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NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. are discussing a plan to fund a new wireless Internet venture that would be run by Sprint Nextel Corp. and Clearwire Corp., The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday.

The partnership would create a nationwide network using WiMax technology, which promises faster wireless Web connection speeds for laptops and cell phones than mobile operators’ third-generation networks.

Under the plan, Philadelphia-based Comcast, the nation’s largest cable operator, would put up as much as $1 billion, while No. 2 Time Warner Cable would add $500 million, the Journal reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. Another cable operator, Bright House Networks, would contribute $100 million to $200 million, the Journal said.

Spokesmen for Comcast and Sprint declined to comment when reached by The Associated Press late Tuesday. Representatives of New York-based Time Warner Cable could not immediately be reached for comment.

Sprint, based in Overland Park, Kan., is testing WiMax service in a few markets, and Clearwire, a Kirkland, Wash., startup founded by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw, has its own network based on WiMax technology in some parts of the country. The two companies have been working for months on a joint WiMax venture that would attract funding from WiMax backer Intel Corp.

Google Inc. could also provide funding, the Journal reported.

Under the plan being discussed, the amount of each company’s contribution could change, and it is still possible the entire deal could fall through, the Journal said.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The two largest U.S. cable operators, Comcast Corp and Time Warner Cable Inc, are discussing a plan to fund a new wireless company that would be run by Sprint Nextel Corp and Clearwire Corp, a person familiar with the discussions said on Tuesday.

Comcastis expected to contribute as much as $1 billion for the wireless venture, which would use emerging WiMax technology, the source said. WiMax is a largely unproven technology that promises to support Internet access at speeds up to five times faster than traditional wireless networks, and can support a range of mobile and video applications.

WiMax is a potential substitute for fixed-wire high-speed Internet that, for instance, could be offered across an entire metropolitan region.

Time Warner Cable is expected to put in about $500 million, the source said.

These parties are trying to raise $3 billion for the joint venture, and Intel Corp and Google Inc may be potential funding partners, the person said.

But the talks are still in “very early stages,” the source said.

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday reported that Bright House Networks, the sixth-largest U.S. cable provider, is also involved in the discussions and would provide between $100 million and $200 million for the venture.

The Journal also reported that Intel has also signaled willingness to put in $1 billion or more, and Google Inc could provide hundreds of millions of dollars.

Intel, Sprint, Google and Clearwire officials declined to comment. Officials from Comcast and Time Warner Cable were not immediately available.

Sprint, the No. 3 U.S. mobile service, has said it aims to use WiMax technology to provide wireless connections to consumer electronic devices such as music players and cameras as well as cell phones and laptops.

Sprint, which has been bleeding subscribers amid customer service problems, said recently that it was reviewing its WiMax plans after it was widely criticized by shareholders for a commitment to spend $5 billion to build the high-speed wireless network based on WiMax.

Both Sprint and Clearwire have said they were looking for outside funding for their WiMax networks.

Sprint and Clearwire also said last month they were continuing to talk even after they announced late last year that they ditched an agreement to let customers roam between both companies' WiMax networks.

Meanwhile, cable companies like Comcast are making a push to enter the wireless business to fend off competition from telecom giants such as Verizon Communications. These companies have been snatching traditional cable customers by offering bundled services including high-speed Internet, cell-phone, land-line and video.

(Reporting by Anupreeta Das and Duncan Martell in San Francisco and Yinka Adegoke and Sinead Carew in New York; Editing by Gary Hill)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Dell Inc (DELL.O) said on Tuesday the personal-computer industry was experiencing a shortage of laptop batteries partly because of a recent fire at a major supplier, but the company was working with other suppliers to limit any price increases.

Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker after Hewlett-Packard Co (HPQ.N), also said prices of its separately sold batteries used as replacements or for surplus power had gone up because of the shortage caused partly by the March 3 fire at LG Chem's (051910.KS) Ochang plant.

LG Chem is the second biggest South Korean battery maker. The fire contributed to a worldwide battery shortage that could affect up to 40 percent of second-quarter shipments at Asustek Computer (2357.TW), Taiwan's No. 2 PC maker, an Asustek executive told Reuters earlier on Tuesday.

A spokesman for Round Rock, Texas-based Dell declined to give the percentage of total Dell sales attributable to separately sold battery packs, but the amount is likely to be minimal as Dell's main products are fully assembled desktop and laptop PCs and business server computers.

“We sell battery packs. The prices of those battery packs for people ordering extra batteries have gone up,” Dell spokesman Jess Blackburn said, declining to say by how much.

He added that Dell is “not commenting on what impact, if any, that this is having on the prices of our products,” referring to notebook PCs.

“The industry is experiencing battery supply constraints because of these problems,” Blackburn added. “Therefore, pricing is being impacted by current availability. But we are working with our partners throughout our supply chain to reduce the impact on our customers.

LG Chem competes in the notebook battery business with Samsung SDI (006400.KS) and Japan's Sony Corp (SNE.N) (6758.T), among others. LG Chem has said it expected the Ochang plant to start production again in two to three months.

HP spokesman Mike Hockey said the company is in “regular communication” with LG Chem about the situation.

“The full extent of the impact to HP and other OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) is still being determined,” Hockey said in an e-mailed statement. “We are aggressively working within the battery cell industry to secure additional supply of battery cells.”

Macquarie Securities analyst Daniel Chang said first-quarter notebook battery supply was already constrained and that the fire had driven PC makers to other makers including Sony and Panasonic.

Notebook PCs accounted for 30 percent of revenue in Dell's most recently completed quarter, the same as desktop PCs. Software and peripherals, which include battery packs, made up 17 percent.

PC makers may be able to offset the rising cost of batteries with other components such as PC memory whose prices have been falling.

Citigroup Analyst Glen Yeung wrote in a February 29 report that Dell had likely built up memory inventory in its fiscal fourth quarter ended February 1, before the fire.

“Our checks suggest Dell did build DRAM (computer memory) inventories in their fiscal fourth quarter in response to low DRAM pricing,” Yeung wrote. “Despite commentary from industry players, we suspect downward pricing will persist in March.”

Analysts attributed an increase in Dell's fourth-quarter operating margin to lower prices for components including memory, which fell 40 percent to 45 percent from the fiscal third quarter, according to Citigroup analysts.

(Additional reporting by Sheena Lee in Taipei, editing by Richard Chang)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Mobile phone company Sprint Nextel Corp (S.N), fighting to retain customers, is changing employee bonus plans to double the importance of stopping cancellations, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed on Tuesday.

A short-term incentive plan for company officers sets performance targets for the last three quarters of the year. Churn, or cancellations, counts for 40 percent of the target, while two measures of cash flow and earnings were weighted at 20 percent each and customer care calls were weighted at 20 percent.

In a February filing for the same incentive plan, the weighting of churn was 20 percent. In addition, 30 percent of the incentive was based on a measure of operating income, the number of calls for customer care was 30 percent, and a type of subscriber additions was 20 percent.

Sprint Nextel posted a $29.45 billion fourth quarter loss in February due to a huge goodwill write-off and forecast the loss of more its customers.

(Reporting by Peter Henderson; editing by Carol Bishopric)

BOSTON (Reuters) - Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N) Chief Executive Marc Benioff will make “some important announcements” at a company gathering next month in San Francisco, the software maker disclosed in an invitation issued on Tuesday.

“Marc Benioff will be hosting a special event and making some important announcements on April 14,” the invitation says.

Company spokesman Bruce Francis declined to say what topics Benioff will discuss.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle; editing by Carol Bishopric)

The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher today posted what some insiders are telling her may come next with the Yahoo/Microsoft buyout drama. One source (which she doesn't name) says Yahoo will likely call Microsoft to negotiate terms within 14 days. While that's not a universal consensus, Swisher writes that she expects such a call will happen, and that the only realistic barrier to the buyout in the wake of Yahoo's ho-hum roadshow is the Justice Department stepping in.  Not a likely event, she says. Sobering stuff, given that a Microhoo could drastically change the Webscape for consumers and business alike, though I couldn't predict just how.

In other Yahoo news, the company changed their home page design to once again put their logo in the top center instead of the upper left. A blogoscoped.com post looks at the change and compares it with past designs from the 90s through today.

WASHINGTON - With its winning $4.7 billion bid last week, Verizon Wireless didn’t just stake claim to beachfront wireless property, it also grabbed control of the guest list to the open-access party.

The government, in opening up the coveted swath of the spectrum, essentially said the winner must allow consumers to use any compatible device or software on it as long as it doesn’t harm the network.

But analysts said the open-access playground comes with restrictions and Verizon Wireless, as the winner, will be the one making the rules and setting the schedule.

“It’s unreasonable to expect these guys to go radically changing their business models if they successfully defended the gaggle from encroachment, from the Googles and Comcasts of the world,” said John Jackson, wireless analyst with the Yankee Group.

Carriers, such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc., have a tight grip on devices and applications that operate on their networks, selling and supporting a limited line of products through their retail stores and partners. Carriers claimed this ensures better service for customers.

The open-access rules are designed to loosen that grip, giving way to more products, innovation and competition. After first fighting the rules, Verizon Wireless has apparently already warmed up to them, and is set to apply them to the rest of its existing network, even before it gets access to the new spectrum.

But with Verizon in a gatekeeper’s role, analysts and others say they expect an incremental improvement in the overall wireless landscape.

“This won’t immediately change much for the average consumer buying an average phone,” said Avi Greengart, research director for mobile devices at consulting firm Current Analysis.

Verizon Wireless won nearly every license for the open-access block of airwaves, one-third of spectrum sold in the record-setting $19.6 billion auction that ended last week. The spectrum is being freed as part of the switch to digital television in February 2009.

Consumer advocates and tech entrepreneurs said the Federal Communications Commission wasted an opportunity by not requiring the winner to lease airwaves to competitors.

However, Verizon Wireless has committed to selling wholesale access to its current network, with pricing based on customer usage, and will presumably apply the same model to the new spectrum.

The agency, including its Republican chairman, Kevin Martin, last year imposed the open-access conditions for devices and software on the desirable block. To that end, it may free up handset makers, such as Nokia Corp. and Motorola Inc., to offer devices directly to the consumer rather than through a carrier.

“The macro point here is it just opens things up to hopefully more innovation, more creativity from more diverse sources,” said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus.

Importantly, Verizon Wireless hasn’t announced how much it will charge for access to its network, raising the prospect of preferential treatment for its own devices.

It’s possible, said Greengart that consumers would have no reason to buy a higher-priced device directly from another company when it can get the same or similar device that Verizon Wireless offers for less or free in its service plans.

But the company has also said that it expects open access to reduce its costs, since sales and customer support will be handled by whoever is selling the devices, not by Verizon Wireless.

The country’s second largest carrier behind AT&T with 66 million customers, Verizon Wireless initially lobbied against all open-access provisions, even challenging the FCC’s agreed-upon conditions in court before dropping the lawsuit in October.

Analysts said the company did an about-face when open access started gaining regulatory traction and winning public opinion. By the end of 2008, Verizon Wireless will allow new devices and applications on its current network as long as they meet minimal technical standards. The company said this will spur innovation and position the company for new growth, which had $44 billion in revenue last year.

The Basking Ridge, N.J.-based company, a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc. and British telecom company Vodafone Group PLC, declined an interview because it is still under FCC anti-collusion rules that prevent discussing the auction. Those rules will be lifted April 3.

The network based on the new spectrum will likely emerge in two years in some cities under government buildout rules, but a nationwide rollout may take a decade.

Critics said the more ambitious condition — also pushed by Google Inc. — to require the winner to lease airwaves to competitors would have given consumers a third option for broadband service besides cable and telephone lines.

“That’s the biggie,” said Ben Scott, policy director for Free Press, a nonpartisan public interest research group. But he said Verizon Communications, which owns a majority of Verizon Wireless and is the dominant DSL provider in the country, isn’t going to create a product to compete with itself.

At least one technology entrepreneur isn’t expecting much from the open network.

Amol Sarva, a former executive at wireless company Virgin Mobile USA Inc., said the auction just concentrated more power among the top two carriers, giving Verizon Wireless an opportunity to shut out innovative applications that may compete against its products. The entrepreneur plans to launch a mobile e-mail startup, Peek, this summer, but not in partnership with either Verizon Wireless or AT&T.

Sarva, who’s testified for open-access conditions before Congress, said he fears that meeting the network’s minimal specifications may be laced with “asterisks and fine print” designed to prevent competition.

“Until it can really be demonstrated to be different, there’s too much history of these guys making these bogus moves to believe it,” he said.

San Francisco - The unpopularity of the United States has IT users in foreign countries happy to use open-source software, Red Hat President/CEO Jim Whitehurst said at the InfoWorld Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

This way, they do not have to pay “intellectual property taxes” to American companies, he said. Outside the United States, open source is seen from a public policy perspective as a fundamental good, Whitehurst said.

“I never thought I would say this but actually, being very unpopular in the world, as frankly the U.S. is these days, is a huge benefit to open source,” because people are resentful of sending billions of dollars back to the U.S. in IP taxes, Whitehurst said. They also do not want to pay it to Western Europe, he said.

[ Checkout InfoWorld's open-source roundtable discussion ]

Whitehurst said he has met with government officials in countries like Russia and China. Moving to a model not shackled by U.S. IP laws is extraordinary, he said.

But an audience member asked if Red Hat, when meeting with officials in countries not wanting to pay American companies, urges them to follow the GNU GPL (General Public License) and share code. “There is a ton of GPL violations going on,” the audience member said.

Whitehurst responded he did not see some deep conspiracy over this issue but stressed the relative newness of the problem. “Absolutely it's an issue we need to watch and to manage,” he said.

Whitehurst also discussed Red Hat's business model, which relies on subscriptions and support. “Fundamentally, our business model is to create enterprise editions of open source projects,” he said. “We have created an enterprise version of Linux that you can sleep on [at] night knowing that it does not go down,” he said. Open source also means having to work every day to keep customers happy, Whitehurst said.

More needs to be done to get enterprises involved in the open-source community, Whitehurst said. “We do a lousy job of getting enterprises involved in the community,” he said.

Whitehurst said Red Hat has an 80-plus percent share in Linux with a little more than $500 million in revenues. “The dollars in open source relative to what we do are relatively small,” he said.

Also at the conference Tuesday, officials from several open-source ventures, serving on a panel about the future of open source, contended that a turbulent economy was good for open source.

“I do think it's going to be good,” said Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO of Ingres. “The question is when will the benefits come.”

But resulting IT staff layoffs during economic downtimes means fewer people are able to start an incremental project, he said. MySQL's Zack Urlocker, vice president of products, countered that project teams without a budget will just find open-source software to get their projects going. “Sometimes the CIOs or CEOs just aren't even aware of it,” he said.

Belt-tightening will be good for innovation and particularly for open source, said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu. “I think the absence of money is the biggest spur to innovation than the presence of money,” he said.??

Open-source attributes were pointed out, such as lower acquisition and maintenance costs, freedom from vendor lock-in, and access to community developed customizations. The use of open source is becoming a first option, according to Shuttleworth. “I think we're pretty close to the point where proprietary software has to be justified instead of the other way around,” he said.

During an introduction to the conference, Matt Asay, vice president of development at at Alfresco, pointed out that roughly $2 billion has been invested in open-source software since 2000 and in one year, it has all been given back through acquisitions like Sun's $1 billion acquisition of MySQL.

Open source has moved beyond CRM and content management systems, Assay said. “Can open source innovate? I think the answer is demonstrably yes,” he said.

At another panel session the future of the operating system, Google's computing model, in which everything is hosted on the Internet and accessed via a thin-client browser, was questioned by an Intel official

“The Google model really scares me,” said Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open-source technologist at Intel. The model gives a third party control of data, which cannot be accessed on an airplane, he noted.

Sun's James Hughes, chief technologist for Solaris, said very large companies are looking at outsourcing their applications to Google but he has not seen it actually happen. “I don???t see anybody doing it, but maybe they will,” he said.

Hughes also pointed out differences between Solaris and Linux, which are vying in the open source OS space. “There's than one OS out there, and if Solaris strives to be Linux, why bother,” Hughes said. Solaris is differentiated by features like DTrace, for dynamic tracing, he said.

“In general, I don???t see it as Unix versus Linux versus whatever. We've gone to a model of open source,” Hughes said. Solaris, though, has had a challenge because it underwent 20 years of closed-source development before going the open-source route, he said.

The nonprofit group behind Wikipedia, the mammoth Internet encyclopedia built by volunteers, is getting its largest donation ever — $3 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The award, to come in $1 million installments over each of the next three years, will help the Wikimedia Foundation become more financially secure as it hires more staff and seeks to improve the quality and reach of Wikipedia content, foundation leaders said.

“We think it will pave the way towards more donations as it is a signal that a major foundation sees good in what we are doing,” said Jimmy Wales, the project’s leader and a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation. “And it should take away a lot of the questions people have had about whether we will need advertising to survive.”

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia is now the seventh-most popular Web site in the U.S., according to comScore Inc. More than half the Wikimedia Foundation’s $4.6 million budget covers the servers and Internet bandwidth to handle all that traffic. It also supports Wikipedias in dozens of other languages and affiliated free projects such as dictionaries and news sites.

The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation said it would use the Sloan grant for software enhancements, including one that make it easier for Wikipedia editors to grade article quality. Wikimedia leaders also envision doing more outreach to new contributors and creating educational content for people without computers.

Doron Weber, a Sloan Foundation representative, said in a statement that Wikipedia “represents a quantum leap” in the collection and organization of knowledge.

Relying largely on small, individual donations, The Wikimedia Foundation saw cash contributions jump to $2.2 million last year from $1.3 million in the prior year. But foundation leaders have been looking for sturdier mechanisms of support to ensure the group’s long-term survival. It does not have an endowment fund.

The group also recently lined up $1 million in gifts from anonymous sources. Those donors were introduced to the group by Roger McNamee, a prominent venture capitalist who himself has given at least $300,000, which raised questions about whether investors might try to capitalize on Wikipedia’s brand name in a for-profit side business. Wales has said no such venture is planned.

___

On the Net:

http://www.wikimedia.org

IBM is among the investors participating in a $10 million boost for open-source vendor EnterpriseDB, which offers enterprise-class products based on PostgreSQL. Also investing are Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures and Valhalla Partners, the company announced at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.

The influx is the latest step in EnterpriseDB's relationship with IBM. The companies have worked together on versions of EnterpriseDB's Advanced Server product for Linux on IBM System z mainframes and for AIX on IBM System p servers.

“This latest round of investment in EnterpriseDB is an acknowledgment of our business model, technical innovation, and emergence as a leading force in the PostgreSQL community, including our work in the areas of database compatibility and performance,” said Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB CEO.

Oracle Competitor

IBM hailed the investment as part of its long-standing commitment to open source. “Global organizations of all sizes rely upon open-source technologies to free information from proprietary silos and use it in innovative ways across their businesses,” said Inna Kuznetsova, IBM's director of Linux strategy

The new investment brings total venture funding for four-year-old EnterpriseDB to $37.5 million. EnterpriseDB now boasts 200 enterprise companies and will be profitable within a year, Astor said.

EnterpriseDB is positioned as cheaper but competitive with industrial-strength Oracle and more powerful than the free open-source MySQL database. Sun recently purchased MySQL for $1 billion.

IBM's investment in EnterpriseDB “can be seen as a slap of sorts at the Sun acquisition,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, in a telephone interview.

“EnterpriseDB was a direct competitor of MySQL,” King noted. “EnterpriseDB feels theirs is the better offering, especially for transactional environments.” When Sun acquired MySQL, it left EnterpriseDB as the only free-standing, enterprise-class open-source offering.

Deep Open-Source Roots

IBM called the investment “another example of IBM's long-standing commitment to open standards.” But while IBM has been a key supporter of Linux, its actual investments in open-source companies have been rather thin.

In 2003, IBM invested $50 million in Novell. In 2005, it bought the open-source application server company GlueCode. In 2006, IBM released a free low-end version of its flagship DB2 database, but that version remains closed.

That's actually a smart approach, King said. “It makes a great deal of sense for IBM to support a range of open-source developers,” he added.

With Sun's acquisition of MySQL, “it's important for IBM to show support for EnterpriseDB, which may not have had the wherewithal to compete with Sun,” he said. “It's a way to make sure diversity in the market continues.”

Overall, the market for open-source databases “appears to be growing,” King said. “MySQL has had some success and EnterpriseDB, I think, is right behind them. As with any middleware platform, success largely depends on the ISVs and application developers you can bring over to the platform.”

The market is growing rapidly — as much as 40 to 50 percent by some analysts' estimates — and it's “nowhere near a mature market,” King said.