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SAN FRANCISCO - Intel Corp. unveiled new features for its line of low-cost laptops for schools Wednesday, adding bigger screens and more data storage capacity as the chip maker ratchets up its rivalry with the One Laptop per Child organization, which sells a competing machine.

Intel’s new Classmate PCs — slated to go on sale in April for between $300 and $500 — reflect the company’s growing efforts to sell computers equipped with its own chips to schools in developing countries, a battleground for technology companies because of the millions of people there just coming online.

But the target market has expanded to include kids in the U.S. as potential users of cheaper, stripped-down machines.

Classmate PCs also are part of Intel’s push to generate interest in a new class of mobile devices the company is calling “netbooks,” which are smaller and have fewer functions than standard laptops but also use far less power and are easier to carry around.

Other tweaks to the Classmate that Intel announced Wednesday from its developer forum in Shanghai include the availability of both 7-inch and 9-inch screens, a 30 gigabyte hard disk drive and an integrated Web camera.

At the developer forum, Intel executives also rolled out five new processors under the “Atom” brand name. The chips are designed for pocket-size Internet devices. The chips come in speeds up to 1.86 gigahertz while using less than 3 watts of power.

Intel said its Classmate PCs will eventually use Atom processors.

Classmates are based on Intel’s design and include its processors, but they are built by other manufacturers and sold under a variety of brand names. The first generation went on sale in March 2007 with the 7-inch screen and fewer functions. Intel said it has sold “tens of thousands” of the machines but declined to provide more specific data.

Intel and OLPC have feuded furiously over their competing products.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit OLPC says it has sold hundreds of thousands of its $188 machines.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff’s low-cost XO laptop includes a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc., the world’s No. 2 microprocessor maker behind Intel.

A short-lived truce between Intel and OLPC ended earlier this year when Intel suddenly pulled out from OLPC’s board of directors.

Intel claimed it couldn’t continue cooperating with OLPC when founder Nicholas Negroponte demanded Intel stop selling Classmates overseas. Negroponte said the dispute stemmed from Intel sales reps disparaging OLPC products while pushing Intel’s own machines.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Oops! … She may be doing it again. Britney Spears is in talks to reprise her highly rated and critically praised guest-starring role on the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” TV Guide magazine's Web site reported on Wednesday.

TVGuide.com cited multiple sources as saying producers are seeking her return for at least one more episode as a dermatology office assistant named Abby, who falls for the show's lead character, Ted, played by Josh Radnor.

The report quoted one insider as saying, “It all depends on her availability.”

CBS and the studio that produces the show, 20th Century Fox Television, declined comment on the report.

Spears' appearance on “Mother” last month drew 10.6 million viewers — up from its season-to-date average of 7.8 million, according to Nielsen Media Research.

Her performance also elicited mostly positive reviews, providing the singer with a rare bit of upbeat publicity amid a torrent of marital, health and legal woes in recent years. And she said in a statement issued weeks ago while shooting her scenes that she was “having a blast.”

It was her first prime-time acting role since she made a guest spot in March 2006 playing a Christian conservative talk show host on “Will & Grace.”

Spears, 26, rose to fame as a child star on the Disney channel and scored numerous hit songs as a teenager, including, “Oops … I Did It Again.”

In 2002, she was named the world's top celebrity by Forbes magazine after earning $39.2 million in a single year.

But in late 2006, Spears split from her second husband, Kevin Federline. Since then she has been in and out of rehab, lost custody of her two young sons to Federline, and was hospitalized twice in January for psychiatric evaluation.

Her highly publicized comeback performance on the MTV Video Music Awards in September last year was widely panned as a flop. Her new album, “Blackout,” debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 last November, but quickly slid down the chart.

(Reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Dean Goodman)

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Yahoo on Wednesday unveiled enhanced oneSearch software that lets people surf the Internet by speaking into their mobile telephones.

Along with letting people make online queries by saying what they are looking for, the application features an “assistant” for written searches that deduces what people want from the first few letters typed.

“With Yahoo oneSearch 2.0, we are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones,” said Yahoo's Connected Life division vice president Marco Boerries.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007, according to Boerries.

The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

Yahoo rivals Google and Microsoft, along with US telecom giants AT&T and Verizon, offer toll-free numbers that US mobile telephone users can call to get business contact information gleaned from the Internet.

Google's ad-supported service at 1.800.GOOG.411 offers to connect callers free to businesses and even email them directions.

TORONTO (Reuters) - BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM.TO)(RIMM.O) reported a higher fourth-quarter profit on Wednesday that topped expectations, and delivered a strong outlook that suggested the company is comfortably weathering the slowdown in the U.S. economy.

RIM's shares, which roughly tripled in 2007 but have stagnated since the start of this year, rose 6 percent in after-hours trading as investors reacted to the results, which were also lauded by analysts.

The company said it earned $412.5 million, or 72 cents a share, in the three months ended March 1. That was up from a profit of $187.4 million, or 33 cents a share, in the same period a year earlier.

That beat a forecast made by the company in February, when it told the market to expect earnings of 66 to 70 cents a share, and sent RIM shares higher in after-hours Nasdaq trade.

For the upcoming first quarter, the company said it expects revenue of $2.23 billion to $2.3 billion and a profit of 82 cents to 86 cents a share — better than the 77 cents expected by analysts, according to Reuters Estimates.

Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek said the “monster” results are even stronger because of RIM's first-quarter forecasts in the face of a faltering U.S. economy.

“What's impressive is that, given the macro environment that they know about, they guided this strong,” he said.

Some analysts have raised concerns that job losses in corporate America would lead to slower sales of the BlackBerry, a staple device of most executives. As well, observers have warned that companies and big government departments could delay upgrading to newer versions of RIM's smartphone lineup.

“To achieve these numbers in what looks like a U.S. recession is a big positive surprise for investors, many of whom had worried that a slowdown would hurt RIM,” said Duncan Stewart, president of Duncan Stewart Asset Management Inc. in Toronto.

RIM's shares haven't made much progress this year as investors weighed the potential impact of the slowing U.S. economy and stiffer competition from the likes of Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Motorola (MOT.N) and Nokia (NOK.N).

However, in the wake of Wednesday's earnings report, the shares rallied 6 percent from their regular session close of $115.79 on Nasdaq to hit $122.90 in after-hours trade.

The after-hours rise was relatively muted when compared to reactions in prior quarters, when the stock has jumped more than 10 percent, implying investors remain cautious despite the strong results.

The stock closed at C$117.63 in Toronto, down C$2.47 or 2 percent.

RIM co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie said strong growth in the consumer market during the quarter was helped by telecom company promotions that lured more users to multimedia-rich models of the BlackBerry, such as the Pearl.

He added: “It is important to note we did not see any evidence of slowdown in our enterprise business outside of normal seasonal trends.”

National Bank Financial analyst Deepak Chopra characterized the results as “very strong” on all fronts and said RIM was benefiting from wireless carriers increasingly looking to data revenue from services like text messaging and wireless e-mail to supplement voice revenues.

“I think obviously we always have to be conscious of the economic downturn,” he said. “But I think the secular trend of data more or less remains intact.”

RIM said it added 2.18 million subscribers during the quarter, on the high end of its earlier predictions, and that the total number of BlackBerry subscribers has surpassed 14 million.

The Waterloo, Ontario-based company said revenue more than doubled to $1.88 billion from $930.4 million a year earlier.

(Additional reporting by Ritsuko Ando; editing by Peter Galloway)

SAN FRANCISCO - Facing prickly questions about possible conflicts of interest, Google Inc. will sell a service called Performics — acquired as part of DoubleClick Inc. — that helps Web sites improve their ranking on Google’s search engine.

The decision, announced Wednesday, comes three weeks after the search leader’s $3.2 billion takeover of online ad service DoubleClick.

Owning Performics thrust Google into an uncomfortable position because the service devises technical tricks to highlight Web sites among the non-advertising results of searches.

That part of Performics’ business threatened to break Google’s long-standing vow not to allow cash to influence the order of the so-called “organic” links featured in the center of its results page.

Landing near the top of the first search results page is prized because it can bring hordes of traffic without costing any advertising dollars.

“Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them,” Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin promised in a 2004 letter spelling out the Mountain View-based company’s “don’t be evil” principles.

Web sites that pay Google for special treatment are supposed to appear only in sections of the results page labeled as “sponsored” links — to shopping or advertising.

Selling the piece of Performics that manipulates search engine results will enable Google to preserve the trust of its users, according to Tom Phillips, who is overseeing the company’s DoubleClick acquisition.

“It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business,” Phillips wrote in a blog on Google’s Web site. “Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission.”

The company intends to hold on to another part of Performics that helps Web sites manage their advertising.

Although Google hasn’t lined up a buyer for Performics yet, several of the company’s business partners already have expressed interest, Phillips wrote, though he didn’t identify any prospective bidders.

The Performics dilemma could be just one of several challenges arising from the DoubleClick deal. Google also has signaled it may lay off workers, a difficult chore for a company that prides itself on pampering its nearly 17,000 employees.

Privacy watchdogs are also scrutinizing the deal for signs that Google is using DoubleClick’s ad-tracking tools to pry deeper into the Web surfing patterns of its users.

San Francisco - AT&T plans to sell phones based on

LAS VEGAS - After initially being standoffish, the head of AT&T Inc.’s wireless arm has taken a liking to Google Inc.’s project to create a new operating system for cell phones.

“I like it a lot more than I did before,” said Ralph de la Vega, chief executive of AT&T Mobility, Wednesday told an audience of journalists and analysts at the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas. “It’s something we would want in our portfolio.”

AT&T has been something of a holdout from Google’s Open Handset Alliance. T-Mobile USA and Sprint Nextel Corp. are members, and Verizon Wireless has said it will throw its network open to any device, which would include phones with the software, called Android.

In December, de la Vega compared Android unfavorably to Apple Inc.’s iPhone, for which AT&T is the exclusive carrier, and said “the jury is still out” on the project.

His change of heart comes from meeting Google executives, who showed him that AT&T will be able to put its own applications on Android phones it sells. Previously, he said, he had been concerned that the platform would be oriented too much toward Google applications.

“I think it’s going to be a good option for us and a good option for our customers,” de la Vega said.

One of Google’s aims with the software is to make its Web services, like search, e-mail and maps, easily accessible on a cell phone. By extension, it wants to extend its dominance in Internet advertising to the wireless sphere. Phones using the software are expected to show up later this year.

NEW YORK - Comcast Corp. will start offering faster Internet services in Minnesota’s Twin Cities region on Thursday, with plans to extend that type of next-generation system to its entire service area by 2010.

The $150-a-month offering for residential customers costs about triple Comcast’s priciest option to date and likely will appeal only to heavy users of online music, movies and other large Internet files.

But the nation’s largest cable operator expects new Internet services down the road to demand ever-greater speeds.

“A decade ago we couldn’t even conceive of … YouTube,” Google Inc.’s video-sharing service, said Greg Butz, Comcast’s vice president for marketing and product development. “We hope that this platform we’re building will drive and create that next-level invention and drag with it a broad array of customers.”

With the faster service, a customer could download a 4 gigabyte high-definition movie in about 10 minutes, compared with about an hour at previous speeds.

Comcast’s announcement comes just a week after the company reversed its stance over hampering online file-sharing by its subscribers and, under pressure from federal regulators, promised to treat all types of Internet traffic equally.

Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas said the technologies being deployed in Minneapolis and St. Paul would help the company meet that promise, which followed an Associated Press investigation in October confirming user reports of interference with file-sharing traffic known as BitTorrent.

The Philadelphia-based company agreed last Thursday to collaborate with BitTorrent Inc. and develop a better system for managing congestion. Comcast has said it must clamp down on heavy users of Internet bandwidth so others won’t be slowed down.

Until the new traffic-management system is fully tested and deployed, expected by year’s end, Douglas said the faster Comcast service would still be subject to hampering.

“Just because we increase all the roads in Philadelphia to eight-lane highways doesn’t mean we can take out all the traffic lights,” Douglas said. “It’s going to take a little bit of time to get this new system in place.”

The new service, which Comcast has yet to name, will allow the cable operator to better compete with phone company Verizon Communications Inc., whose next-generation FiOS already offers service at up to 50 megabits per second.

Comcast will also be offering up to 50 Mbps for downloading, or receiving, files. Uploading, or sending, files will be at up to 5 Mbps. The monthly $150 price is available only to residential customers; small businesses will have to pay $200 for a package that includes additional technical support and security software.

The existing high-end tier costs $53. Maximum upload speeds for those customers will automatically increase to 2 Mbps, more than doubling the current limits. Downloads will remain at up to 8 Mbps. Maximum upload speeds for the basic, $43 tier will nearly triple to 1 Mbps, while downloads will remain capped at 6 Mbps.

Cablevision Systems Corp. already offers a 50 Mbps maximum download service — with 50 Mbps maximum uploads — but does not actively market it. Cablevision’s fastest advertised service costs up to $65 for maximum downloads of 30 Mbps downloads and uploads of 5 Mbps.

To offer the new tier, Comcast is taking advantage of a technology called DOCSIS 3.0, which allows service providers to use four TV channels rather than just one to send data over the cables. The industry group CableLabs is nearing certification of DOCSIS 3.0 modems.

Butz said Comcast would deploy the new systems to about 20 percent of its service area by year’s end, finishing by mid-2010. He refused to say which markets would get the upgrades next. The company said that although the initial offerings would cap downloads at 50 Mbps, the technology could support service three times as fast in the future.

San Francisco - Yahoo recently expanded the list of products that can't be advertised on its search engine, but it appears the company could be more stringent in enforcing its ad rejection policies.

IDG News Service queried Yahoo's search engine on Monday with obvious keywords clearly intended to trigger ads for products and services that violate the company's search ad editorial guidelines. The experiment produced multiple ads that Yahoo apparently should have rejected.

Interestingly, it wasn't only outside advertisers that managed to place inappropriate ads: Yahoo itself appeared to violate its own guidelines with at least one questionable ad from a company unit.

Upon reviewing the examples of possibly inappropriate ads submitted by IDG News Service, Yahoo said that not all violated its editorial guidelines. It declined to identify the infringing ones, but said it had removed them, as it does whenever it sees noncompliant ads.

“We evaluate our marketplace and advertising policies — including unacceptable content — on an ongoing basis. We also continually refine our review processes and procedures in an effort to serve the most appropriate and relevant ads to our users,” it said in an e-mailed statement. Yahoo's ad screening process involves human reviewers and automated filters.

One that should have been easy to flag was an ad for Ephedra products from Yahoo's Shopping comparison shopping engine. Ephedra products are listed by Yahoo Search Marketing as an example of products of questionable legality. The U.S. Federal Drug Administration banned the sale of Ephedra-containing dietary supplements.

Yet, a search on Monday triggered an ad titled “Best Ephedra Products” from Yahoo Shopping. The same keyword query from Monday failed to produce the ad on Wednesday, suggesting it may have been among the ones pulled.

The finding that Yahoo is accepting an undetermined number of ads that should be banned comes less than two weeks after the company announced it had expanded the list of products and services it won't accept ads for to include cigarettes, academic essay-writing services, fake ID or fake diplomas, and firearms, ammunition, and fireworks.

IDG News Service also found an ad from a vendor apparently based in Hong Kong marketing an HIV home test kit, an apparent violation of Yahoo's policy against such kits that haven't been approved by the FDA. Figuring out which of these kits are FDA approved isn't difficult: Only one such product has the FDA endorsement. This was another ad that Yahoo apparently removed.

Searching for “pyramid scheme” triggered multiple ads for so-called MLM (multilevel marketing) companies. These companies, which aren't necessarily illegal, operate under a model of selling via distributors that are offered commissions not only for their sales but also for sales of people they recruit. These MLM companies are considered to be illegally operating pyramid schemes if most of their sales are made among distributors instead of to end consumers.

Why a legitimate MLM company would want its ads to appear whenever someone searches for “pyramid schemes” is highly suspicious. On Wednesday, the roster of MLM company ads triggered by the “pyramid scheme” keyword was gone, replaced instead with ads from vendors that sell products related to this topic, such as books from Amazon.com.

Yahoo's guidelines also forbid ads for products designed to descramble cable and satellite signals to get such services for free, yet on Monday a search for “cable descramblers” called up an ad blatantly promoting “Cable Pirate Boxes.” That ad also seems to have been removed.

IDG News Service also found ads on Monday for cigarettes, designer product knock-offs, police radar detectors and rifle ammunition, all of them from categories banned by Yahoo's guidelines.

TORONTO - Research In Motion Ltd. says its fiscal fourth-quarter profit and sales more than doubled as the BlackBerry maker boosted its subscriber base and shipped about 4.4 million of its smart phones.

For the quarter ended March 1, the Canadian company earned $412.5 million, or 72 cents per share, up from a profit of $187.4 million, or 33 cents per share, in the same period a year earlier.

Revenue more than doubled to $1.88 billion from $930 million.

U.S.-traded shares in RIM rose $5.71, or 5 percent, to $121.50. in after-hours trading Wednesday after closing at $115.79.

Analysts, on average, had expected a profit of 70 cents per share on sales of $1.86 billion, according to a poll by Thomson Financial.

Research In Motion Ltd. says it added 2.2 million new subscriber accounts during the quarter, bringing its total to more than 14 million.

Peter Misek, an analyst with Canaccord Adams, called it a “monster quarter” and said RIM has benefited from Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which brought attention to the smart phone market.

“People are staring to realize, ‘Why should I buy a Razr when I can buy a BlackBerry or an iPhone?’ I think the iPhone was the single biggest blessing RIM ever had,” Misek said.

Misek said sales of the BlackBerry are accelerating.

“It continues to take market share. They are the market leader,” Misek said.

Waterloo, Ontario- based RIM has been targeting the consumer market after enjoying success in the corporate market for years. RIM’s push e-mail software allows customers to access their e-mail on their wireless devices in real time.