Technology latest news

SEATTLE - A magazine that the Humane Society of the United States says promotes cockfighting has agreed to ask Amazon.com to stop selling its publication online.

The settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Monday is related to a lawsuit the Humane Society filed against Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc. in February 2007.

In the lawsuit, the Humane Society accused the online retailer of violating federal animal cruelty laws by selling The Gamecock and The Feathered Warrior, which the group described as cockfighting magazines.

Marburger Publishing Co., which publishes The Gamecock, agreed to settle with the Humane Society because it was a way to remove itself from the case, but the publication does not promote cockfighting or violate a federal ban on the bloody sport, said attorney Ali Beydoun of the law firm Carr Maloney.

Beydoun said the magazine also promised in the settlement “to be more vigilant in its content.” He said the magazine intends to follow the agreement and all applicable laws.

Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said Tuesday the company was reviewing the agreement and had no immediate comment.

Humane Society lawyer Jonathan Lovvorn said his organization is hoping the agreement with Hartford, Ark.-based Marburger, which still needs approval from the judge hearing the case, will encourage Amazon and The Feathered Warrior, another Arkansas magazine, to come to similar agreements.

“We never wanted to have this dispute with Amazon,” Lovvorn said, adding that the Humane Society first went to Amazon to ask the company to remove the two magazines from its site.

Amazon has argued that it has a constitutional right to sell the publications and called pulling them from sale a form of censorship.

A recent federal law added felony-level penalties for activities promoting or encouraging animal fighting. The Animal Fighting Prohibition Act of 2007 also made it a felony to knowingly sponsor or exhibit an animal fight, or to buy, sell or transport knives, gaffs and other weapons used in cockfighting.

Cockfighting is illegal in every state except Louisiana, where a legislative ban goes into effect in August.

Lovvorn called The Gamecock “the oldest and best-known cockfighting magazine in the United States.”

Beydoun described the magazine as appealing to “chicken aficionados,” focusing on animal care and stories about people who raise chickens and game birds.

“It’s a hard magazine to come by. It’s not as available as People magazine or Vanity Fair,” he said.

About the only places a chicken lover could buy the publication are at an animal feed store or via Amazon, where the publication was offered by a magazine distributor, not the publisher, said Barry A. Fisher, of the Los Angeles law firm Fleishman & Fisher, which also represents Marburger Publishing.

Fisher said the lawsuit isn’t really about The Gamecock or The Feathered Warrior.

“Their real target is Amazon,” he said.

Amazon has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, Lovvorn said.

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer scrambled for cover from an egg-hurling protester during a talk at a Hungarian university Monday.

Unlike his boss, Chairman Bill Gates, who was hit in the face with a cream pie a decade ago, Ballmer managed to dodge the eggs.

Ballmer was delivering a speech entitled “You can change the world” to a group of business and technology students at Budapest’s Corvinus University when the incident occurred, according to Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos.

A young man in glasses stood up, pointed at Ballmer and loudly demanded that Microsoft return money it had stolen from the Hungarian people. Then he calmly threw three eggs at Ballmer.

A video of the outburst in a large classroom was widely distributed over the Internet Tuesday. In the footage, Ballmer crouched on the floor behind a large podium as the third egg smashed against the white board behind him.

The man, wearing a white shirt that read “Microsoft corruption,” was escorted out of the room at the behest of the dean of the university.

Gellos said Microsoft does not know who the heckler was. The video shows him leaving peacefully; the crowd even laughs at one point.

Ballmer, who initially looked shaken, appeared to recover quickly. He smiled, shrugged and drew laughter from the audience with a quip: “It was a friendly disruption.”

Gellos declined to comment on what, if any, security measures were in place that day.

Ballmer was in Budapest to announce Microsoft’s leading role and investment a technology skills training program in Hungary, in partnership with the government and other companies. Later in the day, he also accepted an honorary fellowship from the university, according to Gellos.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - With scores of dating Web sites catering for the bold and the beautiful, a growing number of niche sites are emerging for less fortunate lonely hearts, those struggling with mental or physical problems.

Australian matchmaker Sara Fantauzzo came up with www.SpecialSomeone.com.au to link up people with special needs after watching her autistic brother struggle to make friendships.

“I've grown up with a brother with a very mild disability and I've seen him very low and very depressed as a direct result of rejections,” Melbourne-based Fantauzzo, who set up the Web site with her husband Otis nearly a year ago, told Reuters.

“I got sick of seeing Marc at home on a Saturday night or having him come along with my friends because he never had anyone to go out himself.”

Fantauzzo came up the idea of a Web site to match up people with special needs after noticing her brother joining a few community groups with people with different disabilities and these groups were far more accepting of a wide range of problems.

Similarly American Ricky Durham set up www.prescription4love.com, which matches people suffering from a list of health conditions, after realizing how difficult it was for his brother Keith who had Crohns Disease to meet someone.

“It was hard for him to disclose his disease to anyone, but it was really hard for him to tell someone he had a colostomy bag,” Durham told Reuters.

“I thought if he met someone at a Web site where everyone had the same condition, there would be nothing to disclose.”

His brother died in 2004, aged 41, as the Web site was being developed but Atlanta-based Durham pushed ahead.

The site launched two years ago and now has about 5,300 members from the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and Israel suffering from more than 50 types of illnesses and disorders including multiple sclerosis, hepatitis, lupus, Tourette Syndrome, sexually transmitted diseases, and obesity.

HONESTY IN SEARCH OF LOVE

“The ex gave me the gift that keeps on giving … Herpes,” wrote one member. “What I'm looking for is someone who understands why I am on this site and is still willing to live our lives to the fullest and not let this “problem” stop us.”

Analysis company Hitwise estimates there are now more than 1,350 dating sites in the United States alone which is up from 876 three years ago with 44 percent catering for niche groups.

Specialsomeone and Prescription4Love are two of a growing number of niche dating sites emerging for singles who don't fit the traditional mould, with strong growth also in matchmaker sites based on religion, sports, pet ownership and music.

Others include ones catering for people with disabilities like Disabled Dating World or ones for people with STDs like PositiveSingles.com.

Durham believes niche Web sites are successful because they are safe spaces for people seeking friendship or love who risk serious embarrassment talking about their condition with others who cannot relate to it. It also gives them a support network.

Large dating sites like RSVP.com, Match.com, eHarmony and Yahoo Personals have the general market in online dating covered but Hannah Schwartz, general manager of RSVP.com, said niche sites were becoming increasingly popular.

“Niche sites cater to things like religion, sexual preference, ethnicity, lifestyle, hobbies, and dietary needs,” Schwartz told Reuters.

(Reporting by Pauline Askin, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith)

It may seem recently that there's been an exodus from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). First came GamesIndustry.biz reports, not all of the big names agree that it was the right move.

Jeff Brown, EA's Vice President of Corporate Communication, questioned the wisdom of such a radical move. “I think having [Activision and Vivendi] pull out of the ESA reflects an unfortunate lack of leadership,” he said. “They're a big company and we feel that when you're a big company you've got a responsibility to consumers to work on policy issues which are very, very important to consumers. And the best way to do that is with an industry consensus. That's the way it's been done with the ESA in the U.S., and with ELSPA [Entertainment and Leisure Publishers Association] in the U.K.”

Though he doesn't agree with the companies' withdrawals, he did urge the ESA to take extra steps to retain current members. “It was sad to see them step away from that responsibility. We hope that others don't do that, but I think that the onus is on the ESA to prove that membership in it is good for the company and good for consumers. And I think we're going to see the ESA redouble its efforts to prove that.” Brown also stressed that EA has no plans to leave the ESA, but with two companies exiting in just a few weeks, it's likely we haven't heard the last of the ESA's troubles.

Microsoft on Tuesday began letting advertisers display banner ads to mobile users of Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail, following other companies already supporting mobile banner ads.

Mobile users in France, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. will see the banner ads when using the Microsoft services.

Google made a similar announcement in April, inviting AdWords advertisers to display banner ads instead of only text on mobile phones. Yahoo, AdMob and Third Screen, which is now owned by AOL, are among other companies that also display banner ads on mobile phones.

Microsoft also said it plans to support keyword advertising on Live Search Mobile. The beta-test version of the keyword advertising service is available in the U.S., and Microsoft expects to expand it in the second half of the year.

Microsoft also announced that Windows Live for mobile is now available in 49 markets, an increase from 22. Windows Live for mobile offers mobile access to Hotmail, Messenger and Spaces, a social-networking site that lets people blog and share photos and other content with friends.

Microsoft and the other Internet companies are competing for a foothold in the mobile market, where they see a potentially large opportunity for future advertising revenue. The use of the mobile Internet is still quite small relative to the number of mobile phones on the market, and mobile users don't yet have a strong allegiance to any particular search or portal provider.

“We think mobile is a tremendous opportunity going forward,” said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division. Only about 150 million of the 1 billion phones expected to be sold this year will have the capability to display rich advertising, he said. But that number is expected to triple, so that in a few years 400 million to 500 million phones able to receive audio and video advertising will be sold each year, he said.

Bach and the other Internet companies that are equally excited about the mobile market may have overinflated expectations, however. A new report released on Tuesday showed that mobile-phone sales in the first quarter in the U.S. declined 22 percent compared to the same quarter last year, according to The NPD Group. NPD blamed looming economic concerns. Without a large base of users of higher-end phones, none of the Internet companies will be able to execute on their mobile advertising plans.

Microsoft made the mobile advertising announcements on Tuesday at the Advance08 conference, the company's annual advertising get-together. By midday, Microsoft executives hadn't yet made reference to the company's failed attempt to buy Yahoo, which Microsoft hoped would help it expand its online advertising business. The two companies are currently in discussions about other opportunities besides an outright acquisition.

Instead of talking about possible Yahoo deals, Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the advertiser and publisher solutions group at Microsoft, emphasized the company's end-to-end services for advertisers, ad agencies and publishers.

He announced that Microsoft is unifying its advertising initiatives, many of them based on acquisitions of companies such as ScreenTonic and Massive, under a single brand, Microsoft Advertising. The group will continue its work on existing established advertising methods, such as online ads, but will also innovate on emerging technology platforms, including mobile phones, games, IPTV and video on demand, he said.

A 31 percent jump in laptop PC sales helped drive Hewlett-Packard's strong quarterly results on Tuesday, although there were signs of growth in all its businesses.

Total revenue for the second quarter was US$28.3 billion, up 11 percent from a year earlier. Net income was $2.06 billion, up from $1.78 billion in the same quarter a year ago, the company said.

HP announced preliminary financial results last week, when it also revealed plans to buy IT services company Electronic Data Systems for $13.9 billion. It delayed the full results, including details of how the various segments performed, until Tuesday.

HP's biggest growth came from its software and services divisions, although they started from a smaller base. Services revenue increased 12 percent from the same quarter last year to $4.6 billion. Software revenue jumped 28 percent to $727 million, HP said.

The Personal Systems Group is HP's biggest division. Revenue there grew 16 percent from a year earlier to $10.1 billion, with unit sales up 21 percent, the company said. The growth came almost all from laptop sales, which climbed 31 percent. Desktop PC sales were flat.

In a conference call after the results were released, CEO Mark Hurd said the EDS acquisition will allow HP to capture a significantly bigger portion of what businesses spend on IT.

“We expect the acquisition to accelerate our reach into key enterprise accounts,” he said. “HP is great at engineering and customer support, but we have a coverage problem. We expect the EDS acquisition to double our share of the enterprise wallet and create a platform for opportunities for new business growth,” he said.

He said the combination of software and services will become increasingly important for HP and the industry.

“The alignment of software and services is a really strategic thing for us in the context of automating (business) processes,” he said. “EDS is the biggest applications outsourcer in the world, the biggest applications testing company in the world. You'll continue to see more and more alignment of software and services in the evolution of the services industry.”

Hurd said 70 percent of HP's second-quarter revenue came from outside the U.S. “We benefited from robust demand in emerging economies,” he said.

The quarter's results were driven by cost savings, additional sales staff that HP has put in the channel and HP's broad product portfolio, Hurd said.

In other divisions, HP's Imaging and Printing Group reported revenue of $7.6 billion, up 6 percent from the prior year. Revenue from the Enterprise Storage and Servers division climbed 4 percent to $4.8 billion. Storage revenue climbed 14 percent and revenue from blade servers grew 68 percent, HP said. Revenue from industry standard servers was flat, but revenue from high-end servers grew 21 percent and mid-range server revenue grew 17 percent, HP said.

The EDS deal is designed to help HP compete head-on in the global IT services market with IBM, which is currently the leader in services and drives much of its profit from that business.

In particular, analysts say, EDS will give HP a much bigger business in IT outsourcing and in the kind of strategic IT consulting services aimed at business executives. As with most big mergers, there will be significant risk involved in combining the companies' operations and defining a joint strategy.

The deal has been approved by both companies' boards and is expected to close in the second half of the year.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The city of Chicago is suing eBay and its subsidiary StubHub for failing to collect city amusement taxes on concert and sporting event tickets sold through the Web sites.

Chicago’s amusement tax ordinance includes Internet sites that resell tickets, but eBay, which bought StubHub last year, says the 8 percent tax does not apply to it.

It’s not clear how much money is at stake, but when the city first floated the idea of going after taxes for online sales in 2006, Alderman Edward Burke estimated the city could be losing $16 million a year on Internet-based sales by ticket resellers who don’t collect the tax.

The city filed two complaints Monday, one against each company, asking eBay and StubHub to hand over records of sales in Illinois.

“We don’t have enough information to give an estimate (of lost taxes), because of the lack of information from eBay and StubHub,” said Chicago Law Department spokeswoman Jennifer Hoyle.

The city is engaged in similar lawsuits against online companies that secure discount hotel room rates, like Hotels.com, for not paying applicable taxes.

Also, Texas said this month it is looking into whether it can collect sales taxes from Amazon.com Inc. The investigation was prompted by a legal dispute between the online retailer and New York, which plans to require out-of-state online companies to collect sales tax on goods they send to addresses in New York.

EBay has said paying sales taxes could cripple small Internet businesses and has lobbied against Internet sales tax legislation on Capitol Hill. For small business owners who operate through the online auctioneer’s Web site, implementing or modifying tax collection systems would be prohibitively costly, eBay says.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has estimated states lose billions of dollars each year in uncollected taxes from online sales.

But a 1992 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibits states from forcing businesses to collect the states’ sales taxes unless the company has a physical presence in the state.

States argue that when businesses don’t collect taxes for online sales they are competing unfairly against local retailers because customers can check out merchandise locally and then buy online to avoid the sales tax.

StubHub has an office in Chicago, while it’s unclear whether eBay has a “physical presence” there, according to eBay spokesman Jose Mallabo.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The One Laptop Per Child project plans to resume its Give One Get One program, in which people spend $400 to buy one of the nonprofit’s rugged computers and donate a second one to a child in a developing country.

Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the laptop group, announced the return of the donor program Tuesday as he disclosed plans for a second generation of the “XO” computers. By 2010 Negroponte hopes to unveil a smaller, more energy-efficient version with two touch screens and a price closer to the long-term goal of $100. Negroponte said his new target is $75.

For now the group has sold about 600,000 XOs, which cost $188. About 162,000 of them sold in the first round of Give One Get One, which ran in November and December. Negroponte said the program brought laptops to countries that couldn’t have afforded to buy the computers themselves for their residents, including Haiti and Afghanistan.

The second run of the donor program is expected to begin around the end of the summer and be open to buyers in Europe and the United States.

One Laptop Per Child recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. that will enable international governments to choose a Linux or Windows operating system on XOs they buy. But buyers in Give One Get One might not be able to opt for Windows unless the nonprofit and Microsoft work out a licensing arrangement.

___

On the Net:

http://www.laptop.org

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hulu, the online video website owned by News Corp. and NBCUniversal, said on Tuesday its service will be distributed on seven new sites, making its archive of popular television shows more widely available.

The deals come as usage on Hulu and its partner sites exceeded all U.S. television network sites, including those owned by its founders in its first month since launching publicly, the company said, citing Nielsen's VideoCensus data.

Hulu videos will now be distributed on entertainment and social network sites TV.com, TVGuide.com, BuddyTV.com, Flixster.com, MyYearbook.com, Break.com and Zap2it.com, said Hulu Chief Executive Jason Kilar alongside the Reuters Global Technology Media and Telecoms Summit.

Hulu, which hosts free episodes of such current shows as “The Simpsons,” and “The Office” as well as past hits like “WKRP In Cincinnati,” is showing early signs of success in a market dominated by Google Inc's YouTube.

“While it is extremely early in terms of Hulu's history of serving users, we're quite excited to see such positive trends in Hulu's growth and viewership,” Kilar said ahead of his presentation at the summit in New York.

In April, users watched 63.2 million videos on Hulu and its partners' sites and its viewers spent on average viewing 129.3 minutes per month, beating nearest rival Walt Disney Co's ABC.com, where users watched 60.8 million videos with viewers spending an average of 57.3 minutes, according to Nielsen.

Hulu's figures remain a far cry from those of YouTube, where users watched more than 4 billion videos in the same period. Its viewers spent about 90 minutes per month watching.

But Hulu's statistics have helped the site attract big advertisers including McDonald's Corp, Bank of America Corp, and Blackberry-maker Research In Motion Ltd.

Hulu was widely criticized for arriving well after YouTube established itself as the preeminent source of online videos and years after ABC.com first started offering the network's top shows for free. Hulu was hyped by bloggers and analysts as a “YouTube-killer,” a moniker that Hulu has repeatedly denied.

But technology-savvy users and blogs gave Hulu high marks for its cleanly designed site and deep trove of full-length shows.

Its launch has also inspired debate on the value of homemade videos and videos made outside of established television studios, such as those hosted on France's Dailymotion and YouTube, compared with the professional shows hosted on Hulu and other network-owned sites.

Martin Rogard, France country manager for Dailymotion, said he saw Hulu as a less attractive option for investors and users than his own site, which is primarily a source of home videos and clips of professionally produced content.

“I don't see our users as willing to necessarily go after what they can see of TV. Because they can see it on TV,” Rogard said at the Reuters Technology summit in Paris on Monday. “I don't really think the new generation and a lot of people go to Dailymotion to see what has been shown on TV.”

Hulu is one of the few places where viewers can easily find a library of recently broadcast and archived television shows.

“They should be proud and they are number one relative to its major partners,” Forrester analyst James McQuivey said.

However, the analyst said he had expected as many as 80 million to 100 million videos to be viewed on Hulu by now given its line-up of partners with big Internet portals Time Warner Inc's AOL, Comcast Corp, Yahoo Inc, News Corp's MySpace and Microsoft Corp's MSN.

Hulu's partners have yet to figure out how best to attract more usage, McQuivey said, pointing out that it has been somewhat difficult to find Hulu videos easily on AOL.com.

“It suggests that the partners have a little more work to do to capture their fair share of the audience,” he said, referring to Hulu's content partners.

(Editing by Derek Caney)

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

Microsoft showed a future advertising service that will allow companies to hawk their wares on its Zune media player.

Mark Kroese, a general manager with Microsoft's entertainment and devices group, on Tuesday showed a mock Doritos ad campaign on the Zune at Microsoft's Advance08 advertising conference. It was an elaborate demonstration intended to show the platform's full potential, though it will depend on the willingness of Zune users to play along.

In the demonstration, a user could visit a page on the Zune social Web site for information about a music festival sponsored by Doritos. The page included a profile of one of the musicians involved with the festival. Users could become a “friend” of the musician to view his profile on their Zune, and receive updates when the musician added new favorite artists to his profile.

In the example, Doritos offered Zune users free downloads of the musician's favorite music. A Zune user could e-mail the musician's profile to a friend who might be interested in the music. That friend could check the e-mail on a mobile phone through Microsoft's Live Hotmail service. When the friend clicks on the e-mail, a Doritos advertisement flashes briefly on the screen. Doritos is a popular American brand of snack chips.

In addition, embedded in the e-mail is a promotional game from Doritos that looked similar to the classic Asteroids game. If the user does well at the game the user receives a coupon on their phone for a free bag of Doritos. The coupon has a bar code that the user can swipe at a store checkout to collect the free bag of chips. The user can also click on a link to find nearby shops selling Doritos, with directions and a map.

The capabilities are not yet available to advertisers but will be used in a pilot offering later this year, Kroese said.

“This is not something that is far in the future,” said Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices group. “We have the technology. We need to build the back-end systems to make sure we can do it well.”

Bach described the Zune advertising capabilities as part of a larger effort at Microsoft to enable advertising campaigns that span the TV, PC and mobile devices.

Microsoft is already advertising in Xbox games. When Microsoft originally launched the Xbox, Bach said he wouldn't have guessed it could become an important platform for advertising. “Well, it has become a meaningful source of revenue and profit for us,” he said.

Future opportunities on the Zune, mobile phone and TV represent the “new new media,” which Bach described as advertising opportunities beyond the PC browser.

Bach and Kroese spoke at the annual advertisers' get together, Advance08, organized by Microsoft and hosted this year on the company's corporate campus in Redmond, Washington.