The Technophilez

Google, the nearly $13.5 billion search engine major, is believed to be a fortnight away from the worldwide launch of its much-awaited Google Phone(Gphone) and has started talks with service providers in India for an exclusive launch on one of their networks.
 
Talks are believed to be taking place with Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Essar, respectively India’s first- and third-largest mobile telephony operators, and state-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam. 
Sources close to the development said a simultaneous launch across the US and Europe is expected, and announcements would be sent to media firms in India and other parts of the world. US regulatory approval, which is expected soon, is the only hurdle that Google is waiting to cross, they added. Google plans to invest $7-8 billion for its global telephony foray. 

In India, it is also believed to be in talks with Indian providers to offer data and content and platforms including Instant Messaging (IM) and Search functions. However, these could not be confirmed. 
A Google spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on market rumour or speculation. However, Google is committed to providing users with access to the world’s information, and mobile becomes more important to those efforts every day. We’re collaborating with partners worldwide to bring Google search and applications to mobile users everywhere. However, we have nothing to announce at this time.” 
Reports of the Internet major getting into handset manufacturing as an answer to Apple’s iPhone has been doing rounds in cyberspace and international media for some time. These reports suggest that Google has developed a prototype that will hit the markets in a year’s time. The US-based company has neither confirmed nor denied these reports. The Wall Street Journal too had reported that Google had invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the project and was involved in discussions with US-based T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. 

Globally, Google is likely to participate in the upcoming auction for 700 MHz spectrum for which it is prepared to spend up to $4.6 billion. The firm is also introducing ads to YouTube videos which could be replicated on mobile phones. Ironically, Google recently partnered Apple to produce services such as e-mail and maps for its iPhone handset. And Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said recently that more Google services for the iPhone would be rolled out. 

 NEW YORK - A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple's iPhone to AT&T's wireless network, freeing the most hyped cell phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones.

George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major U.S. carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology.

While the possibility of switching from AT&T to T-Mobile may not be a major development for U.S. consumers, it opens up the iPhone for use on the networks of overseas carriers.

"That's the big thing," said Hotz, in a phone interview from his home in Glen Rock.

The phone, which combines an innovative touch-screen interface with the media-playing abilities of the iPod, is sold only in the U.S.

Calls to AT&T and Apple for comment were not immediately returned.

The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform. Since the details are public, it seems likely that a small industry may spring up to buy U.S. iPhones, unlock them and send them overseas.

"That's exactly, like, what I don't want," Hotz said. "I don't want people making money off this."

He said he wished he could make the instructions simpler, so users could modify the phones themselves.

"But that's the simplest I could make them," Hotz said.

The modification leaves the iPhone's many functions, including a built-in camera and the ability to access Wi-Fi networks, intact. The only thing that won't work is the "visual voicemail" feature, which shows voice messages as if they were incoming e-mail.

Hotz collaborated online with four other people, two of them in Russia, to develop the unlocking process.

"Then there are two guys who I think are somewhere U.S.-side," Hotz said. He knows them only by their online handles.

Sony took another step to lure new customers for its high-end PlayStation3, saying it would sell a device to let users record live television that can be stored on the game console or transferred to the PlayStation Portable for later viewing.

The combined television tuner and personal video recorder, dubbed PlayTV, is aimed at helping Sony boost sales of its high-end gaming console as well as its portable gaming unit. Sales are due to start in Spain, Germany, France, Italy and Britain in early 2008.

Sony announced the new product Wednesday at the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany.

Using a format known in Europe as Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial, the PlayTV integrates into the PlayStation 3 console and lets users record individual episodes or entire series to its hard drive.

Sony said the device's twin TV tuners are high-definition ready and able to view, record and play back in that format. Recorded video can be sent wirelessly from the console to a PSP.

For all its advances, Sony's PS3 has faced formidable competition from rivals like Nintendo Co.'s Wii and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360.

Sony had sold 4.3 million PS3 consoles as of June, compared with 11.6 million Xbox 360s and about 8 million Wiis.

The PS3 retails for 599 euros ($808) in Europe and $499 in the U.S. The company did not say how much PlayTV would cost or when it would be available elsewhere in Europe, Asia or the Americas.

Jonathan Arber and Jonathan Coham, analysts at Ovum, a London-based research firm, said PlayTV was the "next logical step" for Sony in competing with the Xbox 360, but said Sony still has to overcome the console's price and bring out more games.

From InfoWorld

San Francisco (IDGNS) - Guns, saws, and some very dim-witted thieves were all apparently involved in a network blackout that affected Internet users, primarily in the northeastern United States, earlier this week.

Cogent Communications said Thursday that a cable cut that occurred near Cleveland on Sunday night was caused by a saw, not by gunshot as first thought, but technicians struggling to replace the cut cable used a replacement cable that had been shot.

Cogent was one of several operators affected through Monday evening when two-thirds of a mile of cable was cut between Cleveland and the tiny town of Montville, Ohio. With more than 32,500 miles of fiber, Cogent is one of the largest network operators in the United States.

Crews rushed in to fix the problem only to discover that their replacement cable had been damaged by gunshots. "The original cable was not shot, it was the replacement cable," Cogent said Thursday. "The original cable was cut with a saw of some sort. Police are speculating that the thieves thought the cable was made of copper."

Copper prices have spiked in recent years, spurred in part by increased demand from China, and theft of all kinds of copper, including wires, has become common. Unfortunately for the Cleveland thieves, fiber-optic cable is made of glass fibers, not metal.

Cogent did not name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 did not return calls seeking comment.

TeliaSonera lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, the company said.

Grant Gross in Washington contributed to this story.

This morning Skype released a statement explaining its two-day outage last week - and pinning the root cause on a routine Microsoft update to the Windows operating system that caused masses of users to reboot their PCs at the same time. In an interview last week, Skype’s chief security officer said he did not think that Microsoft had anything to do with the service’s collapse. Skype engineers must have subsequently decided otherwise.

Bear in mind that the eBay-owned Skype is not blaming Microsoft. An old, undetected error in Skype software made it more difficult for the system to handle the waves of users trying to sign back on after they received the patch and rebooted their machines. Here is Skype’s full statement:
On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they rebooted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
The high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.

Normally Skype’s peer-to-peer network has an inbuilt ability to self-heal, however, this event revealed a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly. Regrettably, as a result of this disruption, Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately two days.

The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users’ security was not, at any point, at risk.

This disruption was unprecedented in terms of its impact and scope. We would like to point out that very few technologies or communications networks today are guaranteed to operate without interruptions.

We are very proud that over the four years of its operation, Skype has provided a technically resilient communications tool to millions of people worldwide. Skype has now identified and already introduced a number of improvements to its software to ensure that our users will not be similarly affected in the unlikely possibility of this combination of events recurring.

The Skype community of users has been incredibly supportive and we are very grateful for all their good wishes.

  Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation have announced that from no on they will support the HD-DVD format exclusively – that means no Blue-ray version of Shrek 3 or Transformers. However Spielberg directed movies such as the Indiana Jones trilogy will remain multi-format.

"I believe HD-DVD is not only the affordable high quality choice for consumers, but also the smart choice for Paramount," said CEO and chairman Brad Grey.

"We decided to release 'Shrek the Third' and other DreamWorks Animation titles exclusively on HD-DVD because we believe it is the best format to bring high quality home entertainment to a key segment of our audience - families," said CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Microsoft said Thursday that presales for its forthcoming Halo 3 video game for the Xbox 360 have surpassed 1 million and set an industry record.

Halo 3 is the "fastest selling preordered video game in history," Microsoft claimed.

A number of major online retailers, including Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, and Wal-Mart, are accepting preorders for the game. "What we've experienced is nothing short of phenomenal," said Bob MacKenzie, senior VP for merchandising at GameStop, in a statement.

Most retailers are selling the title for around $60. A special "Legendary Edition" sells for about $130 and includes a helmet-style case, bonus discs, and collector's art. The game is scheduled to ship Sept. 25.

Halo 3 is a first-person shooter featuring Master Chief, a biologically enhanced soldier who has to blast his way through a futuristic, 3-D landscape to survive and accomplish missions.

Version 3 of the game, developed by Bungie Studios and published by Microsoft, features a host of new levels, weapons, vehicles, and game types.

Last month, Microsoft introduced a special Halo 3 edition of the Xbox 360 and matching wireless controller featuring a Spartan green and gold finish, mirroring the colors worn by Master Chief.

Microsoft is counting on the game's debut -- and a $50 Xbox 360 price cut -- to help boost its console sales. Xbox 360 sales plunged 60% year over year in Microsoft's fiscal fourth quarter.

Apple's iPhone customers have reported dead spots on the handset's touch-screen interface, which is considered the most innovative component of the pricey gadget.

The problem, which appears to have affected only a small number of customers, was reported on the discussion forum of Apple's support site this week. The dead spots were in a variety of locations and occurred irrespective of the software being used.

Many of the customers reported bringing the phone back to an Apple store, where in many cases they received a loaner phone at no charge while the broken handset was being repaired. Apple, according to the reports, was not handing out new phones as replacements.

A minority of customers, however, reported less than satisfactory service at the stores. "I went to the iPhone bar a couple weeks ago, and the guy told me this was just how the screen is, and that it was the length of my nails!!" a Chicago resident who used the name Newtype said.

Another customer reported taking his broken iPhone to an Apple store in Westchester County, N.Y., where a manager denied such a problem existed and refused to waive the $29 fee for a loaner phone. "He denied that he had the discretion to replace the phone or waive the loaner fee. Great product, support not so great," the person who went by the name Tjrubeo said.

Apple was not immediately available for comment on Friday.

The iPhone's unique touch-screen interface is among the innovative features that Apple has used in justifying the high cost of the iPhone, which is as much as $600. Other vendors sell less-expensive smartphones that are also capable of surfing the Web and contain similar software.

An advantage of the iPhone, however, is it sleek design and large screen that displays Web pages pretty much as they appear on a PC. According to recently published patent applications, Apple is working on an interface for "computing devices" that would respond to voice commands.

The initial success of the iPhone, which hit the market June 29, has attracted the attention of lawyers. IPhone-related lawsuits have included one for alleged patent infringement, and another over Apple's decision not to include a user-replaceable battery in the device. Buyers have to ship the phone to Apple to have the battery replaced.

Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.

The annual prices established were $20 for 6 gigabytes of online storage, $75 for 25 GB, $250 for 100 GB and $500 for 250 GB.

Google said the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the e-mail service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are the company's word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Gmail users currently get nearly 3 GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1 GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.

Yahoo and AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their e-mail services.

Mountain View-based Google has been adding about 145 megabytes of free storage to each e-mail account annually — a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25 GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs.

 Microsoft's Xbox 360 video game console will be $50 cheaper starting Wednesday, confirming fuzzy snapshots of leaked advertisements posted by bloggers in late July.

The company said its most popular console, which comes with a 20-gigabyte hard drive, will cost $349.

A basic console without a hard drive or wireless controllers will retail for $279, $20 less than its current price, while the Xbox 360 Elite, a black version with a 120-gigabyte hard drive and high-definition video support, will drop $50 to $449.

In July, the company clipped the price of its add-on HD-DVD player to $179, from $199.

Microsoft has been dodging questions about a console price cut since competitor Sony Corp. slashed the price of its 60-gigabyte PlayStation 3 to $499, from $599, in early July. Nintendo Corp.'s Wii, the least expensive of the so-called next-generation consoles, costs $250.

Last week, spokespeople for Wal-Mart Stores, Toys "R" Us and Microsoft all refused to say whether blurred images found online — purportedly showing weekend ad circulars reflecting the price cuts — were authentic.

Aaron Greenberg, a group product manager for Xbox 360, said in an interview Monday that the ads were real.

Greenberg also said competitors' prices had no impact on Microsoft's decision.

"In fact, we had this in our plans from the very beginning," he said, and added that the timing was linked to the release of several highly anticipated video games, including "Madden NFL 08," which hits retail shelves next Tuesday.

"There is nothing too shocking about this," said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch. He said it's normal for companies to cut console prices between one and two years after launch.

The analyst added that the $50 price cut will bring in a whole new group of customers who ruled it out at the higher price, and that Microsoft should enjoy increased sales immediately — even though the official holiday shopping season is still months away.

Microsoft also said Tuesday that the green and gold "Halo 3"-themed console, will go on sale in September for $400.

Job hunters perfecting their resumes for that dream job are being urged to also polish their online profile -- and clean it up if needs be, with a new breed of companies emerging to help mold Internet images.

Recruitment experts advise job hunters to Google themselves before stepping out into the competitive job market to see if a search pull ups that blog entry written about legalizing marijuana or drunken party photos with friends.

"The internet brings a new dimension to the application process. Sometimes it can work to your advantage, and sometimes to your disadvantage," employment Web site Careerbuilder.com spokeswoman Jennifer Sullivan told Reuters.

Various surveys have shown that employers are using online searches to check out potential candidates -- especially as some of the early Internet surfers become bosses themselves.

A study of 1,150 hiring managers by Careerbuilder.com found 26 percent of managers admitted to using search engines such as Google and 12 percent of managers said they used social networking sites like Facebook.com in their hiring process.

Those numbers may be low, but not the repercussions.

Of the 12 percent who checked social networking sites, 63 percent declined to hire an applicant based on what they found, citing lying about qualifications and criminal behavior as two of the top disqualifiers.

But with hiring managers and job seekers using new and different ways to stay one step ahead of each other, new technology has emerged to help both sides of the game.

For $10 a month, ReputationDefender.com will search your name everywhere -- even "beyond Google" -- including password-protected sites, and give a report of their findings.

For about $30 a month, clients can have them do a clean-up, which involves ensuring all links to, for example, a college kegstand on Facebook.com or a disparaging blog entry from a former partner, will not appear during an online search.

"More than half of my clients use us just to search and don't even ask us to clean anything up," the company's chief executive and founder Michael Fertik, 28, told Reuters.

Fertik, a graduate from Harvard Law School, said it's important for everyone to know how they're perceived online.

"Often pictures that are intrinsically innocuous get taken out of context, and then can become punitive," said Fertik.

Lenovo Group the world's No. 3 PC maker, said on Monday it would start selling laptop computers preloaded with Linux software from Novell Inc. instead of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

The laptops are slated to go on sale in the fourth quarter of this year and will be sold to Lenovo's business customers as well as to consumers.

Lenovo announced its plans at the start of LinuxWorld, an annual conference for information-technology managers being held in San Francisco this week.

The Linux operating system has been one of the fastest-growing types of software on servers and other types of powerful business computers over the past decade.

Last year, Microsoft entered into a business partnership with Novell that includes joint product development on server software. Microsoft also sells Novell products and both companies agreed to provide patent protections for each other's customers.

PC makers have been reluctant to embrace Linux, but that view is starting to change.

In May, No. 2 PC maker Dell  began selling three models to U.S. consumers that come preloaded with another version of Linux, from a nonprofit group known as Ubuntu.

It introduced them after Chief Executive Michael Dell asked customers to post suggestions for new products on the company's Web site. Linux PCs were overwhelming the most-requested item.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, who runs privately held Canonical Inc. which sells service contracts to maintain Ubuntu software, said in an interview last month that he expects Dell to expand its Linux PC program.

He also said that he is in negotiations with other large PC makers that want to introduce models preloaded with Ubuntu.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is considering standardization of the company's HD Photo file format. Tentatively titled "JPEG XR," HD Photo was introduced with the release of Windows Vista.

HD Photo - once known as Windows Media Photo is a new file format for digital photography that Microsoft claims offers better image fidelity, higher image compression efficiency more flexible editing features. It supports both lossy and lossless compression. Microsoft claims that HD Photo offers image comparable to JPEG-2000 with less performance and memory drain, and that it can deliver better quality images than JPEG at less than half the file size.

The news met with applause from leading image sensor and camera makers including Foveon and Hasselblad. It also elicited a statement from a spokesman for the JPEG itself.

"We are voting on consideration of this new file format for standardization because we believe it will foster breakthrough, innovative products and services in the photography and printing industries that will have widespread value for consumers around the world," said Dr. Daniel Lee, convener of the Joint Photographic Expert Group.

The ballot deadline for the new project considering JPEG XR is October 2007, and finalizing and publishing the completed standard may take up to a year after that.

Although Microsoft has patents on the technology used in HD Photo, it has stated plans to make the specification available under its Open Specification Promise, which makes available certain Microsoft technologies to open-source developers.

Sony is working on a digital tuner that would bring live TV recording to the Playstation 3 in parts of the world next year, according to a recent story in New Zealand editorial publication The Press.

In the story, Sony Computer Entertainment's marketing manager for New Zealand Warwick Light said, "We're also hoping next year – about the same time that Freeview launches its terrestrial broadcasting service – to release a digital tuner for the PS3, turning it into a programmable TV recorder."

Freeview is a new organization set to offer free digital terrestrial television in New Zealand by March of next year.

A similar service under the same name has also made its way to the United Kingdom, where the PS3 tuner capabilities are also speculated to come into play.  Last month it was reported that Sony would make an official announcement about the tuners at the Games Convention in Leipzig Germany later this month.

Nothing has yet been mentioned about the service coming to the two top-selling markets for the PS3, Japan and North America.