SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Apple announced on Tuesday that the employee credited with being the "father of the iPod" is stepping down from his post at the iconic California company.
Apple said iPod division vice president Tony Fadell and his wife, Danielle Lambert, who is vice president of the company's human resources department, are "reducing their roles" to "devote more time to their young family."
While the spotlight routinely shines on Apple's notoriously involved chief executive Steve Jobs, Fadell is said to be the one behind the idea for iPod MP3 players that rocketed to global success and revived the company's fortunes.
"Tony and Dani have each made important contributions to Apple over the past eight years," Jobs said in a release.
"We're sorry to see Dani go, and are looking forward to working with Tony in his new capacity."
Lambert is to leave Apple at the end of the year and Fadell is to become an advisor to Jobs.
IBM executive Mark Papermaster has been hired to replace Fadell. Papermaster's former employer is challenging the move on the grounds Papermaster is contractually restricted from working for a competitor.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Q&A: Symbian's switch to open source
Symbian, the U.K.-based maker of the world's most popular smartphone operating system, is going through big changes.
As well as being taken over by Nokia, the company is preparing to convert its closed code into open source.
ZDNet.co.uk caught up with Symbian's research chief, David Wood, at this week's Symbian Smartphone Show at Earls Court in London, to discuss the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years hold for smartphone technology.
Q: It seems as though everyone is waiting for the Nokia takeover to happen before the code starts getting stripped. When is the acquisition likely to be completed? Wood: We expect the approval for the deal sometime in Q4 this year. It's not an exact science. It's been approved in most parts of the world that need to approve it, but there's a small number left. That will happen almost certainly this year, and that will then allow us to do some of the integration. We can't do any integration at all now--it's illegal. What we're doing now is a lot of planning, but no actual change in what we're doing.
In the first half of next year, the Symbian Foundation will be established. On day one, sometime in March or April, the first version of the Foundation software will become available.
What can we expect from that version? It won't be stripped of third-party code yet, will it? Wood: Correct. That will be available only to people who join the Foundation and who sign up to the Foundation license. There will be some parts that are open source.
So the Foundation license is not the open-source license. Wood: The Foundation license is very similar to the open-source license, but it allows the companies to share the code only within the Foundation. It's a community source license, with as much as possible in common with the eventual (open source) license that will take over.
There is some code available as open source from day one, but completion (of the open sourcing) will be sometime in 2010. It's a sensible engineering approach--a stage-by-stage release of the code.
I was speaking earlier to the chief executive of a software firm whose code is currently in Symbian. He said there was no problem in having some proprietary elements within open-sourced code, and that this was acceptable under the GNU General Public License. That doesn't sound right. Wood: We're not using the GPL--it's the EPL (Eclipse Public License). The EPL is indeed able to link to proprietary software. The GPL is less clear. In fact, a straight reading of the GPL says if you link to other software then that other software falls under the same license. Under the EPL, if you link to other software then there's no obligation on that other software to take the same license. EPL is weak "copyleft," whereas GPL is the most famous example of strong copyleft. So I agree with that part, that there could be code that's linked to. This is to encourage innovation.
We're not saying all software should be free of charge. We do realize that there will always be new, interesting software that people will want to monetize by selling for a license. If you change the Symbian code, that has to be given back--you can't hang onto that, so that's the copyleft part of this message.
We're not saying all software should be free of charge. We do realize there will always be software people will want to monetize by selling for a license. But there is code from this company within Symbian's code--won't that have to be scraped out? Wood: Something has to be done, and I don't really want to talk about an individual case, but in principle several things could happen. We could throw money at a supplier, and we could say to them: "We will buy this off you in perpetuity and we will make it available." Or we could say we'll leave this outside the platform and we can put something else in instead. It won't be quite the same, and we might go back to the kind of offering that we had in previous versions of Symbian. It's always possible that someone else will come along and do comparable software and make that available. There should be plenty of ways for companies (whose code is currently within Symbian's code) to recoup their investment, either by selling the software (to Symbian), or by developing a better version and making that available for an additional fee.
Can you give any indication of how many third-party players there are whose code is currently within Symbian's? Wood: There are scores. We have numbers, but it's not clear how many of them are serious cases. In some cases they can be dealt with probably straight away, but scores could take some serious thought. Whether that's nearer 20 or 100, we need to investigate. There's something like 100 cases that we're looking at. In many cases, it looks like it's a trivial solution. In other cases, the software is in a class of its own.
What do you count as "trivia"? Something that can be easily replicated? Wood: Either where it's easily replicable, or where we are confident that we can change the licensing terms. It might be code that's currently under the GPL, so we might pass that through. In reality people will make a phone by taking this and adding in other things that are easily available. So there will be other stuff, GPL, floating around in the broader community. So we will say to people: "Right, you build a phone by taking this Symbian offering and adding in these additional components." Webkit, for example--that's currently under a GPL license.
There are things we might look at and say: "Well, this is easy to solve. It's not an integral part of the system. It will be available as part of what we call a distro." So people will combine what they get from Symbian with other things that are designed to slot in.
So we will see distributions of the Symbian core and some free plug-ins? Wood: Yes, and other plug-ins that people might even pay money for. The point is, there are many business models that are possible. Just as Linux has given rise to many companies that do their labors with Linux, there will be many companies that do things on top of Symbian. We're not looking for different flavors of Symbian in the sense of changing the core, but there will be people who are, for example, specialists in software for navigation devices.
Of course, many of the smartphones are actually navigation devices in their own right, but you can imagine some people might make a navigation device which happens to be a smartphone, as opposed to a smartphone that happens to be a navigation device. There might be people who specialize in that kind of thing and say: "Here's Symbian's offering and we've got some extra navigation stuff that we add in to make us the right starting point."
A lot of manufacturers are likely to bring out Android handsets. Wood: Lots of people will look at bringing out an Android handset. Let's wait and see what actually happens.
Symbian has scale and popularity but Android is starting from zero. It doesn't have to strip out code. For a developer, is there not a period of uncertainty at the moment, because they're not sure of what they're addressing? The message in the keynotes was that addressing Series 60 means addressing the next version of Symbian, but is that actually the case? Some bits may have to be stripped out. Wood: I think that the proportion that might end up being changed in that way is very small. The vast majority of software that's written can be preserved.
For our developer readers, when is that moment of uncertainty going to pass? Wood: It's going to be stage by stage. We have a road map. We will be sharing more information sometime around the middle of (the first half of) 2009. There will be a whole lot more information shared.
What innovations can we expect from Symbian between now and the next Smartphone Show, and how much will the open-sourcing process affect that innovation? Wood: The first phone with Symbian OS 9.4 has been shown, which is the Nokia (5800) Tube device. That runs S60 fifth edition. We have already released Symbian 9.5 to our customers, and there is considerable progress on the next two releases, which you can imagine might be called 9.6 and 9.7. At some stage, they will fall into the new numbering system that will be used for the Symbian Foundation.
What will that numbering system look like? Wood: It's still being discussed. I quite like the idea of staying at 9 forever, because it emphasizes compatibility. But the key thing is, there are two more releases for which we have a road map.
The main core feature for the next releases is twofold. One of them is support for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), which we believe is going to be really important for the future. That comes out in two phases: in the release after 9.5 we've made all the software SMP-safe, which means it won't fall over if there are suddenly more processors in there; and the one afterwards is called SMP-optimized, which is when we actually restructure some of the software to run better when there are multiple cores. That will be the software that lands on phones with multiple cores, sometime around 2010.
The Nokia Tube has got pen inputs and there's about five different ways people can choose to input data into that. Will all five be equally important? Probably not, but let the market decide. What is the point in having SMP on a handset? Wood: It will allow the phone to do more without running the batteries to the same extent, because the individual cores will run at a lower clock speed. It turns out, if you have two cores running at a lower clock speed, you can actually end up calculating more but using less power.
People will use this for all kinds of things; to take one example, real-time language translation. Currently most of the real-time language translation services on smartphones tend to rely on server-side work. So you might speak into it, it might send it off to the network and it comes back with a translation. Now, imagine if you could do more of that kind of calculation on the phone.
Then there's all the multimedia applications. Graphics never get poorer--there are more and more pixels and colors, and all of that requires oomph from the processors. If you can spread that out over multiple processors, it delivers a faster user experience and more functionality without running out of battery.
Does Symbian still believe the smartphone will take over from PCs, as it predicted two years ago? The input and display issues remain, and Netbooks have come into the picture. Wood: I don't think we ever said PCs would disappear. PCs will remain--there will be a whole host of devices that remain. But (smartphones) will be more capable and people will be more comfortable using that will more and more features. Take the (Nokia E71)--people are often surprised that it is actually quite easy to type into it even though the keys are so small. There's some very clever hardware design in that. It's part of the overall step-by-step improvements in input.
The Nokia Tube has got pen inputs and there's about five different ways people can choose to input data into that. Will all five be equally important? Probably not, but let the market decide which ones will be most important. That will make input easier. Also, because there are more pixels on the screen and the pictures are clearer, people often say they don't need their big screen anymore. Perhaps phones will come in due course with projectors as well.
The other thing is that the new generation will just automatically be comfortable in using these devices for these extra capabilities. They won't think of it as squashing down what they are used to; they will just grow up learning how to use them, and take it for granted.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
As well as being taken over by Nokia, the company is preparing to convert its closed code into open source.
ZDNet.co.uk caught up with Symbian's research chief, David Wood, at this week's Symbian Smartphone Show at Earls Court in London, to discuss the complications of such a process, as well as what the next few years hold for smartphone technology.
Q: It seems as though everyone is waiting for the Nokia takeover to happen before the code starts getting stripped. When is the acquisition likely to be completed? Wood: We expect the approval for the deal sometime in Q4 this year. It's not an exact science. It's been approved in most parts of the world that need to approve it, but there's a small number left. That will happen almost certainly this year, and that will then allow us to do some of the integration. We can't do any integration at all now--it's illegal. What we're doing now is a lot of planning, but no actual change in what we're doing.
In the first half of next year, the Symbian Foundation will be established. On day one, sometime in March or April, the first version of the Foundation software will become available.
What can we expect from that version? It won't be stripped of third-party code yet, will it? Wood: Correct. That will be available only to people who join the Foundation and who sign up to the Foundation license. There will be some parts that are open source.
So the Foundation license is not the open-source license. Wood: The Foundation license is very similar to the open-source license, but it allows the companies to share the code only within the Foundation. It's a community source license, with as much as possible in common with the eventual (open source) license that will take over.
There is some code available as open source from day one, but completion (of the open sourcing) will be sometime in 2010. It's a sensible engineering approach--a stage-by-stage release of the code.
I was speaking earlier to the chief executive of a software firm whose code is currently in Symbian. He said there was no problem in having some proprietary elements within open-sourced code, and that this was acceptable under the GNU General Public License. That doesn't sound right. Wood: We're not using the GPL--it's the EPL (Eclipse Public License). The EPL is indeed able to link to proprietary software. The GPL is less clear. In fact, a straight reading of the GPL says if you link to other software then that other software falls under the same license. Under the EPL, if you link to other software then there's no obligation on that other software to take the same license. EPL is weak "copyleft," whereas GPL is the most famous example of strong copyleft. So I agree with that part, that there could be code that's linked to. This is to encourage innovation.
We're not saying all software should be free of charge. We do realize that there will always be new, interesting software that people will want to monetize by selling for a license. If you change the Symbian code, that has to be given back--you can't hang onto that, so that's the copyleft part of this message.
We're not saying all software should be free of charge. We do realize there will always be software people will want to monetize by selling for a license. But there is code from this company within Symbian's code--won't that have to be scraped out? Wood: Something has to be done, and I don't really want to talk about an individual case, but in principle several things could happen. We could throw money at a supplier, and we could say to them: "We will buy this off you in perpetuity and we will make it available." Or we could say we'll leave this outside the platform and we can put something else in instead. It won't be quite the same, and we might go back to the kind of offering that we had in previous versions of Symbian. It's always possible that someone else will come along and do comparable software and make that available. There should be plenty of ways for companies (whose code is currently within Symbian's code) to recoup their investment, either by selling the software (to Symbian), or by developing a better version and making that available for an additional fee.
Can you give any indication of how many third-party players there are whose code is currently within Symbian's? Wood: There are scores. We have numbers, but it's not clear how many of them are serious cases. In some cases they can be dealt with probably straight away, but scores could take some serious thought. Whether that's nearer 20 or 100, we need to investigate. There's something like 100 cases that we're looking at. In many cases, it looks like it's a trivial solution. In other cases, the software is in a class of its own.
What do you count as "trivia"? Something that can be easily replicated? Wood: Either where it's easily replicable, or where we are confident that we can change the licensing terms. It might be code that's currently under the GPL, so we might pass that through. In reality people will make a phone by taking this and adding in other things that are easily available. So there will be other stuff, GPL, floating around in the broader community. So we will say to people: "Right, you build a phone by taking this Symbian offering and adding in these additional components." Webkit, for example--that's currently under a GPL license.
There are things we might look at and say: "Well, this is easy to solve. It's not an integral part of the system. It will be available as part of what we call a distro." So people will combine what they get from Symbian with other things that are designed to slot in.
So we will see distributions of the Symbian core and some free plug-ins? Wood: Yes, and other plug-ins that people might even pay money for. The point is, there are many business models that are possible. Just as Linux has given rise to many companies that do their labors with Linux, there will be many companies that do things on top of Symbian. We're not looking for different flavors of Symbian in the sense of changing the core, but there will be people who are, for example, specialists in software for navigation devices.
Of course, many of the smartphones are actually navigation devices in their own right, but you can imagine some people might make a navigation device which happens to be a smartphone, as opposed to a smartphone that happens to be a navigation device. There might be people who specialize in that kind of thing and say: "Here's Symbian's offering and we've got some extra navigation stuff that we add in to make us the right starting point."
A lot of manufacturers are likely to bring out Android handsets. Wood: Lots of people will look at bringing out an Android handset. Let's wait and see what actually happens.
Symbian has scale and popularity but Android is starting from zero. It doesn't have to strip out code. For a developer, is there not a period of uncertainty at the moment, because they're not sure of what they're addressing? The message in the keynotes was that addressing Series 60 means addressing the next version of Symbian, but is that actually the case? Some bits may have to be stripped out. Wood: I think that the proportion that might end up being changed in that way is very small. The vast majority of software that's written can be preserved.
For our developer readers, when is that moment of uncertainty going to pass? Wood: It's going to be stage by stage. We have a road map. We will be sharing more information sometime around the middle of (the first half of) 2009. There will be a whole lot more information shared.
What innovations can we expect from Symbian between now and the next Smartphone Show, and how much will the open-sourcing process affect that innovation? Wood: The first phone with Symbian OS 9.4 has been shown, which is the Nokia (5800) Tube device. That runs S60 fifth edition. We have already released Symbian 9.5 to our customers, and there is considerable progress on the next two releases, which you can imagine might be called 9.6 and 9.7. At some stage, they will fall into the new numbering system that will be used for the Symbian Foundation.
What will that numbering system look like? Wood: It's still being discussed. I quite like the idea of staying at 9 forever, because it emphasizes compatibility. But the key thing is, there are two more releases for which we have a road map.
The main core feature for the next releases is twofold. One of them is support for symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), which we believe is going to be really important for the future. That comes out in two phases: in the release after 9.5 we've made all the software SMP-safe, which means it won't fall over if there are suddenly more processors in there; and the one afterwards is called SMP-optimized, which is when we actually restructure some of the software to run better when there are multiple cores. That will be the software that lands on phones with multiple cores, sometime around 2010.
The Nokia Tube has got pen inputs and there's about five different ways people can choose to input data into that. Will all five be equally important? Probably not, but let the market decide. What is the point in having SMP on a handset? Wood: It will allow the phone to do more without running the batteries to the same extent, because the individual cores will run at a lower clock speed. It turns out, if you have two cores running at a lower clock speed, you can actually end up calculating more but using less power.
People will use this for all kinds of things; to take one example, real-time language translation. Currently most of the real-time language translation services on smartphones tend to rely on server-side work. So you might speak into it, it might send it off to the network and it comes back with a translation. Now, imagine if you could do more of that kind of calculation on the phone.
Then there's all the multimedia applications. Graphics never get poorer--there are more and more pixels and colors, and all of that requires oomph from the processors. If you can spread that out over multiple processors, it delivers a faster user experience and more functionality without running out of battery.
Does Symbian still believe the smartphone will take over from PCs, as it predicted two years ago? The input and display issues remain, and Netbooks have come into the picture. Wood: I don't think we ever said PCs would disappear. PCs will remain--there will be a whole host of devices that remain. But (smartphones) will be more capable and people will be more comfortable using that will more and more features. Take the (Nokia E71)--people are often surprised that it is actually quite easy to type into it even though the keys are so small. There's some very clever hardware design in that. It's part of the overall step-by-step improvements in input.
The Nokia Tube has got pen inputs and there's about five different ways people can choose to input data into that. Will all five be equally important? Probably not, but let the market decide which ones will be most important. That will make input easier. Also, because there are more pixels on the screen and the pictures are clearer, people often say they don't need their big screen anymore. Perhaps phones will come in due course with projectors as well.
The other thing is that the new generation will just automatically be comfortable in using these devices for these extra capabilities. They won't think of it as squashing down what they are used to; they will just grow up learning how to use them, and take it for granted.
David Meyer of ZDNet UK reported from London.
Motorola to use Android for showcase phones: WSJ
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Motorola Inc. plans to use Android, Google's open-source software platform, as the operating system for its showcase mobile phones, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the matter," said Sanjay Jha, who took over as Motorola's co-chief executive in August, also plans job cuts at the Illinois-based company.
It said Jha, who heads the struggling mobile devices division in addition to being co-CEO, was expected to detail his plans as early as Thursday, when Motorola reports its quarterly earnings.
The Journal said Jha was expected to announce thousands of layoffs at the company, which has its headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois, and employs some 66,000 people.
It said he notably plans to cut back on the number of software platforms the company uses in its mobile phones.
Jha is looking at using Google's Android operating system and just two other software platforms -- Microsoft's Windows Mobile and its own P2K platform -- and would abandon at least four other platforms, the paper said.
The paper noted that Nokia Corp. uses just two operating systems for most of its handsets while Motorola has more than a half a dozen.
It said Motorola is hoping that using an open-source platform will spur outside developers to come up with applications that would allow Motorola to compete with Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry.
The Journal said Motorola was not expected to deliver an Android-based phone until next year
Android is the operating system for the T-Mobile G1 phone which went on sale this month and is Internet search king Google's first venture into the mobile market.
The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the matter," said Sanjay Jha, who took over as Motorola's co-chief executive in August, also plans job cuts at the Illinois-based company.
It said Jha, who heads the struggling mobile devices division in addition to being co-CEO, was expected to detail his plans as early as Thursday, when Motorola reports its quarterly earnings.
The Journal said Jha was expected to announce thousands of layoffs at the company, which has its headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois, and employs some 66,000 people.
It said he notably plans to cut back on the number of software platforms the company uses in its mobile phones.
Jha is looking at using Google's Android operating system and just two other software platforms -- Microsoft's Windows Mobile and its own P2K platform -- and would abandon at least four other platforms, the paper said.
The paper noted that Nokia Corp. uses just two operating systems for most of its handsets while Motorola has more than a half a dozen.
It said Motorola is hoping that using an open-source platform will spur outside developers to come up with applications that would allow Motorola to compete with Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry.
The Journal said Motorola was not expected to deliver an Android-based phone until next year
Android is the operating system for the T-Mobile G1 phone which went on sale this month and is Internet search king Google's first venture into the mobile market.
Intel to establish software center in Taiwan
TAIPEI, Taiwan – Intel Corp. announced Thursday it will join the Taiwanese government in setting up a Linux software center in Taiwan to help better market locally produced laptops and mobile Internet devices to the world.
The announcement by Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini came after two leading Taiwanese computer makers launched "nettops" and "netbooks," cheap and extremely portable laptops with wireless Internet access capabilities.
Both Taiwan-based Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer have adopted Intel's latest Atom chips in their laptops, ranging from $300-$1000. The products allow their customers to choose between the Linux-based and Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Linux is a freely distributed operating system
Otellini told reporters the software development center is being set up as part of Intel's efforts to help Taiwan maintain its competitive edge in the field.
"The center's engineers will provide training and consulting ... to accelerate the adoption of mobile technologies," he said. "These efforts aim to reduce the time to market for shipping Intel Atom processor- and Moblin-based systems."
Moblin is a Linux-based operating system designed to fit nettops and netbooks.
Otellini said Intel Capital, Intel Corp.'s investing arm, intends to invest 386 million New Taiwan dollars ($11.5 million) in Taiwanese WiMAX technology carrier VMAX, making it the 30th WiMAX technology company in the world to get a financial injection from Intel Capital.
WiMAX — short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — expands broadband wireless access over longer distances of up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) and reduces the cost of implementing broadband.
Otellini said its collaboration with Taiwan aims to enhance the competitiveness of Taiwan's WiMAX products on the global stage, in line with its endorsement of the WiMAX technology.
Intel's investment will help VMAX to deploy Taiwan's first nationwide WiMAX fourth generation wireless network, Otellini said.
The VMAX service will be available in Taiwan in the first half of 2009, he said.
The announcement by Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini came after two leading Taiwanese computer makers launched "nettops" and "netbooks," cheap and extremely portable laptops with wireless Internet access capabilities.
Both Taiwan-based Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer have adopted Intel's latest Atom chips in their laptops, ranging from $300-$1000. The products allow their customers to choose between the Linux-based and Microsoft's Windows operating systems. Linux is a freely distributed operating system
Otellini told reporters the software development center is being set up as part of Intel's efforts to help Taiwan maintain its competitive edge in the field.
"The center's engineers will provide training and consulting ... to accelerate the adoption of mobile technologies," he said. "These efforts aim to reduce the time to market for shipping Intel Atom processor- and Moblin-based systems."
Moblin is a Linux-based operating system designed to fit nettops and netbooks.
Otellini said Intel Capital, Intel Corp.'s investing arm, intends to invest 386 million New Taiwan dollars ($11.5 million) in Taiwanese WiMAX technology carrier VMAX, making it the 30th WiMAX technology company in the world to get a financial injection from Intel Capital.
WiMAX — short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — expands broadband wireless access over longer distances of up to 30 miles (50 kilometers) and reduces the cost of implementing broadband.
Otellini said its collaboration with Taiwan aims to enhance the competitiveness of Taiwan's WiMAX products on the global stage, in line with its endorsement of the WiMAX technology.
Intel's investment will help VMAX to deploy Taiwan's first nationwide WiMAX fourth generation wireless network, Otellini said.
The VMAX service will be available in Taiwan in the first half of 2009, he said.
AOL.com rolls out homepage redesign
WASHINGTON (AFP) – AOL.com, the web portal of America Online, rolled out a redesigned homepage on Thursday it hopes will become a central station of sorts for Internet travelers by letting people coordinate social networks, email accounts and more without switching from site to site.
The move comes a month after AOL.com, the number four gateway to the web after Google, MSN and Yahoo, revamped its homepage to allow users to preview outside email accounts without having to leave a homepage.
With "My Networks," users can now log onto their Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, AIM or Twitter accounts directly from the homepage and send a status update to all of them simultaneously.
"AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place," said Bill Wilson, executive vice president, AOL Programming.
"Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com," he said in a statement.
The new RSS Feed Browser allows users to receive news from other websites and display it in scrollable window at the bottom of the page.
Entering the name of a US city or zip code provides a feed of local news and weather.
Another feature, "Themes," gives users the possibility of personalizing the homepage by choosing a color or backdrop of their own design.
AOL, a subsidiary of media giant Time Warner Inc., was a powerful player in the early days of the Internet but has lost ground since then and is trying to refashion itself as a popular one-stop portal.
The move comes a month after AOL.com, the number four gateway to the web after Google, MSN and Yahoo, revamped its homepage to allow users to preview outside email accounts without having to leave a homepage.
With "My Networks," users can now log onto their Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, AIM or Twitter accounts directly from the homepage and send a status update to all of them simultaneously.
"AOL.com is the first traditional big portal to offer access to popular social networking sites all in one place," said Bill Wilson, executive vice president, AOL Programming.
"Now consumers can connect with their numerous networks and information sources all from AOL.com," he said in a statement.
The new RSS Feed Browser allows users to receive news from other websites and display it in scrollable window at the bottom of the page.
Entering the name of a US city or zip code provides a feed of local news and weather.
Another feature, "Themes," gives users the possibility of personalizing the homepage by choosing a color or backdrop of their own design.
AOL, a subsidiary of media giant Time Warner Inc., was a powerful player in the early days of the Internet but has lost ground since then and is trying to refashion itself as a popular one-stop portal.
Apple Fixes MobileMe Service on the Sly
Apple has gotten to the core of the problems plaguing the company's MobileMe Internet service since its July launch, and has resolved several technical glitches.
Subscribers to MobileMe have been dealing with problems since the service launched and, in an e-mail to employees just weeks after the launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted the company prematurely released the service. What MobileMe is supposed to do is keep e-mail, contacts and calendars up to date across several devices, including an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC. Instead, it has been a mobile mess.
Challenges have included problems with the Reply All function, Internet Explorer 7 issues, and difficulties with keyboard shortcuts. Other challenges included using the MobileMe Calendar in Mozilla and Firefox 3, and problems with the MobileMe Gallery, where users share photos with friends and family.
Jobs, in his e-mail to employees made public, said it was not the company's finest hour, and the service needed more testing and should not have been launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and the App Store.
Apple corrected several issues, but did so in stealth mode by not alerting its customers to the upgrade or posting any news about the update on its blog. Instead, the company issued an article about MobileMe's recent improvements and resolutions of known problems.
"Apple is always working to improve MobileMe," the company said. "Since MobileMe is primarily a server-side, or 'cloud'-based, service, the MobileMe team can make improvements and push updates to MobileMe without any action being required of MobileMe customers. Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it's easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just 'work better.'"
Resolutions to Problems
Apple lists several resolutions to each MobileMe problem in the support article and points out changes made to MobileMe's calendar, contacts, gallery and mail.
Resolutions to MobileMe Mail include being able to add contacts, being able to erase a draft message after it has been sent, and fixing problems in replying to messages.
Users also benefit from better performance, according to Apple. Now users see a "loading" message instead of a blank page to show that messages are still being loaded. And performance is said to be improved when a junk-mail filter is enabled.
For MobileMe accounts, there were also some changes. The update now improves accuracy of data-transfer details, addresses an inaccuracy of used storage space in iDisk, and allows users to be fully logged out when clicking "logout."
Those who love snapping photos will be happy with MobileMe's improved viewing experience on an iPhone and iPod touch. And editing a photo's information in www.me.com/gallery will now correctly update the photo on gallery.me.com/membername.
And MobileMe users will no longer make international calls in the middle of the night, thanks to Apple improving the international time-zone handling. Other calendar changes include better performance with a large to-do list, increased performance in Mozilla Firefox 3, and better handling of reoccurring events.
From:yahoo
Subscribers to MobileMe have been dealing with problems since the service launched and, in an e-mail to employees just weeks after the launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted the company prematurely released the service. What MobileMe is supposed to do is keep e-mail, contacts and calendars up to date across several devices, including an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC. Instead, it has been a mobile mess.
Challenges have included problems with the Reply All function, Internet Explorer 7 issues, and difficulties with keyboard shortcuts. Other challenges included using the MobileMe Calendar in Mozilla and Firefox 3, and problems with the MobileMe Gallery, where users share photos with friends and family.
Jobs, in his e-mail to employees made public, said it was not the company's finest hour, and the service needed more testing and should not have been launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and the App Store.
Apple corrected several issues, but did so in stealth mode by not alerting its customers to the upgrade or posting any news about the update on its blog. Instead, the company issued an article about MobileMe's recent improvements and resolutions of known problems.
"Apple is always working to improve MobileMe," the company said. "Since MobileMe is primarily a server-side, or 'cloud'-based, service, the MobileMe team can make improvements and push updates to MobileMe without any action being required of MobileMe customers. Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it's easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just 'work better.'"
Resolutions to Problems
Apple lists several resolutions to each MobileMe problem in the support article and points out changes made to MobileMe's calendar, contacts, gallery and mail.
Resolutions to MobileMe Mail include being able to add contacts, being able to erase a draft message after it has been sent, and fixing problems in replying to messages.
Users also benefit from better performance, according to Apple. Now users see a "loading" message instead of a blank page to show that messages are still being loaded. And performance is said to be improved when a junk-mail filter is enabled.
For MobileMe accounts, there were also some changes. The update now improves accuracy of data-transfer details, addresses an inaccuracy of used storage space in iDisk, and allows users to be fully logged out when clicking "logout."
Those who love snapping photos will be happy with MobileMe's improved viewing experience on an iPhone and iPod touch. And editing a photo's information in www.me.com/gallery will now correctly update the photo on gallery.me.com/membername.
And MobileMe users will no longer make international calls in the middle of the night, thanks to Apple improving the international time-zone handling. Other calendar changes include better performance with a large to-do list, increased performance in Mozilla Firefox 3, and better handling of reoccurring events.
From:yahoo
Google Makes PDF Files Searchable
Google has rarely included scanned documents in its search results because it had no way to determine the nature of the content, but that's about to change. The search engine giant says it will use optical character recognition (OCR) software to make it possible for Web surfers to search any Web-hosted document stored in the PDF file format developed by Adobe Systems.
Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.
"This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful," Levey said.
A Boon for Books
The company's brute-force application of OCR technology to the Web is also expected to aid Google Book Search -- the ambitious and controversial book-scanning project that the search engine giant first unveiled at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair. Ever since, Google has been scanning the book collections at the world's major libraries at a rate of 3,000 book titles per day.
Though the project initially raised copyright concerns, Google has just concluded an agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers under which Google will be able to expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the United States. The agreement resolves lawsuits that had challenged Google's plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond says the agreement is truly groundbreaking because it will give readers online access to millions of in-copyright books for the very first time.
"Second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works," Drummond explained. "And third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers."
Pursuing the Holy Grail
Given the continuing exponential growth of multimedia on the Web, however, the text-based nature of today's search-engine technology is clearly inadequate. That's because current-generation search engines can only locate multimedia material that has been tagged in text -- a cumbersome, time-consuming process that content producers often overlook.
This explains why a number of researchers are hot in pursuit of the Holy Grail of search -- the means whereby search engine providers can directly scan multimedia content and match results to search queries and the ad placement requests of their customers. Adobe Systems has already taken a step along the road to producing the next generation of search technology.
In July, the company revealed that it had optimized its Adobe Flash Player technology to enable search engines to index multimedia content produced in the Flash file format -- content that previously had been undiscoverable.
"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web," explained David Wadhwani, Adobe's vice president. "And we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users."
Google is using the technology to convert scanned documents into equivalent text files that can be searched, indexed and returned as responses to Google search queries, noted Evin Levey, a Google product manager.
"This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world's information accessible and useful," Levey said.
A Boon for Books
The company's brute-force application of OCR technology to the Web is also expected to aid Google Book Search -- the ambitious and controversial book-scanning project that the search engine giant first unveiled at the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair. Ever since, Google has been scanning the book collections at the world's major libraries at a rate of 3,000 book titles per day.
Though the project initially raised copyright concerns, Google has just concluded an agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers under which Google will be able to expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the United States. The agreement resolves lawsuits that had challenged Google's plan to digitize, search and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission of the copyright owner.
Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond says the agreement is truly groundbreaking because it will give readers online access to millions of in-copyright books for the very first time.
"Second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works," Drummond explained. "And third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers."
Pursuing the Holy Grail
Given the continuing exponential growth of multimedia on the Web, however, the text-based nature of today's search-engine technology is clearly inadequate. That's because current-generation search engines can only locate multimedia material that has been tagged in text -- a cumbersome, time-consuming process that content producers often overlook.
This explains why a number of researchers are hot in pursuit of the Holy Grail of search -- the means whereby search engine providers can directly scan multimedia content and match results to search queries and the ad placement requests of their customers. Adobe Systems has already taken a step along the road to producing the next generation of search technology.
In July, the company revealed that it had optimized its Adobe Flash Player technology to enable search engines to index multimedia content produced in the Flash file format -- content that previously had been undiscoverable.
"We are initially working with Google and Yahoo to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web," explained David Wadhwani, Adobe's vice president. "And we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users."
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