Technology latest news

DENVER (Billboard) - Perhaps no single device has had more impact on mobile music than Apple's iPhone.

While only 6.7 percent of overall mobile customers use their phone to listen to music, rising to 27.9 percent for smart-phone users, a full 74.1 percent of iPhone owners reported using the device as an MP3 player, according to M:Metrics.

The majority of this music, however, is transferred from the computer, rather than purchased through the phone and downloaded wirelessly. That may change this summer once Apple unveils what many expect will be a new version of the iconic device, featuring access to high-speed third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

The company has not made an official announcement, but signs point to an early June release. Apple has stopped restocking retailers with the current iPhone version, which analysts say is a sure sign that a new model is imminent. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference is scheduled for June 9, and CEO Steve Jobs will deliver the keynote address.

Existing iPhone models connect to an older, slower wireless network but compensate with access to high-speed Wi-Fi Internet networks. Those using the iPhone to download music from iTunes, for instance, must use this Wi-Fi connection. While certainly faster than cellular networks, Wi-Fi does not offer nearly the same range of coverage.

Apple has sold more than 5 million iPhones worldwide, but many tech-savvy buyers, particularly in Europe, have been holding out for a 3G version. Upgrading the iPhone to 3G is considered crucial if Apple is to meet its stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones this year.

SMART PHONES GET SMARTER

Even if Apple manages to reach its goal, the iPhone would still represent only about 1 percent of all mobile phones available. For the music industry, as significant as the iPhone mobile music usage figures are, the greater significance is how they inspire other device manufacturers to reach for similar levels. The company with the most to lose from the iPhone's momentum is Research in Motion, maker of the popular BlackBerry.

In the United States, RIM leads the smart-phone market with a 40 percent share, but Apple is close behind at 28 percent, according to research group Canalys. Apple has begun incorporating support for Microsoft-based corporate e-mail applications into the iPhone, which is considered a direct attack on the BlackBerry.

So RIM is fighting back on the iPhone's turf — entertainment. The two newest BlackBerry devices, the Pearl and the Curve, are aimed directly at the high-end consumer market. Available music applications include a MediaGuide service that identifies songs played on the radio; streaming XM Satellite Radio; a still-pending full-track downloads service from PureTracks; and a service called NuTsie from Melodeo that enables users to play their iTunes library on either device. It also plans to unveil a 3G version of the BlackBerry, expected later in August.

VERIZON'S VISION

But smart phones cover only a small part of the market. In the United States, there are only about 20 million smart phones, compared with 250 million mobile phones. What the music industry wants most is to turn every mobile phone into a music-playing device.

Which is why there are high hopes for Verizon Wireless and its plans with partner Rhapsody. Record labels are looking to Verizon — with more than 67 million subscribers and a nationwide advertising campaign that heavily incorporates music — as the standard-bearer for mobile music in the coming year.

When MTV Networks merged its Urge music service with Rhapsody in 2007, Verizon agreed to be the mobile platform for the service. The vision is that Rhapsody will become the default music service for Verizon Wireless, but exactly how that is implemented won't be clear until this summer.

Verizon Wireless and Rhapsody originally planned to launch the service in spring 2008, but RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser says the process is three months behind schedule because Verizon Wireless wanted to make the service available to the widest spectrum of phones possible.

The upshot is that the mobile music effort will receive a double shot in the arm — a few iPhone and BlackBerry owners using their phones to access a lot of music, as well as a whole lot of Verizon subscribers using their phones to access just a little.

Reuters/Billboard

SANTIAGO (AFP) - A hacker broke into Chile's government sites mining data from six million people which he then posted on the Internet on two popular servers for several hours, the El Mercurio daily have said.

The personal data included names, street and email addresses, telephone numbers, social and educational background, and was taken from Education Ministry, Electoral Service and state-run telephone companies' websites from late Saturday to early Sunday.

“Its a serious matter and we're investigating,” Police Cibercrime Brigade chief Jaime Jara told the newspaper.

The data was displayed for several hours before authorities removed it on the technology information website “FayerWayer” and community website “ElAntro.”

The hacker said on the websites he splashed the data “for the whole world to see … (to) show how unprotected personal data is in Chile … nobody bothers protecting that information.”

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Once upon a time, people bonded with their co-workers on office softball teams and traded gossip at the watercooler.

OK, so those days aren’t gone yet. But as big companies parcel Information Age work to people in widely dispersed locations, it’s getting harder for colleagues to develop the camaraderie that comes from being in the same place. Beyond making work less fun, feeling disconnected from comrades might be a drag on productivity.

Now technology researchers are trying to replicate old-fashioned office interactions by transforming everyday business software for the new era of work. The historically dry-as-sawdust products are borrowing elements from video games and social-networking Web sites.

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM Corp. that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of “things I can’t live without.”

Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

These tidbits, DiMicco believes, help people understand each other better. And the usual communication tools like e-mail, instant messaging, phones and even videoconferencing do only so much to fill the gap.

This problem isn’t confined to IBM, whose 386,000 employees often find themselves working with people from Boston to Bangalore to Beijing. It affects any company where telecommuting, outsourcing and globalization have spread the staff across cultures and time zones.

At Intel Corp., for example, many project teams have at least one person who has yet to meet the group’s boss face-to-face.

Recently, Intel tried to improve the situation by testing a “visual business card” system. Participants could not only list standard information about their location and job title, but they also could post pictures, brief biographies and things they like.

Now Intel is exploring whether virtual-world software, which can show graphically rich, 3-D representations of meeting rooms, auditoriums, factory floors — you name it — will make it more natural for groups to collaborate. Intel’s initial efforts are focused on such tasks as monitoring computer centers, designing products and training staff.

Other companies are already using virtual worlds for certain events, allowing people to maneuver graphical representations of themselves, known as “avatars,” through online trade shows and product demos.

When CDC Software recently staged parts of an annual sales kickoff event in a virtual world created by Unisfair Inc., it included an online version of the golf outings that commonly accompany such affairs. It held tournaments in baseball and golf video games — and gave real trophies to the champions, said Julian Hannabuss, a CDC sales director.

In the coming years, more aspects of everyday working life could include virtual interactions that resemble games but are plenty serious.

One reason is that the technology is getting more sophisticated. For instance, if my avatar appears to be sitting to your left in a meeting, what I say into my computer microphone can come through your left computer speaker. And I’d hear you on the right.

Soon such meetings will be able to incorporate images from Web cameras that capture gestures and face movements — so your avatar can reflect your nonverbal communication cues, crossing its legs or frowning when you do so in real life.

“Those kinds of things make you forget there’s an interface mediating you and the other people at all,” said Greg Nuyens, CEO of virtual-world creator Qwaq Inc., whose clients include the energy company BP Group PLC. “You’ll just be in a room with them.”

Eyeing that same future, IBM researchers are exploring whether groups of people in different locations can bond by playing collaborative virtual-world games, like solving puzzles together. IBM calls the effort “Inward Bound,” a nod to the Outward Bound wilderness exercises.

And an IBM project called Bluegrass is testing how software programmers in different locations can organize their work in a virtual landscape. People traversing this virtual world appear as the pictures they posted of themselves in Beehive. IBM researcher Steven Rohall hopes to enable people engaged in solitary, “heads down” work at computers to get the kind of “heads up” interactions that come from walking down the hall in an office.

Put more simply, perhaps: “We can make work suck less,” says Reuben Steiger, CEO of virtual-world creator Millions of Us.

Steiger predicts that office politics will be transformed as virtual interactions replace or augment in-person connections, because the technology often liberates wallflowers to act more aggressively.

Cindy Pickering, the engineer overseeing Intel’s internal virtual-world efforts, says younger employees will be key to quickly advancing socially oriented workplace software. They’re already used to chatting and playing online, whether in networking sites or complex video games.

Still, one big question is just how many plane trips for actual meetings can be realistically replaced by software.

“I don’t think we’ll ever completely replace the human interaction element,” Pickering says. “Instead of us going out and playing softball together, now we’ll just go play an (online) game? I don’t know how satisfying I would find that.”

Another question is whether getting distant co-workers to enjoy each other more will actually improve workplace productivity. Research on the subject indicates that a much bigger factor is whether people trust their colleagues to do their parts.

“I think companies underestimate that,” says Catherine Connolly, a professor of industrial psychology at McMaster University. “Especially when they have team-building Kumbaya exercises.”

VANCOUVER, Canada (AFP) - Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.

“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren't very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia's web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.

To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”

In May, three entries created by nine students in the course became the first student works to reach Wikipedia's top rank.

Their articles, about the book “El Se

As Microsoft and Yahoo go their separate ways, IBM and Google are cozying up to move into what they think will be the dominant IT delivery model of the future–so-called cloud computing.

Over the next year, IBM and Google plan to roll out a worldwide network of servers from which consumers and businesses will tap everything from online soccer schedules to advanced engineering applications. The IBM-Google cloud, fresh off testing at several major universities, runs on Linux-based machines using Xen virtualization and Apache Hadoop, an open source implementation of the Google File System.

Google already has launched numerous cloud-based services for consumers, such as e-mail and storage. With the exception of security requirements, “there's not that much difference between the enterprise cloud and the consumer cloud,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said earlier this month during an appearance in Los Angeles with IBM chief Sam Palmisano. “The cloud has higher value in business. That's the secret to our collaboration.”

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS
Palmisano and Schmidt insisted that their companies are similar, despite obvious differences. “We're boring, they're exciting. We're slow, they're fast. We're fat, they're skinny,” Palmisano joked. But the contrasts are mostly skin deep, he said, noting that the companies share “a common technical alignment.”

IBM believes the cloud model will allow it to reach small and midsize companies around the world, which it says represent a $500 billion IT market that it has trouble serving profitably through the usual sales channels. Google and IBM could conceivably supply computer users–both business and consumer–with hosted offerings ranging from basic productivity software like word processing and calendaring to sophisticated management and security tools through IBM's Tivoli brand and Google's Postini unit.

Under a portion of its cloud strategy it's calling the Blue Business Platform, IBM plans to launch an online marketplace offering its own pre-integrated products and services, as well as those from other software developers. Customers will be able to use the software they buy “on premises or in the cloud,” Palmisano said.

DIG DEEPERSAAS: BEYOND CRM Here's how to drive your software-as-a-service strategy beyond the old standbys.Download this InformationWeek Report>> See all our Reports

Software as a service made its name with bold claims that it would force on-premises software into extinction. But with SAP becoming the latest vendor to create a hybrid model, the real dinosaur is the idea that companies must choose one approach or the other.

By eary next year, SAP will offer what co-CEO Henning Kagermann calls “services by design,” an extension of the Business ByDesign service SAP began offering last fall only to small businesses–to tepid response. Services by design, aimed at SAP's core customer base of large companies, will consist of online software components that integrate with a company's on-site SAP software.

SAP calls them components since they're not likely standalone applications. The first offering, for example, will be an online tool for companies to select and manage suppliers, integrating with their on-site supply chain or ERP software. It's the same model Microsoft is pushing as software plus services, though, like SAP, most of Microsoft's product offerings are still in the planning stages.

Those components, to be hosted and managed by SAP, will run on the NetWeaver-based service-oriented architecture developed for Business ByDesign. SAP hasn't determined whether to sell the components as a subscription or license, or both.

Beyond supplier relationship management, SAP is looking at components for ERP, talent management, and analytics. Business intelligence vendor Business Objects, which SAP just acquired, already offers reporting tools and other apps on demand.

NOT EVERYTHING'S GOING TO THE CLOUD
The small-customer Business ByDesign hasn't been a big seller for SAP, and the company's slashing by half what it had planned to invest in the online-only ERP offering–a product Kagermann had called the “most important” of his career. SAP always has portrayed a pure SaaS approach as appealing to only a small sliver of its potential customer base, those with 100 to 500 employees.

The services by design approach, if it works, could let SAP protect its profitable licensed software business, get more services revenue from those customers, and address concerns large companies have with putting some of their most sensitive business data in the cloud. For mission-critical applications like accounting, “I don't think large companies will go on demand,” Kagermann says.

He describes the integration of on-site and off-site software on the vendor's “loosely coupled, asynchronous” SOA platform. “The Business ByDesign architecture and investment must not be focused on midmarket only,” Kagermann now says.

Robert Strickland, CIO of T-Mobile, which uses SAP and Business Objects applications and NetWeaver middleware, sees promise in the model. “If you can have a universal SOA layer that allows you to connect everyone to that common bus and defines how you expose those services, that may ultimately give us the best flexibility,” Strickland says. “It would let us order things ? la carte and connect them seamlessly.” Such cloud computing efforts are becoming more practical as broadband speed and connectivity options improve, he says.

SAP must reassure big customers that they can retain control of their data in the hosted environment, and that they can set rules for what users can do and access, says Technology Business Research analyst Stuart Williams. If it can, SAP might just move this software-and-services model from concept to practical tool.

See original article on InformationWeek.com