Microsoft admits Vista OEM hack works

VistaDespite proud boasts that Vista was the most hack-proof version of Windows to date, Microsoft Senior Product Manager Alex Kochis has written on a developers' blog that Microsoft has recognized two ways that hackers have cracked Vista's product activation.

Basically the hacks affect OEM copies of Vista that are meant to run on a specific piece of hardware. The first hack changes some code in a computer's BIOS to make Vista think it's installed on the correct PC. The other hack does something similar, but with software.

Basically, Kochis says Windows XP was vulnerable to the same sort of hack, but Microsoft never paid much attention because there were far easier ways to obtain a bootleg copy of Windows XP.

And it turns out Microsoft isn't going to place much priority on combating this hack now either. Since it's a relatively tricky and dangerous way to get an illegal copy of Vista running, the company figures most users won't try modifying their BIOS. Microsoft will instead focus on "organized counterfeiters and protect users from becoming unknowing victims."

The next wave of technologies might ultimately blend pared-down Semantic Web tools with Web 2.0's capacity for dynamic user-generated connections. It may include a dash of data mining, with computers automatically extracting patterns from the Net's hubbub of conversation. The technology will probably take years to fulfill its promise, but it will almost certainly make the Web easier to use.

"There is a clear understanding that there have to be better ways to connect the mass of data online and interrogate it," says Daniel Waterhouse, a partner at the venture capital firm 3i. Waterhouse calls himself skeptical of the "Web 3.0" hyperbole but has invested in at least one Semantic Web-based business, the U.K. company Garlik. "We're just at the start," he says. "What we can do with search today is very primitive."

April 16, 2007

The next step in Google advertising - Acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion

Google announced acquisition of DoubleClick, which provides a suite of products that enables agencies, advertisers, and publishers to work efficiently. This will enable Google to extend its ad network and develop deeper relationships with clients, prospects and partners.

Two weeks of rumor and speculation that have reverberated through the interactive marketing industry were concluded today with the announcement that Google will buy DoubleClick. Google has finished negotiations to buy online advertising giant DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. This will give Google a major foothold in visual advertising online. Google makes most of its money currently from relevant text advertising. Doubleclick made $300 million in revenue last year. Either Google has really big plans for the company and its technologies, or this is a long term investment. Or both.

According to Susan Wojcicki, Vice President - Product Management, his new partnership represents a tremendous opportunity for Google to broaden and deepen their inventory of available ads and to better serve both, the publishers and users. Together, Google and DoubleClick will empower agencies, advertisers, and publishers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, which will, in turn, provide a better experience for Google's users.

"DoubleClick's technology is widely adopted by leading advertisers, publishers and agencies, and the combination of the two companies will accelerate the adoption of Google's innovative advances in display advertising," said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google in a company statement. The deal will have major implications for nearly every ad network and ad management platform. The new exchange could compete with existing ad networks for Web traffic, since DoubleClick has established relationships with thousands of sites accounting for large swaths of the available online inventory. Google said it would leverage DoubleClick's publisher relationships to expand its access to online inventory and grow its ad network.

Microsoft and Google had been engaged in a bidding war over DoubleClick. While it'll take a lot of advertising revenue to make up for the largest purchase in Google's history, however silver lining is that Google outbided Microsoft, considered the biggest rival for Google's race for web dominance. The acquisition, heralds a huge consolidation of power in the online marketing industry, combining the largest search engine with an original and still biggest ad management firm.

Microsoft had been trying to catch up to Google in the online advertising business, and DoubleClick is one heck of a chess piece. Google's share of the search market is over 60 percent, and the company has staked its future growth on building an ad network across online and offline media. One of the main factors hindering that growth has been the company's unwillingness to work with third party ad servers. Its acquisition of DoubleClick will do away with that concern, as advertiser trafficking and reporting for campaigns on and off its AdSense network will be available via a single interface. If Microsoft had won, the company would have immediately become a serious contender. With Google winning the bid, it'll be that much harder for Microsoft to get a strong foothold in the online advertising market.

April 16, 2007

Oracle to Announce 'Project X' Integration Framework

Oracle is developing a new service-oriented architecture strategy that could overtake the momentum around its Fusion Applications initiative, according to sources close to the company.

In his keynote address April 16 at the annual Oracle Applications Users Group conference in Las Vegas, Oracle Co-president Charles Phillips is expected to announce a composite application strategy, code-named Project X, that is essentially an application integration framework designed to enable users to pull together the "best of" functionality from Oracle's various application stacks, based on a specific business process, the sources said.

April 15, 2007

A Wireless Sensor City

Engineers at Harvard and BBN Technologies are working on a project that will cover the city of Cambridge, MA, with wireless-sensor nodes mounted to telephone poles that could allow researchers to see the specific locations and times of day when pollution peaks. The researchers could also track the city's weather with more precision and help test new wireless technology for better Wi-Fi. The network, called CitySense, will be an open test bed on which anyone can run experiments, says Matt Welsh, a professor of computer science at Harvard.

The plan is to install 100 general-purpose nodes onto the streetlights of Cambridge, drawing power from the city's infrastructure. Already there are five installed on Harvard's campus and five at BBN's facilities. Each node will be relatively large--about the size of a Mac Mini computer. A node will include a PC that runs the Linux operating system and a couple of gigabytes of flash memory as a hard drive. And instead of using a common low-power wireless-sensor protocol called Zigbee, CitySense nodes will use standard Wi-Fi radios; two radios will be in each node, one for management and control of the network, and the other for experiments. And, Welsh says, virtually any type of sensor will be able to connect to the nodes. A first batch of sensors will collect weather data such as rainfall, wind speed, and barometric pressure. Another set of sensors will measure pollution such as the amount of particles in the air. Researchers could use the weather data to understand how temperature or wind speed vary throughout the city, and doctors could use the pollution data to advise patients with asthma to stay away from certain areas at certain times of day. Eventually, more sensors could be incorporated: for example, motion sensors could measure traffic flow, and light sensors scattered throughout the city could monitor parking spaces; the data would be uploaded to the CitySense network. "With something like CitySense," Welsh says, "we're going to be able to blanket the city with sensors and get a much more complete sense of what's going on."

Welsh expects that CitySense will, in addition to collecting and transmitting sensor data, be employed by computer scientists to test new network software and protocols, which could be used to help make Wi-Fi connections more robust. Currently, the only way to test new wireless protocols, says Welsh, is to run them on a computer simulation. But CitySense could be thought of as "an open laboratory," he says, where researchers can upload and run their programs, collect data, and write papers.

The payoff of having an openly available wireless network like CitySense could be great, says Thomas Little, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University. "The existence of a wireless backbone like CitySense becomes an enormous asset," he says. "There are very interesting opportunities to exploit," he adds, including business opportunities. He envisions being able to integrate all sorts of sensors into the CitySense backbone, such as those that track the position of public transportation--which could help people know when the next bus is coming--and even video cameras that could monitor anything from traffic to urban wildlife.

April 16, 2007

Vista - The start of the end for Microsoft

Vista and the bugs are amongst the news in not only technology world but also in business world, and to be more specifically, investment world. Although Microsoft may claim otherwise, Vista, from both from a technical and business point of view, is proving to be a failure. Microsoft claimed that more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista were sold around the world in February 2007, its first full month of sales. but many others (including investors, analysts and VCs), don't believe those claims for a minute. Goldman Sachs, the international investment bank, thinks that Microsoft is no longer worthy of being on its must buy "conviction list."

Further in a research note, Goldman analyst suggested that the product upgrade cycles should provide strong revenue and profit growth in the next 12-plus months. Normally, this would make us view the stock as a must-own. At the same time, these launches may also mark the end of an era, as changing technology and business models seek to diminish Microsoft's hold on the desktop, which in turn significantly depletes the cash cow. Besides, maybe Vista won't do that well anyway. Investor nervousness remains high, particularly given uncertainty regarding spending plans in 2008 and recent negative management comments on Vista. Microsoft's own CEO Steve Ballmer warned analysts that "some of the Windows revenue forecasts I've seen are overly aggressive.

Looking ahead, Goldman also sees, "Changing technology and business models in areas such as software-as-a-service, virtualization and open source seek to diminish Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop, which in turn significantly depletes the company's cash cow."

April 15, 2007

Personal Supercomputers - Thousands of microprocessors in cell phones and laptops

Recently, Intel announced a research project that made geeks jump with glee: the first programmable "terascale" supercomputer on a chip. The company demonstrated a single chip with 80 cores, or processors, and showed that these cores could be programmed to crunch numbers at the rate of a trillion operations per second, a measure known as a teraflop. The chip is about the size of a large postage stamp, but it has the same calculation speed as a supercomputer that, in 1996, took up about 2,000 square feet and drew about 1,000 times more power.

This research chip is one of Intel's first steps toward massively multicore technology, says Nitin Borkar, engineering manager and lab project head at Intel. The goal, he says, is to use this chip to test techniques that could make massively multicore technology faster, more energy efficient, and, most daunting, easy to program. These techniques will be "funneled into future products" that could appear, if all goes well, within five to ten years.

But nearly all engineers in the computing industry agree that making consumer computers with hundreds of cores won't be easy. In fact, many aren't even sure that it can be done. The most glaring challenge will be to find a way to completely overhaul software so that applications can take advantage of numerous cores. This includes teaching software developers how to write code for multicore machines--a task known as parallel programming--and developing new tools that allow them to code accurately and efficiently.

Researchers and visionaries are already thinking about how these supercomputer chips can best be used. Intel thinks that recognition, mining, and synthesis (RMS) applications will be key. Put together, these technologies could allow real-time language translation via cell phones, real-time video search by spoken phrase or image, and better recommendation systems for shopping, meal planning, and even health care.

April 16, 2007

New technologies will make online search more intelligent--and may even lead to a "Web 3.0."

Six months after the launch of his own Zepheira, a consulting company that helps businesses link fragmented data sources into easily searched wholes, Miller's beachside decision seems increasingly prescient. The Semantic Web community's grandest visions, of data-surfing computer servants that automatically reason their way through problems, have yet to be fulfilled. But the basic technologies that Miller shepherded through research labs and standards committees are joining the everyday Web. They can be found everywhere--on entertainment and travel sites, in business and scientific databases--and are forming the core of what some promoters call a nascent "Web 3.0."

Already, these techniques are helping developers stitch together complex applications or bring once-­inaccessible data sources online. Semantic Web tools now in use improve and automate database searches, helping people choose vacation destinations or sort through complicated financial data more efficiently. It may be years before the Web is populated by truly intelligent software agents automatically doing our bidding, but their precursors are helping people find better answers to questions today.

Analysts, researchers, and pundits have subsequently argued over what, if anything, would deserve to be called "3.0." Definitions have ranged from widespread mobile broadband access to a Web full of on-demand software services. A much-read article in the New York Times last November clarified the debate, however. In it, John Markoff defined Web 3.0 as a set of technologies that offer efficient new ways to help computers organize and draw conclusions from online data, and that definition has since dominated discussions at conferences, on blogs, and among entrepreneurs.

The "3.0" claim is ambitious, casting these new tools as successors to several earlier--but still viable--generations of Net technology. Web 1.0 refers to the first generation of the commercial Internet, dominated by content that was only marginally interactive. Web 2.0, characterized by features such as tagging, social networks, and user-­created taxonomies of content called "folksonomies," added a new layer of interactivity, represented by sites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia.

April 16, 2007

Google Puts Money In OpenSource Handwriting Recognition Technology

Google is sponsoring an artificial-intelligence research group's work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition.

The open source project, called Ocropus, has several goals, including developing a high-level, easy-to-use handwriting recognition system that can convert handwritten documents to computer text, assisting in the creation of electronic libraries, analysing historical documents and helping vision-impaired people access information. The "ocr" in Ocropus stands for optimal character recognition.

The project is headquartered at the Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (IUPR) research group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. DFKI professor Thomas Breuel is leading the project.

Google is sponsoring an artificial-intelligence research group's work to develop advanced technologies for character recognition. DFKI professor Thomas Breuel is leading the project. Breuel made the announcement through a post on the Google Code blog. In addition to Google's sponsorship, Ocropus is getting funds from several German government agencies and other public and private entities.

The Ocropus team expects the project to last three years and it will support three PhD students. IUPR is basing the software primarily on two research projects: one, a handwriting recognition system developed in the mid-1990s for use by the US Census Bureau; and two, newer layout analysis methods for character recognition.

Other resources include Tesseract, a decades-old engine for optimal character recognition originally developed by HP Labs and rereleased by Google last year as an open source system.

A preview of the Ocropus system is available on the project's website under an Apache licence, and the IUPR is soliciting open source contributions in order to complete a number of goals. These include creating a desktop application for the system, adding third-party tools and adapting Ocropus to a variety of languages. It's currently English-only.

April 16, 2007

'Electronic Paper' Edging Toward Reality

"Electronic paper" has long been hyped as the future of newspapers and books, but products like e-books have been slow to take off. That may soon change, say executives involved in the pioneering technology. While Internet companies are scanning libraries of books and making them available online, E Ink Corp., which emerged out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, is seeing a surge in orders for its portable, foldable displays that mimic conventional paper to carry such books.

Nine different companies launched products last year based on the technology,among those products are Sony's Reader tablet, whose black-and-white displays can be read in bright sunlight or a dimly lit room from almost any angle—just like paper—without traditional back-lit screens that chew up power. While the displays are becoming more flexible and conserve power, they face other limitations such as working only in monochrome and failing to display video—areas critical to attracting advertisers and consumers to the technology.

April 15, 2007

InfoLogix Hosts Series of Webinars on RFID Asset Tracking Software

InfoLogix, a provider of Healthcare Integrated Mobility Solutions, announced a series of free Healthcare Webinars on RFID Asset Tracking and Reporting using HealthTrax, their software solution for Real-Time Location Asset Tracking, Patient Tracking, Maintenance Management Reporting on hospital equipment, and Preventive Maintenance Reporting

SkyeTek's AURA Enables Widespread Embedded RFID Adoption

SkyeTek, Inc., a provider of embedded RFID reader technology and developer of ReaderWare, introduced AURA, the Advanced Universal Reader Architecture

Digital Rights Management Market Spending Exceeds $11 Billion

DRM evolved over the last two decades to serve corporations that needed a means to deal with information piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing, and various regulatory requirements. While organizations like Creative Commons have emerged to balance the respective-and sometimes conflicting-rights of artists and creators, media companies, and individuals who share content, by and large the focus of the DRM industry is to protect the rights of the owner of the content, not the end user.

As the value of digital content increases, applications of DRM will increase, though at a slower rate than the value of content based on the fact that DRM pricing is not tied to the value of the protected content. Spending on digital rights management (DRM) software and hardware to protect entertainment, commercial software, and other information will exceed $11 billion dollars over the next seven years, says a new market research report from Resource4Business.

DRM involves the combination of software and hardware technologies that enable the content owner and distributors to assign and control rights and conditions for viewing, listening, and employing the content present in digital media and applications-be it a song, a movie, a personal or financial record, or a software application or game. According to R4B's newly-released market analysis report, "The Future of Digital Rights Management, Outlook 2007-2014," total worldwide spending on DRM which reached $1 billion in 2007, will increase to $5 billion by 2010 and total spending is forecasted to grow to nearly $11 billion by 2014, according to the new research study. The study focuses on the use of DRM by retail users, TV and home entertainment network (HEN) users, software application users.

April 19, 2007

Intel Have Upper Hand in Processor War, At least for Now

R4B, a top knowledge player and market research company active in this area, believes that Intel is actually gaining share and that AMD is having trouble staving that off and is having to cut prices to help make that happen.

Intel had about 75 to 76 percent of the market for desktop, laptop and server processors, according to February and March data from R4B, which estimated AMD's share at about 24 -25 percent.

When Intel reports first-quarter earnings this month, it is expected to show a net profit of $1.28 billion, or 22 cents per share, on revenue of $8.97 billion, according to the average Wall Street forecast on Reuters Estimates.

While that would be a 5 percent fall in profit from a year earlier, Wall Street analysts are bracing for AMD to report a net loss of almost $342 million, a dramatic about-face from the $184.5 million profit it posted a year earlier.

Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, had been losing market share to rival AMD, but is now believed by analysts to have stemmed losses or even gained share thanks to a raft of new products.

Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which saw its sales soar in recent years as its powerful, energy-efficient processors trumped Intel's, is now struggling with outdated products and a costly acquisition.

AMD's woes were underscored earlier when it publicly acknowledged that lower prices and unit sales meant that first-quarter revenue would be about $1.23 billion, 20 percent below the average Wall Street forecast.

Today, market roles of Intel and AMD have reversed then what they were two years back. AMD had superior products a year to two years ago and for the first time was able to have prices above Intel's, and Intel was having to be competitive on pricing to clear inventories.

AMD plans to counter Intel in the middle of this year when it launches a new chip with four processing cores, meaning that it can handle several tasks at once.

The big question is whether the chip, known as Barcelona, will offer enough of an advantage to take more customers away from Intel.

Intel has a quad-core chip as well, but it consists of two dual-core chips stuck together. AMD says its design of having all four cores on one piece of silicon will be faster and use less energy.

Even if Barcelona is a winner, it won't have an immediate financial effect since it takes months for a new processor to attain the production volume and industry acceptance needed to generate meaningful revenue. Barcelona is nice, but Intel's not that far behind.

Intel isn't standing still. AMD's resurgence a couple years ago took the Silicon Valley stalwart by surprise and sparked a renewed determination by Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini not to fall behind in the technology race.

Intel plans to start making chips with new production tools that will shrink circuitry width by about 30 percent, lowering its per-chip production costs and making its processors faster. It also has an all-new chip design planned for next year.

AMD hopes to wow the market in 2009 when it introduces a chip incorporating graphics technology it gained when it bought ATI last year for $5.4 billion. Strategically over several years, this deal is going to look like a good acquisition, but definitely there's a lot of short-term pain and right now that deal is also weighing on its bottom line and balance sheet.

Enterprise MarketHawk, April 2007 Issue