

There were no further details of what his involvement may have been.

Spitzer was due to make an announcement at 2:15 p.m. EDT, the Times said.

As state attorney general before being elected governor in November 2006, Spitzer was sometimes called the Sheriff of Wall Street for his prominent role in investigating financial cases.

A Democrat, he entered the governor's office promising reform but soon entered into a conflict with Republican leaders in the state Senate, slowing his agenda.

He has been married to Silva Wall Spitzer since 1987 and they have three daughters.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Eric Walsh)