technology news

Yahoo said Monday it will have a Web-based system in place to buy online ad space across some 600 newspapers and other online sites as soon as July.

The system is designed to let publishers quickly find available ad space on their own sites for advertisers, and when none is available, on other sites. The system is "almost ready" and will be launched in the third quarter of this year, Yahoo said.

The announcement comes as Yahoo is expected to respond to Microsoft's renewed threat on Saturday to pursue a proxy battle if Yahoo doesn't agree to an acquisition within the next three weeks.

The new ad system, which Yahoo calls AMP and was formerly known as Project Apex, is likely one of the technologies Microsoft is eager to incorporate into its own operations.

Microsoft's justification for its $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo on Feb. 1 was largely centered on trying to invigorate its online advertising operations, which have trailed Google's.

Yahoo's early preview of AMP may also be a move designed to show the company's strength in order to force Microsoft to raise its bid. Yahoo has maintained Microsoft's offer undervalues the company.

But Yahoo's AMP already faces a competing up-and-running service: Google's PrintAds, which lets customers who are already buying contextual Web-based ads to also place ads in around 600 daily and weekly U.S. newspapers. PrintAds also offers ad-design tools.

AMP will be the technology platform that will leverage a historic ad revenue-sharing agreement Yahoo made in November 2006 with U.S. newspaper publishers.

As part of the agreement, Yahoo provides search services, places job ads on its own HotJobs site, and sells Web advertising. The deal was expanded one year ago, and now Yahoo says 600 U.S. newspapers are part of the Newspaper Consortium.

AMP will link together the ad inventory of those publishers, offering advertisers the ability to buy search, display, local, mobile or video ads, Yahoo said.

Publishers have a couple problems with the way they sell ads now, Yahoo said in a preview of the system. When an advertiser approaches and wants, for example, 2 million impressions for a campaign advertising a new car, the publisher must use their ad systems to find out if they can deliver that many impressions. The process can take up to 15 minutes, which Yahoo describes as slow.

If the publisher can't deliver that many impressions, they must look to other Web sites to share in the deal. That typically involves phones calls, which starts another slow process by another publisher to see if they have inventory and can deliver a certain number of impressions, Yahoo said.

AMP wraps up the ability to see others' available ad space as well as a publisher's own through a Web-based interface, speeding up the ad placement process. Yahoo also describes it as a stock market for ads, with competitive bidding, as well as the ability to do behavioral, demographic and geographic targeting.

Samsung Electronics says it remains committed to its sponsorship of the Olympic torch relay despite large protests in London on Sunday that dogged the progress of the torch through the city.

"We understand there are concerns among consumers, customers, and even internally within Samsung," said Louis Kim, a spokesman for Samsung in Seoul. He said Samsung has no control over the route of the torch or the cities it visits. "Just like the spectators we are trying to embrace the Olympic Games," he said.

Thousands of people turned out to see the Olympic torch and among them were a sizable number who were protesting China's human-rights record and its treatment of people in Tibet.

To enable the torch to travel through the city without interruption, a protective ring of Chinese security staff supplemented two rings of local police but at several points people managed to get close to the torch. At one point a protestor managed to grab the torch for a moment before being wrestled to the ground by police.

By the end of the day there had been 37 arrests by police involving incidents related to the relay.

On Monday the torch relay moved on to Paris and on Wednesday it is due to travel through San Francisco.

"We have to watch carefully but the torch will continue to travel until the end of the international relay," said Kim.

Television pictures from Paris show hundreds of mainly pro-Tibet protestors along part of the torch relay route and some clashes with police. Several arrests have reportedly been made. Perhaps most symbolically, the Olympic torch has been extinguished during the Paris leg, according to several reports from the city.

Samsung is one of a handful of major sponsors of the Olympic Games. It began sponsoring the torch relay at the 2004 games in Athens and will continue to do so until the 2016 games.

IBM and Microsoft are poised to dominate the collaboration technology market for providing applications to the future workplace, says a new report by Forrester Research. But that doesn't mean small vendors in the Web 2.0 space, or a little company called Google, won't have a prominent role as well.

Forrester's vision for the future office is the "information workplace," a 21st century platform that manages content, messaging, team collaboration, real-time collaboration, and communication among employees using a common platform.

This would be a departure from many current businesses. Today users toggle among multiple applications that often don't talk well with each other and aren't integrated with back-end data.

The amount of enterprises who are actually ready to embrace this information workplace is still relatively small, however. When asked if implementing such a converged strategy was in the works for the coming year, only 24 percent of the 1,017 enterprise IT decision makers surveyed said it was a priority and 8 percent said it was a critical priority. Nearly 34 percent said it was not a priority, and 32 percent said it was not on their agenda altogether.

The report is bullish on Microsoft and IBM to be at the center of the information workplace. With Microsoft's SharePoint gathering nearly 85 million licenses, and IBM's Sametime collaboration platform having 18 million, CIOs looking to create the information workplace will likely try to leverage existing investments with those vendors.

As the report notes, both of these incumbents have offerings in collaboration, content, portals, office productivity and business intelligence - all the technologies Forrester views as critical for achieving the information workplace.

While IBM or Microsoft might provide the baseline, however, that doesn't mean smaller vendors won't play a part, so long as they design their software to connect with the big boys' mammoth platforms.

"Enterprises do want to work with a smaller number of vendors, but that doesn't mean [IBM and Microsoft] can do it alone,"says Erica Driver, the primary author of the report.

For instance, some Web 2.0 vendors might provide an enterprise wiki and blog with better functionality than the one provided by SharePoint. If that Web 2.0 vendor designed the software properly so that it integrated with SharePoint, however, an enterprise customer would be more likely to buy it.

"That's exactly the approach the point product ones need to take,"Driver says. "They need to keep their functionality ahead of what [IBM and Microsoft] are delivering. There's a chance they can stay ahead by releasing products more quickly."

But vendors such as Google, Driver notes, might not concede that businesses are always going to be in an all-Microsoft world.

With the company's Google Apps , its web-based collaboration suite that includes e-mail, calendaring, documents and spreadsheets, and now a wiki, Google could become a compelling option in the collaboration space in the coming years-provided they can start to integrate with existing systems, Driver says.

"They have their own office productivity tools now, and they're trying to change the game," Driver says.

CIO is an InfoWorld affiliate.

A jury in San Diego ordered Microsoft to pay Alcatel-Lucent $367.4 million for infringing on two patents, adding a new chapter to a long-running dispute between the companies.

The jury, in U.S. District Court in San Diego, found that Microsoft had infringed on two patents involving user interface technology. It also found that Microsoft didn't infringe on another Alcatel-Lucent patent related to video decoding. The court ruled that patent, which Alcatel-Lucent alleged was infringed in MPEG2-based DVD playback in Windows, is invalid.

According to Microsoft, which will try to overturn the infringement verdict, Alcatel-Lucent had hoped to receive $1.75 billion in damages. Microsoft called the video patent ruling a victory for the many companies that use MPEG video-decoding technology.

The case dates back to 2003, when Alcatel-Lucent charged Microsoft, Dell and Gateway with patent infringement.

Last year, a court reversed a $1.5 billion patent infringement case against Microsoft in a case Alcatel-Lucent brought against the software giant related to MP3 technology.

There's more to come in the ongoing battle between the companies. On April 22, the San Diego court will hear a case Microsoft is bringing against Alcatel-Lucent, accusing it of infringing on nine patents.

Both Verizon Wireless and AT&T won enough spectrum licenses in the U.S. government's 700MHz auction concluded last month to roll out services a cut above what they offer today, though how fast they are for subscribers will be up to the carriers.

Both service providers will use the frequencies, at least in part, for LTE (Long-Term Evolution), an emerging mobile broadband technology sponsored by the organization that backs GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications). AT&T said the licenses would provide the foundation for rolling out HSPA+, a technology further along in its development, as well as LTE. The carriers released some details of their plans on Thursday after a quiet period imposed by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ended. Also on Thursday, Qualcomm said it will use eight new licenses to expand its FLO TV mobile broadcasting service.

The 700MHz spectrum, which TV stations are required to give up by mid-February 2009 when they drop analog broadcasts, can reach farther and penetrate walls better than current cellular frequencies. The auction brought in more than $19 billion, with Verizon agreeing to pay more than $9 billion and AT&T about $6.6 billion. At the urging of Google and other parties, the FCC set requirements for use of some of the frequencies by any application or device. Google didn't win any licenses, but it hopes, along with Microsoft and others, to take advantage of "white spaces" between channels.

Verizon won a nearly nationwide block of spectrum that is 22MHz wide. That's broader than the block where AT&T said it won licenses covering the 200 largest markets in the U.S. But though AT&T's block is only 12MHz, the two carriers may be on roughly equal footing, according to IDC analyst Godfrey Chua. Anything over 10MHz is enough spectrum to take advantage of LTE, which can deliver higher speeds than current technologies and is also more efficient, he said. AT&T also recently acquired valuable 700MHz spectrum from Aloha Partners. Those licenses, for which AT&T said it would pay $2.5 billion, cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population.

As wireless technology continues its march through new standards, its speed can increase with each step. One of the latest, HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), will offer 600Kbps to 1.4Mbps downstream and between 500Kbps and 800Kbps upstream on average, according to AT&T. The carrier said it will finish building its HSUPA network using existing spectrum in the middle of this year.

But speed gains for individual subscribers don't have to follow that path directly, according to IDC's Chua. The bottom line is that LTE handles spectrum more efficiently, but carriers have to determine the best tradeoff between speed and subscriber base, he said.

"With that 22MHz, I can either serve more customers with less bandwidth or serve fewer customers with more bandwidth," Chua said.

Even the higher speeds that LTE can deliver won't meet the expectations of many users, in the view of Albert Lin, a mobile analyst at investment firm Sooner Cap.

"Ask any moderate or heavy user, and they'll start rattling off features that won't exist even with LTE," such as videoconferencing, certain types of community interaction, and virtual sessions in enterprise applications, he said.

Consumers won't really benefit from the spectrum for some time. For one thing, some successful TV stations are likely to fight the handover of frequencies, Lin said. Verizon, for its part, said Thursday it doesn't plan to roll out LTE until 2010.

Borland Software has announced Borland Silk 2008, an application lifecycle management product line featuring capabilities for Web 2.0. It is intended to break down barriers among business, development and quality assurance, the company said. Enhancements to Silk products improve the quality process by delivering better manual testing, expanded automation, and improved enterprise support of the quality lifecycle, according to Borland.

Web 2.0 capabilities include the ability to test Web 2.0 applications, which Borland defines as rich Internet applications.

SilkTest 2008 is a functional and regression-testing product featuring "open agent" technology to support Web 2.0 applications built on Adobe Flex and Windows. The agent technology features a framework for user extensibility. Java language scripting and an Eclipse interface will be available for the product later this quarter. "Test automation [in SilkTest 2008] allows you to run functional tests over and over again," said Brad Johnson, a senior director of product.

The new version also includes SilkPerformer 2008 for load and performance-testing. It allows testing for Adobe Flex-based applications via AMF3 (ActionScript Messaging Format), as well as provides enhanced AJAX support providing recognition of XML and JSON requests. SilkPerformer 2008 also adds support for the BMC Remedy Web ARS (Action Request System) help desk system.

Another enhanced component is SilkCentral Test Manager 2008 for quality management. This release enables reuse and management of large sets of test assets and greater flexibility for manual tests, Borland said. Also featured are security improvements and performance and scalability updates to meet demands of large, distributed teams.