http://www.corigin.com sofware news Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:33:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en DigitalBridge Communications, a provider of WiMAX-based broadband-to-rural communities, announced a $20 million Series B round of financing Monday, showing that some investors believe there might be gold to mine in them thar rural broadband markets. The new funding (which PE Hub says is closer to $23 million) joins the $17 ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/million_into_rural_wimax/ By Tim O'Reilly Sun Microsystems announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire open source database leader MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. (Disclosure: I ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/acquire_mysql/ As expected, Steve Jobs in his keynote at Macworld unveiled iTunes movie rentals. Library titles will cost $2.99 each, new releases will be $3.99. Jobs also announced Apple TV Take 2 and other product news. NewTeeVee editor Liz Gannes is at the conference and is liveblogging all the details. ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/apple_unveils_itunes_movie_rentals/ In addition to unveiling a movie rental service for iTunes and an updated version of Apple TV (with a lower price), Steve Jobs in his Macworld keytnote today announced the MacBook Air, which at a maximum thickness of 0.76 inches (and 3 lbs), is the world’s thinnest notebook. It sports both ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_comes/ I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company's About page is lifted ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/first_scareware/ UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/nanotech_anode_promises_battery/ ta bu shi da yu writes "Mozilla has hired several developers from Humanized. According to Ars Technica, Humanized is a "small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/designers_hired_mozilla/ With its $265 million deal to buy TicketsNow, Ticketmaster has finally succumbed to the siren song of ticket scalping. The ticketing giant had long complained about online ticket brokers, but perhaps eBay’s success after buying StubHub back a year ago, the grim performance of its online TicketExchange platform, and ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/ticketmaster_wants_online_ticketsnow/ Written by Martin Geddes, chief analyst at STL Partners, which is responsible for the Telco 2.0 Initiative. More about this research project and the results can be found here. “[O]ur business is about scope and scale and having superior incremental margins. If you are looking to tax content and bundle ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/things_need_know_about_future_broadband/ The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like "ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun," "MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org," and "OOXML improved many problems of DOC." The Burton Group also claims that although ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/study_touting_ooxml_over_debunked/ I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Swedish prosecutors appear to be close to finally pressing charges against The Pirate Bay, having served them with 4,000 pages of legal papers. While this might appear bad, the administrators have already moved some of the servers out of the country, so Swedish ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/pirate_gets_4000_page_complaint/ Struggling gay and lesbian media and entertainment company PlanetOut Inc. [LGBT] late Monday said it has retained Allen & Company LLC to assist it in evaluating strategic alternatives, including a possible sale of the company. http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/planetout_looking_bail/ Just in time for the Super Bowl and ahead of IAC’s (IACI) breakup, Ticketmaster has struck a deal to acquire online ticket scalper TicketsNow for $265 million. This follows eBay’s (EBAY) acquisition of StubHub for $310 million last year. TicketsNow is the ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/ticketmaster_buys_ticketsnow_million/ An anonymous reader writes "Following the success of Elephants Dream, the Blender Foundation is developing a follow-on open movie called Peach, set for completion later this year. Computerworld has up an interesting interview with Matt Ebb, lead artist from Elephants Dream (the interview is split over 5 pages). Ebb talks ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/open_source_screen/ Unless you’re an information technology manager or a Wall Street banker still drooling over VWware’s $32 billion market cap, virtualization is not sexy. But it soon might be, with VMware’s agreement to buy desktop virtualization startup Thinstall. Bringing virtual software to the desktop for employees and consumers effectively makes the ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/vmware_acquires_thinstall_take/ So 214 bidders have been approved for the forthcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, which starts on Jan. 24. The big bidders include AT&T, Verizon and Google. These bidders will go after 1,200 licenses. The bidding will conclude on March 24; down payments will be due by April 11. A third of ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/auction_update/ I had planned to post a trip report article about Macworld Expo tonight, but the wifi in my hotel room is horrendous. As a result, there's no way I'll be able to upload pix. So a report will be posted after I get home Friday. This was my very first Macworld, ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/julies_gear_diary_survived_first/ Turns out Oracle really wanted BEA Systems after all, enough to pay a 24 percent premium over Tuesday’s closing price for BEA shares. The database giant said today it would pay $19.38 a share in cash, which values the deal at $8.5 billion including the $1.3 billion in cash BEA ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/oracle_finally_gets/ Several readers sent us the story of three high school sophomores in Racine, Wisconsin who were just notified that a celestial body they had discovered during a science project has been verified as an asteroid. The students at Racine's Prairie School will be given the opportunity to name the asteroid ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/high_school_sophomores_discover/ Google Inc. (GOOG) is a virtual printing press for money, so it's not too surprising to hear it may be looking to acquire U.K.-based Yellow Pages publisher Yell Group plc [YELL], a company with a $5 billion market cap. Published reports indicate Google could offer as ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/google_could_yelling_across_pond/ Fabrik, a vendor of physical and on-demand storage products, said at Macworld today in San Francisco that it has made a deeper foray into the consumer storage market by purchasing G-Technology, a vendor of attached storage products for Macintosh computers. The acquisition comes less than a year Fabrik acquired SimpleTech. ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/fabrik_buys_tech_consolidate_consumer/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/google_beefs_iphone_interface/ Coldeagle sends us the news that the US Food and Drug Administration has declared that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. The agency decided that no labeling is necessary for meat or milk from cloned cows, pigs, or goats or their offspring. (Ironically the FDA didn't include cloned ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/deems_cloned_animals_edible/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/comic_2008/ Yeah well Jobs said portable video was stupid. This sound like cutting remarks from some one worried. Google is becoming this gianormous company out of nowhere and they are wasting no time venturing. As for make a phone to be hard um I thought goggle was just doing the OS ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/steve_jobs_people_dont_read_anymore/ 4T writes "Forget about monitoring your computers with spyware, now they're going to monitor the users as well! 'Microsoft is developing Big Brother-style software capable of remotely monitoring a worker's productivity, physical wellbeing and competence. The Times has seen a patent application filed by the company for a computer system ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/microsoft_employees/ It used to be that if you avoided sketchy Web sites and were very careful about clicking on links in e-mail messages, your odds of acquiring a nasty worm or trojan through a drive-by download were pretty low. That may... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/scary_threats_scarier/ After finally admitting that the company did a poor job with the Apple TV, Steve Jobs in his Macworld keynote today unveiled a totally new interface with loads of functionality that should be enough for any Apple zealot to jump for joy. But how much faith do people really have ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/apple_hello_apple/ These companies couldn't be more different: Intel, the big chipmaker whose stock in trade is billions of silicon chips, and Facebook, the online social network whose business is--well, not very much yet, but ultimately getting its members to take on... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/facebook_intel_tale_frenzies/ Anonymous writes "Security researchers Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw poked around in World of Warcraft and other online games, finding vulnerabilities and exploiting the system using online bots and rootkit-like techniques to evade detection. Their adventures in online game security became fodder for the book, Exploiting Online Games. McGraw discussed ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/state_security_mmorpgs/ By Brady Forrest Last week I had the opportunity to get hands-on with the Dash's new interface and learn about its upcoming API (previous Radar post). The internet-connected GPS has gone through quite ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/dash_your_gets/ Isn't Las Vegas in a desert? where are they going to get all the water needed? Seems this would work better in a place like downtown Chicago. Jason http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/vegas_raising_story_vertical_farm/ An anonymous reader writes "After four fires in two years — see earlier Slashdot discussions for background — AT&T is going against its own independent lab findings and declaring that the Avestor batteries powering its U-verse network aren't safe and need to be replaced. This is the network that SBC ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/replace_17000_batteries/ Looks great. But having to send the machine in for repair every time the hard drive or battery dies is a kill point. Battery will be dead in less then two years. And a hard drive, while not having a set lifespan, does fail often in a business setting. ...way ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_airs_fatal_flaw_battery/ Looks like Toshiba isn't going to give up the high-definition format war without a fight. The only major CE manufacturer supporting HD DVD announced today that it will slash the price of its entire line by up to 50% as... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/toshiba_strikes_back_dvdblu_battle/ Clearwire (CLWR) will migrate its customers to Google (GOOG) Apps including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk. http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/clearwire_migrate_google_apps/ If it weren't for luck, or lucky accidents, none of these products would exist today. The following ten products were all discovered as a result of pure accidents. Where would we be today without some of these great products? http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/oops_lucky_accidental_product_discoveries/ WirePosted writes "MacSpeech, the leading supplier of speech recognition software for the Mac, has canned its long-running iListen product and has launched a Mac version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the top-selling Windows speech recognition product. MacSpeech had made a licensing agreement with Dragon's developer, Nuance Communications. The new product is said ... http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/version_naturallyspeaking_launched/ Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/buys_mysql/ If people go back to reading, what will become of the new iTunes Movie Rentals? Oh, the horror! beyondthetech2007 http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/steve_jobs_people_dont_read_anymore/