Technology latest news

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese videogame maker Square Enix Co Ltd (9684.T) said on Tuesday it is considering taking stakes in game developers to boost its competitiveness.

“We face competition not only from Japanese videogame companies but from game companies worldwide. We also see some new players from outside the videogame industry coming in,” Square Enix President Yoichi Wada told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Tokyo.

“Economies of scale and breadth of scope is getting important. It may be a business alliance or it may be us taking a stake in others, but we need to go beyond traditional Square Enix.”

Square Enix, creator of blockbuster game series including “Dragon Quest,” “Final Fantasy” and “Kingdom Hearts,” was created in 2003 through a merger of two leading Japanese game makers.

Wada also said he aims to boost the ratio of overseas videogame software sales among its total game software revenues to 80 percent in three years from about 50 percent now.

(For summit blog: http://summitnotebook.reuters.com/)

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka and Noriyuki Hirata; Editing by Louise Heavens)

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Research in Motion (RIM.TO) (RIMM.O) is expected to resolve in two months Indian security concerns about its BlackBerry wireless e-mail device, Indian Minister for Communications and Information Technology Andimuthu Raja said on Tuesday.

The minister also said India would announce its policy on third generation mobile network services in three months. He was speaking on the sidelines of a tech conference in the Malaysian capital.

(Reporting by Jennifer Tan; Editing by Tomasz Janowski)

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Monday launched Google Health, a long-anticipated medical records service letting US users store and manage their health care information online.

The offering draws yet another battle line between Internet search king Google and global software giant Microsoft, which began offering a similar HealthVault service in October.

“It isn't surprising both sides are going after it,” Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told AFP, who said the service was likely to strongly appeal to “Baby Boomers” — the generation of Americans born between the late 1940s and early 1960s.

“Health care is not just lucrative; you are solving a problem critical to an aging group of Boomers. There are public relations and business benefits to it.”

Amid concerns over privacy, Google said it built a secure computer platform separate from its search system to host medical records as part of an emphasis on keeping the health information protected.

“We have put in place the firmest privacy policy we can construct,” Google vice president of search product and user experience Marissa Mayer said during a press event at the Internet giant's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

“It is our highest level of security.”

Privacy advocates however, said it is critical to protect medical information from tampering or snooping, say from insurance companies or employers out to reduce liabilities by shunning those with health issues.

“It's the Wild West online,” said Deborah Peel, a psychiatrist who founded the nonprofit advocacy group PatientPrivacyRights.org. “The risks are massive.”

Microsoft consulted PatientPrivacyRights.org while designing HealthVault and agreed to routine privacy audits, the first of which is to be completed in June, according to Peel.

“We think it is critical to actually have external proof technology companies working with medical records are doing what they say they do,” Peel said. “Talk is cheap.”

Google executives said pains were taken to build a system that will protect people's medical records online while providing them access from where ever they might want it.

“No Google Health users should expect to find their health information as search results on Google,” product manager Roni Zeiger said after demonstrating the service.

Google Health has links to pharmacies, clinics and diagnostic labs. The service is free and enables people to have electronic copies of information such as prescriptions, lab test results, hospital stays, and medical conditions stored on Google computers.

Users of the service dictate how the information is shared.

For example, a user could set up a relationship with hospital so that in case of emergency, his or her personal medical history could be instantly available to emergency room doctors.

Or, someone planning an exotic vacation could check the vaccinations they have or might need.

“Google, on your behalf, is storing a copy of your records,” Zeiger said. “This is a user controled database that Google is hosting.”

Google said it will mine anonymous trend data along the lines of what percentage of people with diabetes using Google Health report getting flu shots.

Google search boxes are on Health pages and targeted advertising is displayed with query results, according to Zeiger.

Google said it has crafted protected online connections with a host of major US medical service providers and is open to working with other health care outlets interested in crafting software to join the network.

People can link heart monitors to Google Health so vital statistics can be fed to a heart attack assessment services online, according to Zeiger.

A “virtual pillbox” will automatically send alerts to people's mobile telephones, reminding them when it is time to take medicines.

“I'm excited by this because it really empowers people with getting more control over their information,” said Dr. Dean Ornish, a California professor of medicine and founder of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute.

“Health care costs are really reaching a tipping point … so the timing for this couldn't be better.”

Inefficiency accounts for an estimated 30 percent of US health costs and making updated health records quickly available to care providers is a “good start” toward efficiency, Ornish said.

Ornish was on a medical advisory board that worked with Google on Health.

Virtualization has moved beyond applications themselves to software that makes those applications run faster over a network.

WAN (wide-area network) acceleration vendor Certeon on Monday introduced aCelera, an application-acceleration platform that comes without hardware and is designed to run on servers virtualized with VMware and with Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V technology.

Like other application accelerators, aCelera shortens response times for applications that have to run over networks, namely between central and branch offices. But aCelera does it without a dedicated appliance. The software is designed to run on standard x86 hardware in one or more virtual machines, so it can share resources with an enterprise's overall computing infrastructure. This allows for scaling up application acceleration as needed and also avoids requiring users to buy a specialized device for each end of a WAN connection, said Gareth Taube, vice president of marketing at Certeon.

Many large enterprises are looking to server and storage virtualization to become more efficient and keep more IT gear at central sites. Centralization helps drive the need for WAN acceleration as branch-office employees rely on far-away data centers to run their applications. Certeon, a venture-capital-backed startup in Burlington, Massachusetts, is turning that technology to its advantage and claims to be the first to do so.

Certeon claims aCelera can cut the time required for applications to respond over WANs by 95 percent. The Linux-based software is compatible with VMware ESX and ESXi.

There are other software-based acceleration products that could run on virtualized servers, but they weren't created with virtualization in mind or certified to work with VMware as aCelera was, according to Forrester Research analyst Rob Whiteley.

Virtualization has proved so useful for boosting efficiency and easing management that it's moved beyond traditional server workloads to include functions such as firewalling, intrusion prevention and now WAN acceleration, Whiteley said. Certeon's move may help break the constraints of cost and complexity that have forced enterprises to limit WAN acceleration to just a few key locations, he said.

“It has had some challenges in reaching a more mainstream audience,” Whiteley said.

Although aCelera costs US$2,495 and up per site, dedicated appliances commonly cost twice that, he said. And as long as there is a virtualized server at the site capable of running aCelera, all the IT department has to do is download the software to it, Whiteley said. He believes dedicated appliances will become the exception over time.

VMware can automatically scale up and reallocate aCelera's needed resources up to the point where more virtual machines need to be added for it, said Shawn Cooney, director of research at Certeon. Then, by adding more virtual machines, administrators can increase the acceleration capacity as much as needed for certain times of the day or month when application traffic over the WAN will be especially high, he said.

Flexibility would be a key benefit of a virtual WAN accelerator, said analyst Michael Brandenburg of Current Analysis.

With dedicated appliances, “You have to buy toward what you might possibly need, versus what your typical traffic is,” Brandenburg said.

Certeon is pricing aCelera per user, with the basic price covering a certain number of users at a site. The software is available now for VMware and will be available for Hyper-V when that system comes out, which Certeon expects in July. In the future, the company hopes to make aCelera work with other virtualization platforms such as Xen and KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), Taube said. The company will also continue to sell its earlier hardware appliances.

One of the researchers behind ScanAlert, the “Hacker Safe” certification company McAfee recently acquired, is facing fraud charges in Indiana.

Brett Oliphant, whose title had been vice president of security services before the Napa, California, company was acquired by McAfee in January, is facing 11 counts of securities fraud in transactions that allegedly brought in more than US$1.215 million.

Oliphant and his brother Bryan were charged in December. Their trial is set for Nov. 18 at the Elkhart County Superior Court in Indiana.

ScanAlert built technology for auditing and then certifying Web sites as “Hacker Safe.” McAfee paid $54.9 million for the company in January and has since renamed the certification service “McAfee Safe.”

The Hacker Safe and McAfee Safe marks are designed to reassure potential customers that the Web site they are visiting has been tested for vulnerabilities and is unlikely to have been hacked by online fraudsters.

Oliphant's arrest was not widely known until blogger Ronald van den Heetkamp posted news of it on Monday. Van den Heetkamp has been critical of McAfee's certification service in the past.

The ScanAlert vice president had led the development of his company's vulnerability scanning technology and managed the company's research division.

A McAfee spokesman declined to comment on the matter or confirm whether Oliphant was still with the company. “McAfee does not comment on the private affairs of others, legal or otherwise,” he said in an instant message.

The USB Net ShareStation from Iogear isn't the only device on the market that lets you share USB peripherals, including Webcams, over a network by installing special driver software on local computers. But it appears to be the cheapest currently on the market, and with the ability to support the most devices: 1 out of the box, but up to 4 by attaching a USB hub.The idea of a networked USB gateway is awfully nice: you put scanners, printers, memory card readers, speakers, and other devices that more than one person in an office or a home might need, and you avoid the time and fuss in moving equipment around as needed. At $80 for one of these Iogear hubs, and $20 to $30 for an externally powered USB hub, it's easy to see the time savings pay off.There's a little bit of fuss, in that each networked user has to have the Iogear software installed that fools their computer into seeing a 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps networked device as a directly connected USB peripheral; no gigabit Ethernet support, sorry, even though that would improve throughput for USB 2.0's 480 Mbps raw data rate. And each user has to install the necessary software for each USB device, too.Keyspan introduced a similar unit last year that lists for $130 and retails for about $15 less. Keyspan's USB 2.0 Server, however, currently only supports a maximum of two USB devices; the company “expects” a future firmware upgrade will add hub support. Iogera offers Windows 2000, XP, and Vista support; Keyspan provides software Windows XP and Vista, but also Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - With Yahoo facing pressure from a corporate raider, the Internet giant has reopened discussions on a tie-up with Microsoft, but for a new deal that would probably not be an outright takeover.

The two firms said over the weekend that they were exploring new options two weeks after Microsoft withdrew its offer to acquire the struggling Internet pioneer.

The news came after last week's announcement by billionaire Carl Icahn that he had acquired a big stake in Yahoo and would seek to unseat its board in an effort to reopen merger talks with Microsoft, which Icahn said had been “completely botched.”

“If I was Carl Icahn, I would be selling today,” Canaccord Adams analyst Colin Gillis told AFP.

Microsoft said in a statement Sunday that in light of developments since it backed out of takeover talks, the software giant “is considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo.”

The Redmond, Washington-based firm added: “Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions.”

Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for 44.6 billion dollars in stock and cash on January 31, but withdrew the offer on May 3, saying Yahoo refused to budge despite the software giant upping its offer to nearly 50 billion dollars.

Yahoo said in a separate statement that it has confirmed with Microsoft “that it is not interested in pursuing an acquisition of all of Yahoo at this time.”

What might be on Microsoft's mind is a trial-run Yahoo did last month with Google, letting the Internet search colossus handle advertising posted with Yahoo search results.

Google's money-making methods proved superior to Yahoo's recently launched Panama advertising platform.

“I think Microsoft realized Yahoo was willing to do a deal like this with Google and let them know they would do the same kind of deal,” said Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle.

“It gives Microsoft what they wanted, market share, without the aggravation of an acquisition.”

Alliance talks with Microsoft “muddy the waters” for Icahn by giving Yahoo shareholders more confidence that the current board of directors has a grip on the situation, according to Enderle.

By voting in an Icahn slate of directors with a mandate to sell to Microsoft, Yahoo shareholders would put the firm in a weak bargaining position, Gillis said.

“All those thinking that this means a shotgun marriage is going to work, I don't think that,” Gillis said.

Yahoo said its board members “continue to consider a number of value-maximizing strategic alternatives for Yahoo, and we remain open to pursuing any transaction which is in the best interest of our stockholders.”

Greg Sterling, analyst at Search Engine Land, said the tie-up could bring together Yahoo's and Microsoft's Internet search and advertising operations in an effort to take on sector leader Google.

Jeffrey Ham at Briefing.com said the two firms have an interest in joining forces to take on Google.

“Microsoft's interest in improving and expanding its online and advertising business reflects its commitment to challenging Google for market share,” he said.

“If Microsoft can obtain the specific assets it was seeking all along, without the headache of completely merging operations and culture, it may find itself better positioned in the long run.”

Icahn said in an open letter last Thursday that Yahoo's board bungled merger talks with Microsoft and that he is amassing Yahoo stock to oust the board of directors at an annual shareholders meeting on July 3.

Microsoft's initial takeover bid unveiled in February was aimed at merging online resources to better compete with Google, which has been gobbling up an increasing share of the lucrative Web search market.

Apple is in talks with major music labels to beef up its ringtones and offer over-the-air music downloads on its upcoming 3G iPhone, according to The New York Times.

The Times cited label executives who leaked reports of “very active” negotiations. While a final deal has not yet been inked, the paper quoted a “label executive familiar with the matter” as saying that Apple wants a big launch in June.

Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference begins June 9, and many expect to see the introduction of the 3G iPhone during the event.

Ringtones: A Multibillion-Dollar Market

IDC expects that mobile entertainment will account for 5.1 percent of the $800 billion global wireless services revenue and 23 percent of all mobile data revenue by 2011.

Ringtones and ring-back tones (answer tones) are expected to lead the way, along with mobile television and video services. Ring-back tones should overtake ringtones by 2010 to become the single largest revenue source in the mobile entertainment category by 2010, IDC reported.

“I'm surprised Apple hasn't done more around ringtones. Right now, iPhone users can't buy AT&T ringtones, which is rather curious. I have suggested that Apple has its own walled garden of content, if you will,” said Lewis Ward, an analyst at IDC. “Ringtones have been one of the success stories around mobile entertainment services in the past five years, growing from nothing to $1.2 billion in the U.S. this year.”

Apple is reportedly looking to add ringtones, ring-back tones and songs downloaded over-the-air directly from its iTunes Store over a cell phone broadband network. The music labels are reportedly arguing that hey should be paid more for an over-the-air download than a track bought over the Internet.

Apple's Direct Assault

“Some of these ringtones from the carriers can cost $2 or $3 per unit; it costs twice as much for a full track,” Ward said. “As long as there is demand, it makes sense that Apple would try to get into the market much more directly than they are.”

The possibilities are huge for both sides. Apple can tap into the figures IDC cited, which represent new revenue streams for the iPhone, and the music labels can ride on the back of the iPhone's popularity. Investment-banking firm Piper Jaffray estimates Apple works with carriers that reach 575 million cell phone users.

Apple still has plenty of competition, though, and the music labels know it.

What's more, IDC's Ward said full-track over-the-air downloads have not performed as well as ringtones and ring-back tones. There are several reasons for this, he said, noting that the average youthful audiophile can listen to free music on the Internet and has megs of music burned on CDs, PC hard drives and iPods. Music listeners can also find pirated music for free online, Ward said, but seem to be willing to pay for music if the experience is good.

“Over-the-air downloads have immediacy,” Ward said. “What that immediacy does is help those of us who are dangerous impulse buyers to go ahead and spend that extra money. If you really want it and they make it really easy, carriers can make the case for charging a premium for that instant gratification.”

Mozilla has rolled out Firefox 3 release candidate 1 to testers in advance of a full release in the weeks ahead. According to the program's developers, RC1 features more than 14,000 updates, “including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability.”

Though the latest Firefox release has been dubbed a “public preview,” it is primarily aimed at the developer community. So anyone who downloads RC1 should expect a few glitches.

For example, some Firefox 2 plug-ins are not compatible with RC1. Moreover, when Yahoo pages are loaded, images and other page elements are replaced by generic icons. On the other hand, the browser displays pristine pages from popular sites such as The New York Times portal.

User-Friendly Enhancements

Firefox 3's new auto-complete feature enables users to access a list of the matches gleaned from their recent Web-surfing history and bookmarked pages. The browser matches “what you're typing — even multiple words — against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by 'frecency' — an algorithm combining frequency + recency,” noted Mozilla blogger Deb Richardson.

Firefox 3 also introduces three new bookmark features called stars, tags and smart folders. “Bookmark stars are a quick and easy way to bookmark a page with a single click,” Richardson wrote. “If you click the star again, it opens the Bookmark dialog,” giving users the ability to edit the title, add tags, file the bookmark in a folder, or delete the bookmark.

By contrast, the new tags feature enables users to add extra information to a bookmark. “Where folders let you organize bookmarks in a way, they're limited in that you can only put each bookmark in a single folder,” Richardson explained. “Not so with tags — you can add as many tags to a bookmark as you want.”

Smart folders are basically saved searches that automatically update whenever users add new items matching previous searches to their bookmarks, Richardson noted. “So if I create a 'soup recipes' smart bookmark folder, any time I add a bookmark that has 'soup' and 'recipes' in the title or tag, it will automatically be added to my 'soup recipes' folder,” she explained.

Security Boosters

Several security enhancements to Firefox 3 promise to improve the overall user experience. For example, the browser automatically warns PC users whenever they visit Web pages that are known to install viruses, spyware, Trojans or malware, and refrains from displaying the content on Web pages that are suspected to be phisher Web forgeries.

To check a Web site's authenticity, Web surfers can click on the favicon button on the location bar to find out who owns the site and check if the connection is protected from eavesdropping. Even better, the browser's favicon button turns green when pages are being accessed that use extended validation SSL certificates, which site operators can obtain only after vetting by an established certificate authority.

Mozilla developers also say improvements to the browser's JavaScript engine, together with the introduction of profile-guided optimization, speed up the browser's page-loading performance. “Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3,” they said.

SAN FRANCISCO - Just two weeks after breaking off merger talks, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have been pulled back to the bargaining table by their fears about what might happen if they don’t work out a deal.

For now, Microsoft and Yahoo are still dancing around the edges as they explore possible business arrangements without melding the two companies.

The notion of a half-baked deal didn’t excite investors Monday as they got their first chance to react to Sunday’s news that Microsoft and Yahoo are talking again.

Yahoo shares rose a scant 0.7 percent, or 2 cents, to close at $27.68 on Monday, while Microsoft shares fell 1.8 percent, or 53 cents, to close at $29.46.

But most analysts remain convinced the preliminary talks will culminate in Microsoft buying Yahoo for somewhere between $33 to $37 per share, a price that translates to $47.5 billion to $53 billion.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo issued statements Sunday acknowledging they haven’t ruled out the possibility of a merger even though they aren’t discussing one now.

Although their discussions fell apart this month in a disagreement over price, both Yahoo and Microsoft have powerful incentives to reach a compromise within the next few weeks.

If Yahoo doesn’t stop demanding $37 per share, its board could be overthrown in a shareholder mutiny led by activist investor Carl Icahn.

To pressure Yahoo into reviving the talks, he has nominated an alternate slate of 10 directors scheduled to stand for election at Yahoo’s July 3 annual meeting. Icahn didn’t respond to a request for comment Monday.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s unwillingness to pay more than $33 per share created an opportunity for its nemesis, Google Inc., to enter an advertising partnership with Yahoo.

“It’s becoming pretty clear that Yahoo is either going to work something out with Microsoft or do a deal with Google,” said Standard & Poor’s equity analyst Scott Kessler. “If Yahoo winds up with Google after all this, it would be pretty damaging to Microsoft.”

Microsoft began pursuing a Yahoo takeover in late January largely as a means to counter Google’s dominance of the Internet search and advertising markets.

After Microsoft pounced, Yahoo became more receptive to an idea that it had resisted in the past — allowing Google to show some of the ads alongside Yahoo’s search results.

A two-week trial last month demonstrated Google’s technology could help boost Yahoo’s profits, and the two sides began exploring a long-term alliance. But any partnership between Google and Yahoo likely would face antitrust obstacles because the two companies control more than 80 percent of the U.S. search advertising market.

A similar deal between Yahoo and Microsoft wouldn’t pose the same antitrust problems because Google still would control more than half the market.

“We believe that a core issue for Microsoft is to acquire Yahoo on friendly terms,” UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote in a Monday research note. “A near-term deal (in search) could act as an intermediate step that would go a long way toward testing the waters.”

Microsoft also might buy key pieces of Yahoo’s online operations instead of doing a search advertising partnership or acquiring the entire company, Collins Stewart analyst Sanded Aggarwal said in a Monday research note. He values Yahoo’s search technology at $21 billion, its display advertising service at $14 billion and its Internet holdings outside the United States at $9.25 billion.

Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang believes the Sunnyvale-based company is on the verge of a turnaround that will prove it’s worth more $50 billion. Starting next year, he has promised Yahoo’s net revenue will increase by 25 percent annually — more than doubling its recent rate of growth.

But Icahn, who owns a 4.3 percent stake in Yahoo, so far has indicated he isn’t willing to wait until next year. And many other major shareholders appear ready to back him.

Kessler doubts Yahoo will be able to placate its shareholders by entering a partnership with Google, particularly if the alliance could hurt Yahoo in the long run by subverting its own technology in the critical search advertising market.

“It’s almost a no-win situation for Yahoo because they aren’t going to get sufficient time to prove they are worth $33 per share or more,” Kessler said.