2018 Gold Earrings blog

Eventually, all three music services reversed their decisions, but it convinced DRM critics that DRM software never truly surrenders control of music to a buyer. While it’s inconceivable to think that Apple would ever stop issuing DRM keys, it’s absolutely possible.

In the past year, the four top recording companies have been moving away from DRM–at least with other music services. In that time, companies such as Amazon, MySpace Music, and Napster have all begun selling open MP3s. MP3s are the format used to compress music files. Universal Music is expected to soon announce that the label is licensing MP3s to Microsoft for
Zune. EMI and Warner already have DRM-free deals with Microsoft.

Talks with at least two of the labels have taken place on and off for several months, said the sources. They cautioned that there’s no guarantee Apple and the labels can close the deals. But if iTunes is successful in acquiring the rights to sell unprotected music from Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony BMG, the deal could help bolster iTunes’ dominant position in digital music, as well as send competitors scrambling to find something new to differentiate themselves.

Universal Music is expected to soon announce that it is licensing MP3s to Microsoft for Zune.

Also in the past year, technological shortcomings of copy-protection software have generated a lot of public scrutiny. As some iTunes competitors have exited the market, they have taken their DRM music with them.

A year after iTunes began offering music without copy protection software from EMI, Apple is in discussions with the other three top recording companies about acquiring DRM-free songs, according to two music industry sources.

The talks are still preliminary and no deals have been finalized, but one source said one of the major labels is close to a final agreement. Rumors have been swirling on the Internet for a week that Sony would soon be offering music without the controversial digital rights management software. My sources could not confirm this.

This year, MSN, Yahoo, and Wal-Mart outraged some customers and consumer groups by announcing they would stop issuing keys for their DRM-protected songs. This meant the music would be prevented from being transferred to an owner’s other devices.

The marketing efforts of these Apple rivals have played up the idea that their music is unencumbered with DRM.

Should the deals get done, the songs offered by Apple’s iTunes would no longer be restricted to playing on Apple devices, such as the
iPhone or
iPod. This has been one of the main criticisms of iTunes music for a long time. Apple says the music labels are the ones that force Apple to adopt DRM. Music insiders say Apple has long dragged its feet about getting unprotected music. Right now, Apple uses the proprietary DRM scheme, FairPlay, to lock down its music.

Spokespeople for Apple and the major labels declined to comment.

CNET News reporter Ina Fried contributed to this report.

See also:

• Wal-Mart to carry iPhone after holidays?

Hit by the economic downturn and fluctuating exchange rates, worldwide IT spending is expected to drop 6 percent this year, according to a new Gartner report.

As the global economy revives, Gartner believes IT spending will shoot up 2.3 percent next year. Overall, Gartner expects IT spending to grow annually at a weak 1.9 percent rate from 2008 through 2013.

Spending will likely settle in at $3.2 trillion for 2009, compared with $3.4 trillion in 2008. Last year, IT spending had actually surged by 6.2 percent over 2007.

For comparison, Gartner noted, a drop in all four segments did not occur during the last major downturn in 2001.

This year’s spending decline touches all four major IT segments tracked by Gartner–hardware, software, IT services, and telecommunications. Hardware spending will see the sharpest drop at 16.3 percent, while software spending will ease down only 1.6 percent.

Due to the ongoing recession, the projected 6 percent spending decline is greater than Gartner’s original forecast of a 3.8 percent drop, which the firm made in March.

“While the global economic downturn shows signs of easing, this year IT budgets are still being cut, and consumers will need a lot more persuading before they can feel confident enough to loosen their purse strings,” Richard Gordon, head of global forecasting at Gartner, said in a statement Tuesday.

(Credit:
IBM)

It took 13 years for researchers to catalog all the information in a human genome the first time. Now IBM believes it can do better–somewhat perversely by equipping a newer genetic sequencing method with brakes.

IBM is working on prototype DNA-processing electronics that slurps strands of DNA through an extremely small hole called a nanopore, measuring the electrical properties of the chemicals as they go by to determine the genetic information. That technique is used beyond IBM, but what Big Blue researchers have been working on is a way to slow down, an essential step toward improving its precision, said Gustavo Stolovitzky, manager of the IBM Functional Genomics and Systems Biology Group.

The genes of animals and plants are encoded in DNA with just four molecular-scale substances–adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. Their particular order governs not only their the formation of humans and other organisms but also the day-to-day biochemistry that keeps us alive.

IBM Chief Executive Sam Palmisano is scheduled to unveil the project and what the company calls its “DNA transistor” Tuesday in a talk, “IT Innovation in Healthcare,” at the Cleveland Clinic, IBM said.

IBM’s sequencing technique to transcribe this biochemical data has been under way for three years, and it’s easier said than done. The company is in the process of creating a new prototype device updated to reflect what IBM learned from an earlier one that didn’t work as hoped.

The distance scales alone make the work difficult. Each DNA base is about 5 or 6 angstroms away from its neighbor–about half a billionth of a meter. By comparison, a human hair is colossal, about a ten-thousandth of a meter in diameter. And the DNA strands slip through a nanopore that’s 2 to 3 billionths of a meter wide.

The ultimate goal for such research is affordable genetic sequencing. “It would allow DNA sequences to be more or less routine,” Stolovitzky said, forecasting that the technology will arrive in five or ten years.

The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs, so that’s still a lot of time to do a full analysis. But it’s sill more complicated because the chromosomes that house the genetic data must be broken up into smaller strands for practical reasons.

This illustration shows a strand of DNA traveling through a nanopore. With IBM's approach, some layers periodically stop the DNA strand while another measures its properties to determine its genetic information.

But IBM Research is happy to pursue a number of projects that may not pay off immediately, including work touching on nanotechnology, computing, and biotechnology. Whether it’ll all come to fruition remains to be seen, but one way or the other, it’s likely you’ll know your own genetic data within a matter of years.

“Translocation control we should have in a year’s time more or less,” Stolovitzky said, referring to the ability to ease the DNA through the nanopore one pair at a time.

OK, but why should you care?

IBM isn’t the only one working on this technology. In addition to various academic efforts, start-up 23andMe offers some genetic analysis today.

“It would enable the possibility of going to the doctor with some infection, and the doctor gets the sequence pretty much on spot of the bacteria affecting the patient or the virus is in the blood,” Stolovitzky said.

IBM’s approach uses a flat device about 250 nanometers on a side. It has very thin alternating layers of metal and a material called a dielectric. The nanopore is bored through these layers using an electron beam from a tunneling electron microscope, Stolovitzky said.

On one side of the layer is the DNA, unzipped from its familiar double-helix configuration with two strands of matched bases into a single strand with single bases. The single-strand is important in part because the distance between each pair increases to between 5 and 6 angstroms, making them more manageable than the double strand with bases 3.4 angstroms apart, he said.

One problem with the nanopore approach is that it’s hard to distinguish the four substances, called bases, as they slip through the hole. The four bases have overlapping electrical properties, so the more time spent measuring each, the better the accuracy.

Even slowed down, the process is fast compared with humans toiling away with pipettes and polymerase chain reaction equipment in a lab. “We think 1 millisecond should be a reasonable time to measure (a base),” Stolovitzky said. In other words, it would take about a second to perform 1,000 measurements.

Big Blue is among those who believe electronics technology can be applied to the task of sequencing a person’s genes, thereby bringing genetic testing into the computing era and lowering its cost to something like $100 to $1,000.

Or another possibility: knowing patients’ specific genotypes could mean doctors would know if they had a negative reaction to some drug. That could mean some drugs useful that today are banned could become useful to a subset of the population.

The strand is pulled through the nanopore by an electrical field that attracts the negatively charged strand. But in the nanopore, some layers are electrically switched on to fix the strand in place for a tick of an electronic clock while another layer makes its measurement, Stolovitzky said.

(Credit:
Aquamarine)

Preliminary studies on the device conducted in wave pools showed that 10 Oysters could supply power to about 3,000 homes, according to statistics provided by Aquamarine Power.

Unlike other attempts at ocean power, the Oyster does not use the waves themselves as the force to turn turbines and generate electricity directly with an underwater generator. Instead, the wave power is harnessed to activate a series of pistons in the Oyster to vigorously pump ocean water to shore through an underwater pipeline. A conventional hydro-electric generator is then used to convert what has become a high-pressure water source into electricity.

The Oyster, a giant oscillating device developed by Aquamarine Power that uses hydraulic technology to convert wave power into electricity, won the “Innovator of 2009″ award from Britain’s Renewable Energy Association in June.

Now comes the that the Oyster is set to be installed and working at a test site by this fall, according Aquamarine Power.

The simple approach, which has been tried in other forms by projects like the Seadog Pump, is thought to be more scalable.

The Oyster in open position.

The Oyster will be installed at European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) by Fugro Seacore in the waters of the Orkney Islands, the series of islands off northern Scotland where the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean come together.

A new approach to harnessing the ocean’s power for energy is getting some positive attention.

Then on July 15 the Edinburgh, Scotland-based company was awarded 60 million pounds (over $101 million) by the U.K.’s Department of Energy and Climate Change to further develop its device.

10:20 a.m. Ballmer has switched into the full-on sales pitch, highlighting the cost savings that can be achieved. Customers can expect to save $90 to $160 in costs each year per computer that they move onto Windows 7, largely from lower support and management costs. (It wasn’t clear if this was as compared to a PC running XP or one running Windows Vista.)

“The problem is it costs money to save money,” Gillen said.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who earlier Tuesday sent out an e-mail to customers arguing for “the new efficiency” driven by software, is slated to speak shortly at the event being held at the at the University of California, San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus.

(Credit:
CNET News)

(Credit:
CNET)

A panel of Microsoft executives and customers talked about the pending launch of Windows 7 at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday.

CEO Steve Ballmer presided over an event that was, effectively, the business launch of Windows 7.

There, he said, it will come down to whether Windows 7 really can make business workers more productive, something he clearly believes it can.

Among those already trying out Windows 7 is Intel. The chipmaker did a lot of work to make Windows Vista work, but like many companies, it decided not to put it on its own desktops.

The gathering of invited corporate IT users here is designed to serve as the beginning of the business push for
Windows 7, which is already available to larger businesses and goes on sale to consumers and small businesses on October 22.

Although a good business case can be made for upgrading our machines, it can still be a tough sell, said IDC analyst Al Gillen.

“It’s a very strong pull,” Bryant said.

Still, he said, it’s a “very good place in the product cycle” to embrace Windows 7,” Ballmer said, noting that businesses that move now would be early adopters, but not the first companies to do so, pointing to a list that included Ford, Fiat, BMW, Bombardier, Continental Airlines, Intel, Halliburton and Starwood.

Update 9:55 a.m.: The panel has wrapped up and Ballmer has taken the stage. So far, we’re hearing familiar talk about doing more with less and his case that technology is at the early stage of its influence on business.

SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft trotted out some of its biggest customers on Tuesday to make its case that it still makes sense to spend money on software in a tough economy.

Ballmer said he expects most companies will start moving to Windows 7 as they add new PCs, but won’t do large-scale upgrades of existing machines and probably won’t rush out to replace all their PCs either.

10 a.m.: Ballmer starts his pitch for Windows 7.

Windows 7 can also make it cheaper to deploy new software, though Ballmer acknowledged that skeptics will point out the cheapest thing is just not to deploy new software at all. “I got that,” Ballmer said.

10:30 a.m.: On to questions and answers. Microsoft starts with a few written ones that came in over the Internet. First off: No, Ballmer is not free for golf next Monday–he’ll be in London.

But, he acknowledged that alone won’t sway businesses. “Even with that swell of interest, you are still going to have to confront the new efficiency.”

By contrast, Intel is adopting Windows 7 rather quickly. Already about 500 employees from throughout the company are testing the software, said CIO Diane Bryant. Of those workers, 97 percent said they would recommend the operating system.

Ballmer said his hope is that, once the new operating system hits the market, that individual workers will be going to businesses asking them to put Windows 7 on their corporate computers. “I think we are going to see a lot of that kind of demand,” Ballmer said.

10:32 a.m.: Well, he took a couple more written questions but no live questions from the audience before the event wrapped up.

The Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server (download) is available for free to corporate Google Apps Premier and Education Editions customers, and must be implemented by an IT administrator.

Check out more details in this Google blog post.

If your office has given you a BlackBerry for work purposes, you may soon be accessing your Google Apps Gmail, calendar, and contacts via the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

The Google Apps Connector promises to push Gmail messages within 60 seconds, and sync in-box actions like assigning labels and archiving messages. You’ll also be able to search contacts from the company’s global address list, a huge bonus for mobile workers. Synchronization between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry calendar is one-way in this release, with Google’s calendar populating your schedule on the phone. Google plans to include bidirectional calendar syncing in the future.

While the connector opens up syncing to some of the Google Apps, in this iteration it does not sync with Google Docs, the intranet site-hosting app called Google Site, and Google Video. You’ll still be able to view content through the mobile browser, however.

On Friday, Google announced that some functionality in Google Apps, its suite of premium enterprise-level applications, will now give company-issued BlackBerrys some push and sync functionality.

Better Place is developing a service that will allow drivers to charge electric car batteries and to change out batteries at a network of swapping stations. It has signed partnerships to develop a number of networks, with the first expected in Israel.

Better Place will test its battery-swapping service with electric
cars used as taxis in Tokyo.

All-electric cars will generally have a shorter range than gasoline cars–Nissan’s Leaf and Coda Automotive’s sedan are expected to have a roughly 100-mile range. But since many city dwellers don’t have a dedicated electrical outlet outdoors, charging electric cars in urban areas can be challenging without public charging stations or battery-changing stations.

(Credit:
Better Place)

Earlier this year, Better Place successfully tested an automated car-changing station in Yokohama, Japan, where a car drives up a ramp and a machine pulls out a depleted battery, then slides in a fresh one.

Better Place said Wednesday it hopes to the trial will lead to other battery-changing stations in cities. “This puts the Better Place battery switch system to use in a real-world application involving heavy-use vehicles that drive much more than the average passenger car,” Kiyotaka Fujii, president of Better Place Japan, said in a statement.

A test at Better Place's automated battery-swapping station in Japan earlier this year.

The project, funded by Japanese government agencies, will use as many as four cars converted to run on batteries. The taxis will be able to swap in fresh batteries at an existing station in Tokyo.

The trial in Tokyo, scheduled to begin in January, will gather data on driving range and battery durability under urban driving conditions.

The Redditch, U.K.-based company will wed its bullet resistant glazing expertise with a “suspended particle device” technology called SPD-SmartGlass, licensed to it by Research Frontiers. GKN is the same company that designed and produced the windows for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

GKN Aerospace was awarded the $425,000 contract by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office’s VIP Protection Subgroup to incorporate dimmable films with armored glass to provide a “SmartShade” that conceals the location and identity of VIPs traveling in armored vehicles.

“This new development will have its initial application in the global counterterrorism market for government VIP armored personnel vehicles but also has real value in the civilian VIP market,” said William Fischer, GKN’s vice president of technology. “These SmartShade windows will give a level of control, protection, and privacy for vehicle occupants not available until now,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Defense has contracted for the development of bullet resistant windows that dim instantly with a touch of a button, providing “on-demand” light control, privacy, and protection from heat, glare, and ultraviolet rays.

The VIP Protection Subgroup’s job is to provide “security enhancing technology” for your betters: recent projects include bulletproof cubicles, portable, air-conditioned rooms for VIPs to hold “sensitive discussions,” and canine body armor (PDF).

SmartGlass is already available for architectural and automotive applications, and the developers hope the armored variety will soon be an option on your car, too (view demo).

(Credit:
GKN)

There may be an economic recovery in the works, but video game giant Electronic Arts has a way to go before it joins the party.

Still, despite strong results for games like The Sims 3 and EA Sports Active, EA has to deal with the reality that its business is struggling in the face of the economy. Of course, it’s hardly alone. During June, industry sales across the board were down 31 percent from the same period a year earlier.

For the quarter, EA said it brought in $644 million in net revenue, down 20 percent, compared with $804 million a year earlier.

The quick start for The Sims 3 isn’t surprising since it is part of one of the best-selling video game franchises in history, and because the game in June set a company record for first-week sales of a PC game.

EA also touted the performance of games like EA Sports Active and Fight Night Round 4, which it said also drove sales for the quarter.

That seemed to be the message Tuesday, when EA reported its first-quarter results, the highlights of which were mixed: On the one hand, it reported a quarterly net loss of $234 million, or 72 cents a share, compared with a loss of $95 million, or 30 cents a share, for the same quarter a year earlier. But on the other hand, its big summer release, The Sims 3, appears to have gotten off to a great start, moving an impressive 3.7 million copies since its June 2 launch.

Spiffbox is looking to shake up social networking by rewarding its users with cash for participating. Recognizing that today we are inundated with friend requests, messages, and e-mails, Spiffbox supposed that people could be motivated to respond quickly by offering a financial incentive for doing so.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)

Spiffbox utilizes Facebook Connect and Twitter and is meant to build on top of pre-existing social networks instead of trying to build their own unique user base. Instead of trying to be another communication platform for you and your friends, it is intended to help you engage with people outside of your social graph. The focus here is on expert advice as well as career promotion and advancement.

I am impressed by the thinking behind Spiffbox, however, I fear that some new users might find it to be too complex and intimidating. Once the site irons some of its kinks out and becomes a little more user friendly, then we could start to see some real widespread adoption.

Spiffbox's friend invite, detailing the effects of accepting the request.

In Spiffbox’s system, the person sending a message or friend request has to spend points, which can be redeemed for cash, and the receiver gets points for responding. Users are given a set number of points when they sign up and can earn more by responding to messages, completing offers, or purchasing them. At this time, all of the actions on the site have a fixed cost, but Spiffbox is playing around with the idea of letting the sender define how much money they want to attach to a message. Obviously, if there is more money attached to a message, then the recipient will be more inclined to respond.

Spiffbox has some really interesting concepts behind it. We are starting to see a trend of social-networking sites rewarding users for their actions. In September, Vreebit launched their version of the concept, but it awards items (electronics, books, etc.) as opposed to cash like Spiffbox does. There could be a real future in this space.