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DENVER (Billboard) - Leave it to the gadget industry to turn concern over electronic waste into a sales opportunity. Simply put, they're offering to buy back old devices to recycle or resell, in return for cash or in-store credit.

Coming to consumer electronic retailers nationwide this spring is the ecoNEW program from NEW Customer Service Cos., the company that provides extended warranty plans and protection programs for such retailers as Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

Under the program, consumers can return any electronics products they own to participating retailers (which have not yet been announced) — even if they weren't purchased at the store. In return they'll receive an in-store credit gift card for a predetermined amount based on the type and condition of the device. EcoNEW handles all the collection and evaluation details and issues the gift cards directly.

Another company, TechForward, offers a guaranteed buyback program similar to the optional extended warranty services offered by many consumer electronic retail stores. But instead of buying extra coverage in case the product breaks, the consumer buys insurance of sorts against future upgrades.

TechForward vice president of operations Marc Lebovitz says the program enjoys a 12 percent conversion rate on the devices covered. Close to 70 percent of the devices covered under the plan are returned for the agreed-upon fee.

Both ecoNEW and TechForward then evaluate the condition of the devices returned, wipe clean the hard drives and either resell the refurbished devices online via used MP3 sites or eBay or harvest the components and sell them as salvage parts.

The money gained from this process pays for the rewards given to the customer. While TechForward hopes the difference will make a tidy profit, ecoNEW will be happy to just break even.

“It's not necessarily the revenue opportunity, because frankly it's not that great,” NEW senior VP of strategy and corporate development Kevin Porter says. “If you look at the margins … they're razor thin. Until we have more experience on the flow rate of product, we're not quite sure yet if this will be a positive moneymaker. We're hoping to at least make it neutral.”

The benefit, ultimately, comes in encouraging more sales.

“It allows people to purchase now with more confidence,” Lebovitz says. “Sometimes people will wait to make a purchase because they know a new device will come out in three or six months. This allows them to purchase now and know they can upgrade to the new one whenever they're ready.”

But environmental responsibility is also a driving factor, and both companies are gambling that end-of-life programs like these will become more profitable in the years ahead as demand increases for safe disposal programs for consumer electronic products.

Following is a quick snapshot of companies providing buyback programs.

TechForward

How it works: Customers buy the plan at point of purchase for a guaranteed rate, then return the item using the program's free packaging and shipping.

Supporting stores: Los Angeles-area independent electronics stores

Cost to consumer: About $9 for MP3 players, more for other devices

Reward rate for an MP3 player: The guaranteed buyback on an iPod Touch is $240 for a 3-month-old device, $190 for up to six months and $160 for up to a year. Prices may vary if the units are damaged or inoperable.

ecoNEW

How it works: Customers fill out an online survey detailing what devices they want to get rid of and the condition of the product, and ecoNEW provides an estimate for the buyback, as well as free shipping.

Supporting stores: To be announced, but warranty clients include Best Buy and Wal-Mart

Cost to consumer: None

Reward rate for an MP3 player: $20-$60 range depending on model; in-store credit only

Apple

How it works: Customers can return iPods to any Apple store for a discount on a new iPod bought that day. Also offers a mail-in recycling program for iPods and mobile phones.

Supporting stores: All Apple retail locations

Cost to consumer: None

Reward rate for an MP3 player: 10 percent discount on new iPods when returning to the store. No reward if mailed in.

Reuters/Billboard

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Gibson Guitar said on Friday that it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Viacom Inc's (VIAb.N) MTV networks, Harmonix and Electronic Arts (ERTS.O) relating to the wildly popular “Rock Band” video game and Harmonix's previously developed game, “Guitar Hero.”

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Tennessee, relates to the same patent involved in another suit Gibson filed earlier against various retailers of “Guitar Hero,” a competitor to “Rock Band,” the Tennessee-based guitar maker said in a statement.

The “Guitar Hero” series, published by Activision (ATVI.O)), has sold more than 14 million units in North America and raked in more than $1 billion since its 2005 debut, while “Rock Band” is a newer rival.

Gibson said the games, in which players use a guitar-shaped controller in time with notes on a television screen, violate a 1999 patent for technology to simulate a musical performance.

Harmonix developed the first “Guitar Hero” game and was later bought by MTV. Electronic Arts publishes “Rock Band” and another company, Activision Inc, as well as several retailers, either develop, distribute or sell one or several of the games in the “Guitar Hero” series.

“This lawsuit is completely without merit and we intend to defend it vigorously,” Harmonix said in a statement.

A spokesperson for Electronic Arts could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month, Activision filed a preemptive suit against Gibson, which had complained that the games infringe upon one of its patents.

Activision filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. District Court for Central California to declare Gibson's patent invalid and to bar it from seeking damages.

Gibson, whose electric guitars are used by legendary blues and rock artists such as Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Slash, has been a high-profile partner in the “Guitar Hero” games.

Activision licensed the rights to model its video controllers on Gibson guitar models and to use their likenesses in the game.

Activision has said that by waiting three years to raise its claim, Gibson had granted an implied license for any technology.

(Editing by Christian Wiessner)

PARIS (AFP) - US Internet giant Yahoo! denied Saturday posting on its websites pictures of 19 people wanted by the Chinese authorities for protesting in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

“Contrary to media reports, Yahoo! Inc. is not displaying images on its web sites of individuals wanted by Chinese authorities in connection with the recent unrest in Tibet,” it said in a statement sent to AFP in Paris.

“We are looking into this matter with Alibaba Group, the company that controls ChinaYahoo!,” the company said.

China on Friday released a list and photos of what it called the 19 most-wanted Lhasa rioters as it vowed to punish those responsible for last week's violence in the Tibetan capital.

The photos, which appeared on top websites in China, were taken from grainy footage shot during the unrest which exploded through the city on March 14.

The state-controlled Tibet Daily later said two of the 19 alleged perpetrators had already been taken into custody. It also provided a hotline number for information from the public on those still at large.

Chinese police and armed forces have clamped down firmly on the unrest, which spilled into Tibetan-populated neighbouring provinces, amid warnings by overseas activist groups of harsh reprisals, including torture, against protesters.

Tibetan groups say the unrest was sparked when Lhasa police used tear gas to break up protests led by Buddhist monks last week to mark the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.

But China has insisted the violence was orchestrated by the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, a figure beloved in Tibet but reviled in Beijing as a separatist.

The Dalai Lama has denied any involvement and has repeatedly said he is not seeking independence for his homeland.

China maintains that only 13 people have died in the unrest, all “innocent civilians” killed by rioters. It denies security forces killed any protesters.

However Tibet's government-in-exile has put the “confirmed” death toll from a week of unrest across the Himalayan region and neighbouring provinces at 99, while the exiled Tibetan parliament in India has said “hundreds” may have died.

“Yahoo! deplores the use of the Internet to suppress freedom of expression,” the statement said.

“We are a company founded on the principle that promoting access to information can fundamentally improve people's lives and enhance their relationship with the world around them.”

Imagine a man you know but whose name you can't remember approaches you, and your mobile phone uses face-recognition capability to give you his name and information about him before he says hello. This is the kind of application that researchers hope will be developed from US$20 million Microsoft and Intel are giving two U.S. universities for research on parallel computing.

The companies are donating the money to UniversalParallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRCs) at the University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, they announced at a news conference on Tuesday. The centers are aimed at tackling the challenges of programming for processors that have more than one core and so can carry out more than one set of program instructions at a time, a scenario known as parallel computing.

In addition to the $20 million, the University of Illinois will provide $8 million to fund its center, and UC Berkeley has applied for $7 million in grants for its research.

UC Berkeley quietly opened its Parallel Computing Lab in January, according to a UC Berkeley Web site. The lab was born out of research done there and published in a white paper by researchers at Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department in 2006.

In the paper, they said the current evolution of programming models from single-core to the dual-core and quad-core processors available today from Intel and AMD won't work for a future where processors could have as many as 16, 32 or hundreds of processors. They set out to find a better way to develop programming models to meet the challenges of multi-core chips.

UC Berkeley's David Patterson, a professor of computer science and director of the UPCRC, described the problem as one of designing programs to take advantage of parallel computing's ability to divvy up workloads across different processors. On Tuesday's conference call, he compared the scenario to dividing the work of writing one story between 16, or even hundreds, of reporters. While the work could potentially be done 16– or even hundreds of times– faster, “we won't get to deliver on that performance without balancing the work well,” he said.

Microsoft's and Intel's interest in parallel computing is not merely altruistic– both companies already are doing their own research so they can take advantage of the computing power that comes with multi-core technology, and thus gain a competitive advantage in their respective software and processor markets. The agendas of the research centers will align closely with Intel's Tera-scale Computing Research Program and Microsoft's Technical Computing Initiative, the companies said.

As for some of the real-world applications of parallel computing, Patterson and Marc Snir, professor of computer science at the University of Illinois, said if researchers can use programming to harness the capabilities of multi-core machines, it will give mobile devices the computing performance that today comes only from supercomputers.

Patterson described the scenario in which a mobile phone might use face-recognition technology to save someone– he used himself as an example– from an embarrassing situation of not knowing a person's name. “I'd personally be excited to buy a cell phone that has that technology,” because this is a situation he often encounters as a university professor, Patterson said.

Fourteen members from the UC Berkeley faculty, as well as 50 doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers, will staff the UPCRC, while the center at the University of Illinois will be led by Snir and Wen-Mei Hwu, professor of electrical and computer engineering. Twenty additional faculty members and 26 graduate students and researchers also will participate in research at the Illinois center. Both centers will make software available to the technology community for additional development.

While there are only dual-core and quad-core processors available today, Intel plans to release a six-core processor, code-named Dunnington, in the second half of this year, and an eight-core processor, called Nehalem, at some point in the future.

A former education consultant from California has been sentenced to serve seven and a half years in prison for rigging bids and defrauding a U.S. government program designed to help schools and libraries in poor areas connect to the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice announced last week.

Judy N. Green, of Temecula, California, was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco. A jury there found her guilty on 22 counts of fraud, bid rigging and conspiracy to commit wire fraud relating to technology projects funded by the E-Rate program. Green served as a consultant for E-Rate programs in Arkansas, California, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin.

In September, Green was convicted of using schemes to defraud the E-Rate program of funds by inflating the cost of equipment and services in order to pay for ineligible equipment and services, the DOJ said. Green also misrepresented schools' ability and willingness to pay their portions of the cost of the projects, the DOJ said.

Green also rigged the bids on projects in favor of vendors who had relationships with her, according to the DOJ. Green's fraud and bid-rigging schemes involved more than 25 projects from 1998 to 2003, the DOJ said.

The DOJ Antitrust Division has an ongoing investigation into fraud and anticompetitive conduct in the E-Rate program. Six companies and 12 individuals have either pleaded guilty, have been convicted or entered civil settlements, and they have been fined or agreed to pay about US$40 million. Trials are pending in three E-Rate cases, and one defendant is an international fugitive, the DOJ said.

WASHINGTON - Satellite-television provider DirecTV Group Inc. spent more than $1.2 million in 2007 to lobby on the nation’s switch next year from an analog to a digital TV format.

Broadcasters, cable operators and satellite providers are in the midst of an advertising campaign to educate consumers about the transition scheduled for Feb. 17, 2009.

Cable and satellite companies say viewers will be unaffected by the transition because they will provide devices that will work with old analog TVs. But viewers who get free, over-the-air programming will need to buy converter boxes now available in stores. The government is providing coupons to consumers to help pay for such devices.

DirecTV spent $600,000 in the second half of 2007 to lobby Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration, according to a disclosure form posted online Feb. 14 by the Senate’s public records office. It also lobbied on indecent programming, Internet tax legislation and free trade matters.

The company spent $640,000 in the first six months of 2007 to lobby on largely the same issues.

Lobbyists are required to disclose activities that could influence members of the executive and legislative branches, under a federal law enacted in 1995.

Hewlett-Packard at the end of the month will start offering virtualization technology from Citrix and VMware in ProLiant servers, a move that reflects a trend among hardware makers to offer computers with preinstalled software for consolidating business applications.

HP said Thursday that it would offer customers 64-bit ProLiant machines with the Citrix XenServer hypervisor. The announcements followed by about a month similar plans unveiled for VMware. HP customers will have a choice between the two virtualization environments starting March 31.

HP also plans to offer ProLiant and BladeSystem servers with Microsoft's Hyper-V Server software. Microsoft's technology for consolidating multiple software servers on a single physical server is expected to ship this year. The software maker released a near-final test version of Hyper-V this month.

HP plans to offer its own management tools as the interface for the third-party virtualization environments. Virtualization enables companies to consolidate applications that run on different platforms on a single server, making better use of the hardware's processing power.

“Citrix and HP share the belief that virtualization should be a natural extension of the hardware platform,” Peter Levine, senior VP and general manager of Citrix's virtualization and management division, said in a statement.

HP rival Dell is also moving aggressively to offer virtualization technology to customers. Dell and VMware have a partnership in which the latter company's software is jointly tested and certified on Dell PowerEdge Servers and Dell/EMC storage products.

Along with server consolidation in the data center, companies such as Citrix Systems, Sun Microsystems, and VMware are also pushing technology to virtualize PC and Linux desktops on a central server and to make those environments accessible by employees using a notebook, desktop, or smartphone.

See original article on InformationWeek.com

DENVER (Billboard) - Search for an artist on any of the popular search engines, and the top three results are practically guaranteed: the artist's official Web site, Wikipedia entry and MySpace page — often in that order.

But while artists and their handlers devote massive attention to the Web site and MySpace, the Wikipedia page is often overlooked. Recent data suggests they may want to reconsider their priorities.

According to data provided to Billboard from Yahoo — the second-most popular search engine on the Web after Google — those searching for artist information are selecting the Wikipedia entry link over artists' MySpace pages by a factor of more than 2-to-1. The Wikipedia entries are also more popular than artists' Web sites.

“The interest that people had to go to MySpace to find out more about their favorite band is waning in favor of going to Wikipedia,” Yahoo head of programming and label relations John Lenac says. “In the last six months, it's surpassed it.”

Yet when compared with the number of artist profiles on MySpace, Wikipedia entries are noticeably fewer. MySpace claims 3 million artist profiles. Wikipedia does not have an exact count of artist entries, but estimates that it's in the “tens of thousands,” according to Wikipedia Foundation head of communications Jay Walsh.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

What's more, because of Wikipedia's low profile relative to the MySpace hype machine, many artists and their managers remain ignorant of the resources available to them.

“There's been many people I've talked to that didn't even know they could upload a Wikipedia page,” Lenac says. “There's been some managers that didn't even know what it was.”

For those in the latter category, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that relies on everyday users to submit the information listed about a given topic, using a collaborative software system known as “wiki.” It contains more than 7 million articles in 200 languages and receives some 300 million page views per day. Anyone can contribute to a given article, BUT they must first past muster from a team of volunteer editors with a particular passion about the subject before the text appears live.

The result is a rather tight, focused and vetted overview of the subject, which some online marketing experts feel is why fans are selecting Wikipedia over other options.

“Wikipedia is a fantastic landing page,” says Jason Feinberg, owner/president of On Target Media Group, a Web promotions consultancy. “It's so clear, so concise, and it's standardized. That's something I think is a draw over MySpace, where you never quite know the experience you're going to get. Is it going to be a horrible jumble of images and video and text that's difficult to read? Also, (Wikipedia is) rooted in fact. It's not promotional. Especially these days when the Internet is full of artists trying to essentially ram their message down your throat, I think a fan is a lot more receptive to a simple, no-hype approach.”

But don't expect to see Wikipedia offering full-song streams or links to buy digital songs anytime soon.

“That's not what we're about,” Walsh says. “We're about knowledge. We're about bringing the reader to other free content … content they can use and enjoy without worrying about violating any copyrights.”

Reuters/Billboard