by Stephen Shankland
December 10, 2008 7:25 PM PST

Google hopes the second time will be a charm for a Gmail Labs feature that lets people send text messages to people's mobile phones with the company's Web-based e-mail service.

"A few weeks back, we ran into a few snags when we first started rolling this out, but starting today you can turn on text messaging for chat," said Leo Dirac, a Google product manager, in a blog post Wednesday. After the feature's fleeting debut in October, Google removed it to fix a problem where turning the feature on didn't actually fully turn it on. It took a little longer than two weeks, though.

The feature is available only in the United States for now. To use it, people must first enable it through Gmail Labs, then they can initiate SMS-based instant message chats by typing in a phone number in the chat box on the left of the Gmail page. People who receive SMS messages from the service will get a return phone number from the 406 area code, which Dirac was happy to point out spells G0O.

Each pairing uses a unique phone number, so a person receiving messages can store a the 406 phone number on his or her phone for future use to communicate with that specific person. Tactfully, Dirac also observes that sending SMS messages from Gmail might be costing your buddies money, so be judicious.

By Joel Hruska
December 11, 2008 - 07:05AM CT

Last June, the Korean Fair Trade Commission fined Intel approximately $19 million for what it described as anticompetitive behavior and for abuse of its market position. The penalty followed a three-year investigation into Intel's behavior; at the time Intel expressed "disappointment" with the Korean FTC's ruling.

Today, the CPU manufacturer filed a complaint with the Seoul High Court in South Korea, alleging that the Korean FTC's ruling was based on "substantial factual and legal errors," that the organization had "failed to understand the dynamics, pricing and competition," and that it "misinterpreted or chose to ignore evidence" that would have proven Intel's innocence.

No company would appeal a complaint and then turn over an admission of guilt in its filing, but Intel's continued protestations of innocence seem a bit too heavy-handed. Intel spokesperson Nick Jacobs stated that the company is taking this action as an "opportunity to demonstrate that our business practices are fair and lawful," but the company's filing appears to do more than allege that the Korean FTC made a mistake.

Arguing that the Korean FTC made substantial errors, failed to understand the dynamics of the market it is charged with overseeing, and chose to ignore evidence is essentially the same as claiming that the Korean FTC is staffed with incompetent, biased morons. If this verbiage seems a tad familiar, it's because we've seen it before.

By James Sherwood
10th December 2008 15:34 GMT

Sony Ericsson’s recent membership to the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) has finally prompted it to come clean over rumours that it’s planning to launch a handset based on Google’s Android platform. Rikko Sakaguchi, Corporate VP at Sony Ericsson, said it’s the company’s aim to “develop a handset based on the Android platform”, according to his OHA membership statement.

He added that SE’s a strong supporter of open operating systems, of which Android is one. Speculation that SE was building up to such an announcement has been doing the rounds since the Android-based T-Mobile G1 was launched back in September. Following the unveiling, SE’s President, Dick Komiyama, said the firm was “certainly interested” in the Google phone platform.

SE’s still keeping mum about any specific Android phone details, though. But following an interview with one of SE’s PR executives, website Computer Sweden reports that the company will launch its first Android phone in summer 2009. HTC would be an obvious route into the Android market for SE. The Taiwanese company developed the G1 and is also behind SE’s Windows Mobile-based Xperia smartphone.

By Wily Ferret
10 December 2008, 16:27

DEFYING ITS usual practice of leaving products in beta for... well, ever, Google has announced that Chrome, its web browser, will be officially released, er... imminently. Chrome was first released to the public just over three months ago, and is Google's attempt at gaining some market share in the browser wars, which are still as open as they ever have been.

Although the Vole's Internet Exploder still owns more than half of the market, the absolute dominance of Firefox amongst those with half a brain has taken a large slice out of IE's zombie audience. The increasing popularity of Macs has also seen Safari use rise, and Google is hoping that this will keep the door wedged open for new switchers to Chrome.

What is unclear is whether Chrome can take any action from IE, or whether it will merely attract disaffected or curious Firefox and Opera fans. It's clear that Google wants to offer Chrome to PC vendors to pre-install on the desktop, along with Google Toolbar and Google Apps. Although there is no official information, it seems likely that PC vendors will get kickbacks in the form of Adsense cuts for putting Chrome on desktops.

Chrome is currently only available for Windows, and no date for a Mac version has been given. There's not even a rumour of a Linux version of Chrome either, which is passing strange because Google's zillions of networked systems run Linux. The release of Chrome is part of Google's larger strategy to overthrow its Volish competitor. Chrome includes a large offline component, allowing users to operate Google's Office apps whilst not connected to the Internet.

by Andrew Nusca
December 10th, 2008 @ 10:47 am

HP has announced a fast-charging laptop battery that promises to last at least three years without any degradation in performance, according to InfoWorld. The “Sonata” battery, as it is called, will be an option on HP’s laptops, and is the product of three years of development work by Boston-Power.

It will be rebranded by HP as the “Enviro” battery and offered starting in early 2009 on select laptops. The battery will cost an extra $20 to $30 over a standard model, and will initially only be available in North America. The battery can be charged to 80 percent of capacity in 30 minutes and will go 1,000 charges before the battery’s capacity begins degrading. In other words, this battery might outlast your laptop (common laptop batteries today start to degrade after 300 charges).

HP is backing up the longer-life promise with a 3-year warranty.

by Dawn Kawamoto
December 10, 2008 8:25 AM PST

Major Yahoo investor Ivory Investment Management on Wednesday called on Yahoo's board to restart talks with Microsoft and offered up a search buyout proposal that it claims could yield investors a value of $24 to $29 per share.

Ivory, which holds a 1.5 percent stake in Yahoo, is proposing Yahoo sell its search business to Microsoft for an upfront payment of approximately $15 billion, in which Microsoft then becomes the search provider for all of Yahoo's properties and its existing affiliates. Microsoft would own and operate the combined search platform, making Yahoo an affiliate that would receive 80 percent of revenue generated from searches performed on its own site.

Ivory believes that arrangement could also result in annual cash flow to Yahoo of nearly $500 million. Shares of Yahoo rose as high as 7.4 percent to $13.09 in Wednesday morning trading. In its letter to Yahoo's board of directors, Curtis Macnguyen, Ivory's managing partner, said: This deal would offer Microsoft the unique opportunity to immediately gain critical mass to better level the playing field with Google, while it would simultaneously allow Yahoo to both receive a sizable upfront cash payment and increase its prospective cash flow (i.e., EBITDA).

There are two key reasons why we believe this proposed deal is extremely beneficial to both parties: 1) Approximately $800 million of duplicate operating costs could be eliminated. This estimate is based upon benchmarking Yahoo's and Microsoft's Online Services Business' operating costs versus Google's cost structure....

By Ryan Paul
December 10, 2008 - 08:18AM CT

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Thunderbird 3 beta release. This version introduces some significant user interface improvements to the e-mail client, along with some very good IMAP optimizations.

Tabbed interface - The most visible enhancement in the beta release is the new tabbed user interface. When we looked at alpha 3 in October and wrote about some of the prominent upcoming features on the short-term roadmap, we pointed out that tab management and session restore were in the works. In the beta release, users can open mail folders and individual messages in new tabs.

The tabbing system is also exposed through Thunderbird's extension API so that third-party add-ons can take advantage of the feature. The latest nightly builds of Lightning, a calendaring extension for Thunderbird, allow users to display the calendar and task list in separate tabs. The new tab bar interface, which is modeled after the one in Firefox, has an overflow menu at the end but doesn't appear to allows tab reordering yet.

Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark has written several blog entries about the new tab feature in which he explains the thought process behind some of the design decisions. Cribbing from Firefox - Developers have also continued their efforts to reorganize the message interface and move message-related features out of the toolbar and into the message pane.

By Eric Lai
December 9, 2008

The market for netbooks -- small notebook PCs with even tinier prices -- exploded in the third quarter of this year, according to market researcher DisplaySearch LLC, as vendors aimed their wares at students during the back-to-school season.

The global market for netbooks, also known as mini-notebooks, was 5.61 million in the third quarter, up 160% from the second quarter, according to a statement today from DisplaySearch, an Austin-based research firm. Acer Inc. displaced Asustek Computer Inc. (Asus) as the netbook market leader for the first time during the quarter, taking 38.3% of the market, compared to 30.3% for Asus.

DisplaySearch expects sales of netbooks, which are lighter-weight, lower-powered and generally cheaper than regular notebook PCs, to hit 14 million by the end of the year. That's a sharp rise from 2007, when just 1 million were sold.

"Worldwide demand for these products is forecast to grow rapidly over the next few years, with demand from a variety of sources, including early adopters, consumer and enterprise PC customers seeking a smaller or secondary notebook PC, as well as new PC customers in emerging markets," DisplaySearch analyst John F. Jacobs wrote in a report.

By Paul Taylor
9 December 2008, 06:35

IT IS RATHER unsurprising that China, that great bastion for “liberated software”, would generate this sort of event: an attendee at WinHEC China snuck away with the VHD image (Virtual PC 2004 Virtual Hard Drive) file of Windows 7’s 6956 build and promptly uploaded it to a torrent site.

As expected world+dog are on the case, having a go at it. Unfortunately, the VHD isn’t a bootable disk, but some users have fiddled enough with the virtual disk image and the 6801 build install to create a fully installable ISO. Torrent chat is reporting users have overcome the non-boot disk issue by using the installer for the 6801 build, and the jury-rigged ISOs are replacing the original VHD on torrent sites as we speak.

We can’t imagine a better deal for Microsoft. You know... having someone leak the build and dozens of torrent sites picking up on it so thousands of new machines are populated with the Vole’s latest OS.

We still don’t know what the fuss is about, though. Once you’ve overcome the ISO hurdle, jumped over the activation timer and ran through the WGA protection gate, you get Windows 7 Beta 1 out in two weeks time reinstall... quite frankly, why bother? Apparently Chinese bragging rights are in order.

by Richard Koman
December 9, 2008 @ 4:58 PM

Microsoft offered to dramatically scale back its data retention policies — if Google and Yahoo do the same, PCWorld reports. Microsoft proposed to adopt European guidelines that search query data not be kept longer than six months.

John Vassallo, vice president of E.U. affairs for Microsoft, said that the company couldn’t unillaterally switch to a six month policy, as that would result in “a very unlevel playing field.”

Microsoft retains search data for 18 months before anonymizing it. In September, Google said it would anonymize IP addresses connected to specific searches that are recorded in its server logs after nine months. Google, which holds about 80 percent of the European search market, previously did that after 18 months. Yahoo anonymizes data after 13 months.

by Brooke Crothers
December 9, 2008 10:30 PM PST

Intel has completed the development phase of its next-generation manufacturing process that shrinks chip circuitry to 32 nanometers, the chipmaker said Tuesday night. Intel processors are currently made on a 45nm process.

Generally, smaller geometries result in faster and more power-efficient processors. "The company is on track for production readiness of this future generation (of transistors)...in the fourth quarter of 2009," the chipmaker said in a statement.

Intel said it will provide technical details about the 32nm process technology at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) next week in San Francisco. Finishing the development phase for 32nm process technology keeps Intel on track with its "tick-tock" strategy. Tick-tock is intended to introduce either a new processor microarchitecture or cutting-edge manufacturing process about every 12 months.

"Producing 32nm chips next year would mark the fourth consecutive year that Intel has met its goal," the company said. The 32nm paper and presentation "describe a logic technology that incorporates second-generation high-k + metal gate technology, 193nm immersion lithography for critical patterning layers, and enhanced transistor strain techniques," Intel said.

By Sam Gustin
December 10, 2008 - 05:15AM CT

Former Vodafone head Arun Sarin may or may not become Yahoo's next chief executive, but one thing is for sure: he's no Jerry Yang. In fact, he may be the Anti-Yang.

Sarin's reputation as a tough, military-trained former boxer stands in stark contrast with Yang's image as a cerebral, mild-mannered software engineer. The 54-year-old Sarin was recently praised by India's Economic Times for his "near-legendary pugnacious ability to stand up to sustained battering," a quality that could very well be required of Yahoo's next chief executive.

In order to lead Yahoo out of its current morass, the beleaguered Web company may well need an experienced brawler—something Jerry Yang will never be accused of. Sarin, the well-regarded former chief executive of mobile giant Vodafone, is on the short list of candidates being examined by a working group of Yahoo board members, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo's board is vetting candidates to succeed Yang, Yahoo's cofounder, who announced his intention to step down after a turbulent 17-month run during which the company's stock price tanked and he failed to achieve major deals with Microsoft and Google. Sarin is attractive for several reasons, not least of all his experience leading Vodafone, one of the world's largest wireless carriers.

by Stephen Shankland
December 9, 2008 11:40 AM PST

On Tuesday, Mozilla released Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and Google released Chrome 0.4.154.33, so it's time for the latest installment of JavaScript performance testing. Here's the highlight: Though Firefox remains the leader on the SunSpider test, with a score of 2,110, Chrome edged very close with 2,140.

A lower score is better; because of some variation in results, the numbers I quoted are an average of several runs. Firefox and Chrome aren't the only browsers out there, but they're interesting to compare for a few reasons. First, they're both open-source projects launched to shake up the establishment with new ideas about the browsing experience. Second, given that philosophical alignment, they're likely to appeal to the same early-adopter crowd.

Finally, both have new JavaScript engines, Chrome's V8 and Mozilla's TraceMonkey, which in the new beta is switched on by default. JavaScript is used to build sophisticated Web sites such as Gmail or Google Docs, but it's also widely used for more ordinary operations, so faster JavaScript performance is desirable. One interesting possibility Google has raised for Web applications though is to bypass JavaScript altogether and use Google's new Native Client software, a research project that lets Web-based software run closer to the speeds of regular software on a computer.

SunSpider is only one test, though; Google has its own JavaScript benchmark on which Chrome wins hands-down. A glitch in the first Firefox beta kept me from testing it on Google's benchmarks, but the new beta runs again, yielding a score of 182. That's lower than the earlier Firefox 3.1 beta's 235 score, so perhaps something is still amiss. Either way, it's a far cry from Chrome 0.4.154.33's score of 2,635.

By Jacqui Cheng
December 09, 2008 - 07:09PM CT

Google's book search is no longer limited to just books—now, users can turn up magazine results when hunting through the electronic versions of dead trees. The company announced Tuesday that it had begun an initiative to add magazine archives (in addition to current issues) to its online collection, with full articles now showing up alongside search results for various keywords.

As of today, Google has partnered with a number of publishers to digitize their offerings and link them in the book search. This includes selections from New York magazine, which now has hundreds of issues online from as far back as 1965, and Popular Science. The magazine selection isn't just limited to those, however—just do a keyword search for almost anything and you'll see magazine results turn up alongside the book results.

If you want to limit your search to just magazines, you can do so through the advanced book search preferences. Unlike some of the book results, magazines found through Google's book search are offered as full articles—helpful for performing that last tidbit of research online without hiking to a library in the dead of night.

Google says that it eventually plans to start mixing magazine results into regular old search results, "so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for." Google first began digitizing books in 2004 through partnerships with various libraries, but it quickly ran into legal trouble as publishers' associations began to raise questions about Google's respect of copyright.

By Kelly Fiveash
9th December 2008 16:07 GMT

Microsoft has released alpha code for an "open source" blogging platform dubbed Oxite. Redmond will be hoping the platform – which sounds like a spotty teen's best friend to us – will compete with the likes of market big boys Wordpress and Google’s Blogger.

But many will argue that now is an odd time for the firm to be developing its own blogging platform. However, Microsoft is on its somewhat kamikaze mission to become a force in the Web 2.0 world – whatever the cost. The company’s developer evangelist Jeff Sandquist claimed that “Oxite, is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.”

But, as we’ve previously reported, Microsoft’s CodePlex site, where the code was published, hasn’t exactly fared well when scrutinised about its open source claims. Just last month Microsoft said its CodePlex site would be revised before the year's out to signpost genuinely open source projects, after the company got itself in hot water.

Sandquist said the code, which was built using ASP.NET Model View Controller, currently on offer is merely a “lightweight sample” for developers to play with. As for whether Oxite can be considered truly open source, you can judge for yourself by downloading the alpha code here.