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BRUSSELS, Belgium — Nov 30, ‘07 — EU governments agreed Friday to jointly complete the development of the much-delayed Galileo satellite navigation project after mollifying Spain, which had demanded a bigger stake in the venture, the AP reported.

Spain was the lone holdout in a 26-1 vote at an EU meeting on moving ahead with the $5 billion undertaking.

In seeking unanimity, the EU later won Spain’s approval with a deal that said a secondary ground station - planned for Spain to monitor emergency services on Galileo channels - may one day be a full-blown ground control station if Spain pays for that upgrade.

The European Commission set a Dec. 31 deadline for final approval of the satellite program. When completed, by 2013, it is expected to rival the American global positioning system, which also is satellite-based.

On Nov 23, EU governments agreed to a taxpayer bailout for the project, several months after a consortium of private companies walked away from it in a financing dispute. Most of the €2.4 billion ($3.56 billion) needed to complete the project will come from unspent funds originally earmarked for agriculture

“Why would a kid in the developing world need a laptop of all things, when they might not have food, they probably…in some cases don’t live beyond the age of five, they don’t have drinking water and parents earn dollar a day or less?

Good grief why should they have a laptop?

Take the word laptop and substitute the word education and no body would say that.

This ( XO Laptop ) is probably only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really have to look at … sort of … how to eliminate poverty and create peace, and work on the environment, I  think, I can’t think of a better way to do it.” Says Nicholas Negroponte.

Nov 30, ‘07 –Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organisation, has worked to use computing as a means to bring education to the poorest regions of the world.

Since 2005 the focus of Professor Negroponte’s project has been to develop an innovative laptop that will be distributed to children across the developing world and cost about $100.

But founding pioneering initiatives is nothing new to the American computing guru. He obtained two professional architecture degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s and then set up MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in 1968.

In the 1980s he co-founded and directed the MIT Media Laboratory, where much of the technology that enabled the “digital revolution” was developed, including wireless communication, and progressive approaches to how children learn.

Professor Ken Morse, an MIT colleague, has called him: “An indefatigable leader. He has done an amazing job of recruiting incredibly busy people, including me, to help him with his crusade to bridge the digital divide”.

He has made it clear that his vision is not about the laptop itself. “It’s as if people spent all their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” Professor Negroponte told The New York Times. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”The latest laptop model, the XO, is now in production, and with interest from several developing nations, including Nigeria, Uruguay, and Libya, Negroponte’s vision is slowly becoming realised.

More at BBC News, LaptopGiving.org, OLPC.

Taipei, Taiwan — Nov 30, ‘07 — DigiTimes is reporting on AMD’s plan to drop the price of its Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 GPUs by around $20, citing sources at graphics card makers.

DigiTimes further writes,”In response to AMD’s plans, Nvidia also notified its partners that it will consider following up with price reductions of its own, causing several makers to delay mass orders to prevent themselves from absorbing the price damage, according to the sources.”

The original official Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 prices were US$179 and US$219. More at DigiTimes.

SCHAUMBURG, Ill — Nov 30, ‘07 — Mobile phone maker Motorola said on Friday, embattled Chief Executive Ed Zander will step down after a year of disappointing earnings and market share losses, raising investor hopes his successor, Greg Brown, will turn the business around and Zander, 60, will continue to serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors until the annual meeting of stockholders in May 2008.

Chief Operating Officer Brown, 47, is set to take over on Jan 1, ‘08. Motorola has been losing money and customers to rivals such as Nokia Oyj  and Samsung amid criticism for failing to come up with a strong successor to its Razr phone.

Zander’s departure comes after Motorola warned in the summer that it would likely made a loss for 2007. Analysts say Motorola, which has cut 7,500 jobs this year, is struggling with a weak range of handsets.

“I am privileged to become the CEO of Motorola,” said Greg Brown. “This is a unique Company with strong technology, people and customers. I welcome this opportunity to lead Motorola successfully into the future. We have a lot to do and I am intensely focused on building shareholder value. I look forward to working closely with Ed to ensure a smooth transition.”

Since March 2007, Mr. Brown has served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Motorola and was elected to the Company’s Board of Directors earlier this year.

Prior to his role as President and COO, Brown headed four different businesses at Motorola. He also led the $3.9 billion acquisition of Symbol Technologies, the second largest transaction in Motorola’s history and an important strategic move to strengthen Motorola’s enterprise offering.

Greg Brown joined Motorola in 2003. More at Motorola.

Know your contribution to climate change
mobGAS will challenge individuals to make small changes to their daily routine in order to achieve significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.

Brussels — Nov 30, ‘07 — mobGAS is a new mobile phone application available in 21 European languages that allows users to see how their daily choices impact on climate change.

This smart technology, developed by scientists working at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, allows users to see the implications of the choices they make every day, in terms of the three major greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

Information about everyday activities – cooking, transport, lighting, electronic appliances etc. - is put into the application, and calculations made of individual emissions. A user diary of daily, weekly and yearly emissions can be registered on a secure website, allowing a comparison with national and world averages.

The application also includes an animation reflecting the user’s contribution to the Kyoto Protocol target.

Individuals can have a significant impact on reducing emissions. According to recent Eurostat figures, 21% of emissions are related to industrial and associated processes, while 31% are from energy production, 20% from transport, 9% from agriculture and 3% from waste, and the remainder from other sources.

All of this shows that individual behaviour, such as how we travel, the appliances we use or the food we eat, can make a real different to emissions. Lifestyle and consumer choices are a key factor, so it is important that people are aware of the implications of their personal choices.

By downloading the application to a mobile phone – something people carry with them almost all the time – it is possible to make use of quieter moments – travelling on a bus, or waiting for an appointment, for example – to input the data for that day. This could include the means of transport they took, how they heated their house, how long they watched television and what they ate.

From today, mobGAS is being made available free of charge to anyone who is interested. Communication networks and mobile phone producers will also be involved in rolling-out the technology at national level.

This technology will be demonstrated by scientists of the JRC at the EU pavilion during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali from 3 December.

To download the application visit mobGAS

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif — November 30, 2007 — Google announced today that it will apply to participate in the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming auction of wireless spectrum in the 700 megahertz (MHz) band.

As part of the nationally mandated transition to digital television, the 700 MHz spectrum auction — which begins January 24, 2008 — will free up spectrum airwaves for more efficient wireless Internet service for consumers.

Advocacy by public interest groups and Google earlier this year helped ensure that regardless of which bidders win a key portion of the spectrum up for auction (the so-called “C Block”), they will be required to allow their users to download any software application they want on their mobile device, and to use any mobile devices they would like on that wireless network.

The winner must ensure these rights for consumers if the reserve price of $4.6 billion for the C Block is met at auction.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”

Schmidt also praised the leadership of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and his fellow commissioners for adopting the new rights for consumers earlier this year.

Google’s formal application to participate in the 700 MHz auction will be filed with the FCC on Monday, December 3, 2007 — the required first step in the auction process. Google’s application does not include any partners.More at Google.

Bidding separately instead of assembling a coalition does not rule out Google later signing up partners if it wins the bidding, said a source familiar with the company’s strategy. But the FCC has “anti-collusion” rules that prevent deal-making between potential bidders during the auction period.

The auction is expected to take several weeks, or even months, of daily, back-and-forth bidding, with the identities of the bidders kept secret. Big spectrum bidders typically draw up elaborate strategies, often with input from game-theory experts.

FCC officials hope the company’s participation will mean a possible new player in the wireless business and boost the amount of money the government can bring in from the auction.

San Francisco, CA — Nov 29, ‘07  — Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies, the AP is reporting.

The AP further reports, “Under the changes outlined late Thursday, Facebook’s 55 million users will be given greater control over whether they want to participate in a three-week-old program that circulates potentially sensitive information about their online purchases and other activities.

Facebook provided two different opportunities to block the details from being shared, but many users said they never saw the “opt-out” notices before they disappeared from the screen.

With the reforms, Facebook promised its users will now have to give their explicit consent, or “opt-in,” before any information is passed along.

The concessions were made after more than 50,000 Facebook users signed an online petition blasting the system, called “Beacon,” as a galling intrusion that put the Palo Alto-based startup’s pursuit of profit ahead of its members’ privacy interests.

More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.” More at AP.

Wellington, New Zealand — Nov 29, ‘07 — Police nabbed the suspected teenage kingpin of an international cyber crime network accused of infiltrating 1.3 million computers and skimming millions of dollars from victims’ bank accounts, officials said.

“Working with the FBI and police in the Netherlands, New Zealand police arrested the 18-year-old in the North Island city of Hamilton, said Martin Kleintjes, head of the police electronic crime center. The suspect’s name was not immediately available.

Kleintjes charged that the ring was responsible for stealing at least $20 million using bank account and login details detected by their illegal spyware.

The 18-year-old Hamilton man is now co-operating with police after they carried out searches at Canterbury, Northland and Waikato addresses.

The FBI believes “AKILL” is the ringleader of a “botnet” – in this case a cluster of over a million computers infected by a malicious virus letting the perpetrator gain control of them, access private information and attack other computers.

The arrest was part of international probe into the criminal use of “botnets,” in which hackers gain control of third-party computers through malicious software and then use them as remote-controlled robots to crash online systems, accept spam and steal users’ personal information.

Eight people have been indicted, pleaded guilty or convicted since the investigation started in June. Thirteen additional warrants have been served in the U.S. and overseas in the investigation, which the FBI says has uncovered more than $20 million in economic losses.

New Zealand police searched the residence of the 18-year-old suspected to be the ringleader earlier this week. The federal agency identified the person by the online handle “AKILL.”

Earlier this month, Ryan Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pa., was indicted in the case. Authorities allege that the New Zealand suspect and Goldstein were involved in crashing a University of Pennsylvania engineering school server Feb. 23, 2006.” More at Stuff.co.nz

As a strategic partner of Microsoft, Infosys has a multidimensional relationship with the company. Infosys has established the new 400-seat capacity VOF to facilitate and highlight its expertise in working on Microsoft programs and industry-leading solutions. It is completely compliant with Microsoft’s rigorous security and privacy standards.

The companies’ collaboration has resulted in measurable enhancements to productivity, customer and partner experience, and operational efficiencies across Microsoft’s businesses while enabling Infosys to refine its industry service offerings for high-tech companies. Examples of joint projects include:

“The Infosys and Microsoft relationship is a shining example of how a strong collaboration may enhance a client’s competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Anand Swaminathan, associate vice president, High-Tech & Manufacturing, Infosys. “Infosys is committed to combining its industry solutions and services and extending the global delivery model we pioneered to enable Microsoft to deliver world-class software and customer experience in the flat world.”

More at Microsoft.

Round Rock, Texas — November 29, 2007 — Dell today reported results for its third quarter of fiscal year 2008, with revenue up nine percent year-over-year to a record $15.6 billion, operating income up 13 percent to $829 million and earnings per share of $0.34, a 26 percent increase over the prior year.

Cash from operations totaled $1 billion, while cash and marketable securities at the end of the quarter were $14.6 billion. The company plans to resume its share repurchase program in early December.

“We embarked this year on a long-term strategy to re-ignite growth and our Q3 results indicate we’re making solid progress through investments in five key business priorities – consumer, emerging countries, notebooks, enterprise and small/medium business,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO.

“Initiatives to simplify IT will drive innovation across all industries, creating new value for customers and shareholders. For consumers we will continue to launch products that set the bar for design, personalization, and price performance – and we will make them available in more places than ever before.”

Key Business Priorities

Nov 29, ‘07 — A developing star wrapped in a black cocoon of dust is seen sprouting giant jets in a new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

The stellar portrait, seen in infrared light, offers the first glimpse at a very early stage in the life of an embryonic sun-like star — a time when the star’s natal envelope is beginning to flatten and collapse, and streams of gas are escaping. The observations will ultimately help astronomers better understand how stars and their planets form.

“This is the first time we’ve clearly seen a flattened envelope around a forming star,” said Leslie Looney of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author of a study about the star, called L1157, appearing Dec. 1 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Some theories had predicted that envelopes flatten as they collapse onto their stars and surrounding planet-forming disks, but we hadn’t seen any strong evidence of this until now.”

Stars are born out of thick clouds, or envelopes, of gas and dust that condense and collapse inward. As a star grows and feeds off the envelope, it spins faster and faster like a twirling ice skater. A disk of planet-forming material begins to take shape in orbit around the star, and jets of gas shoot up from above and below the disk to relieve the star’s accumulating pressure. Eventually, the original envelope falls onto the spinning disk, and the jets slow to a stop.

The regions where all the action takes place are dark and dusty, letting little visible light escape. For example, the embryonic star L1157 appears black in visible-light views. Spitzer’s infrared view of the star, on the other hand, penetrates the dusty haze, giving us a rare look at what our own solar system might have looked like when it was very young.

The bipolar jets shooting away from L1157 are enormous; light itself would take about nine months to travel the length of one jet. The color white shows the hottest parts of the jets, with temperatures around 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit). Most of the material in the jets, seen in orange, is roughly zero degrees on the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales.

The flattened envelope around the fledgling star is perpendicular to the jets and appears deep black. This is because it is so thick with dust that even infrared light cannot escape. The envelope is big enough to engulf the equivalent of tens of thousands of mature solar systems similar to our own, while the planet-forming disk tucked inside cannot be seen in this photo – it is smaller than a pixel.

L1157 is located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. It is roughly 10,000 years old, and, according to astronomers’ estimates, will ignite to become a full-fledged star about the mass of our sun in a million years or so.

“Taking baby pictures of stars is not easy to do,” said Looney. “Now that we have a good picture, we can begin to ask questions about whether this star system and its potential planets will grow up to become like ours.”

Other authors of this study include John J. Tobin of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Woojin Kwan of the University of Illinois.

More at NASA.

Nov 29, ‘07 — BBC news is reporting on this shocking story of a British teacher being found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported. She had been accused on three counts of insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs.

The Foreign Office said it was extremely disappointed by the verdict. Her lawyer says she will now appeal. The prime minister, Sudanese embassy officials in London and UK Muslim organisations all expressed the hope that Mrs Gibbons would be released.

But Sudan’s top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam. She could have faced up to 40 lashes.

In September, Mrs Gibbons allowed her class of primary school pupils to name the teddy bear Muhammad as part of a study of animals and their habitats. More at BBC News. Photo Credit: BBC.

BRUSSELS — Nov 29, ‘07 — European Union telecom ministers backed proposals on Thursday to open radio frequencies allocated exclusively for GSM mobile phone services to other technologies, such as third-generation (3G) mobile data, reports Reuters.

“The mobile phone industry has been pushing for regulators to open the airwaves.

A 3G network in the 900 MHz band would achieve up to 40 percent greater coverage than one in the 2,100 MHz band for the same capital expenditure, the GSM Association (GSMA), the global trade body for the mobile industry, said earlier this year.

The GSMA estimates an additional 300 million people across Asia, Europe and Africa would have access to mobile broadband services by 2012 if mobile operators could use a 900 MHz frequency spectrum for 3G services.

The proposal now needs to be approved by the European Parliament before ministers give their final green light. The final decision would abolish a 20-year-old EU legislation.” More at Reuters.

Nov 29, ‘07 — Scientists analyzing data gathered by Cassini have confirmed the presence of heavy negative ions in the upper regions of Titan’s atmosphere. These particles may act as building blocks for more complicated organic molecules.

The discovery was completely unexpected because of the chemical composition of the atmosphere (which lacks oxygen - responsible for forming negative ions in the lower ionosphere of the Earth - and mainly consists of nitrogen and methane). The observation has now been verified on 16 different encounters.

Prof Andrew Coates, researcher at University College London’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory and lead author of the paper, says: “Cassini’s electron spectrometer has enabled us to detect negative ions which have 10 000 times the mass of hydrogen. Additional rings of carbon can build up on these ions, forming molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which may act as a basis for the earliest forms of life.

Coates added, “Their existence poses questions about the processes involved in atmospheric chemistry and aerosol formation and we now think it most likely that these negative ions form in the upper atmosphere before moving closer to the surface, where they probably form the mist which shrouds the planet and which has hidden its secrets from us in the past. It was this mist which stopped the Voyager mission from examining Titan more closely in 1980 and was one of the reasons that Cassini was launched.”

The new paper builds on work published in Science on 11 May where the team found smaller tholins, up to 8000 times the mass of hydrogen, forming away from the surface of Titan.

Dr Hunter Waite of the South West Research Institute in Texas and author of the earlier study, said: “Tholins are very large, complex, organic molecules thought to include chemical precursors to life. Understanding how they form could provide valuable insight into the origin of life in the solar system.”

The findings, authored by A. Coates, F. Crary, G. Lewis, D. Young, J. Waite Jr. and E. Sittler Jr., published yesterday, 28 November, in the Geophysical Research Letters appear in ‘Discovery of heavy negative ions in Titan’s ionosphere’. More at ESA.

ALVISO, Calif — Nov 29, ‘07 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — TiVo offered the following statement today on the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) decision with respect to the reexamination of TiVo’s Multimedia Timewarping System patent, U.S. patent number 6,233,389 (the “Time Warp Patent”):

“We are extremely pleased that the PTO has now found all claims of the Time Warp Patent to be valid after conducting a reexamination of the patent requested by EchoStar. This decision by the PTO is final and not appealable by EchoStar. Today’s decision by the PTO brings us another step closer to ending EchoStar’s continued infringement and we are hopeful that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will uphold the district court judgment of patent infringement and reinstate the injunction.” More at PRNewsWire.

SAN JOSE, Calif –BUSINESS WIRE– Nov 29, ‘07 — New LED-backlit LCD displays of Samsung Electronics are now available in large premium-model, full-HD TVs at major U.S retailers for the holiday season.

The new panels enable a huge jump in the dynamic contrast ratio from between 5,000:1 and 25,000:1, to 100,000:1 and even 500,000:1, for the clearest images on the market today.

Available in 40-inch, 46-inch, 52-inch and 57-inch diagonal screen sizes, Samsung’s new “local dimming,” LED (light-emitting diode) technology provides a brightness level of 450nits, and reduces power consumption by as much as 30 percent.

Depending upon the number of LEDs used in a screen panel design, the dynamic contrast ratio can improve the contrast in colors by as much as a thousand percent over the CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) LCD TVs typically used today.

Another significant advantage to Samsung’s “local dimming” technology is that the LED scanning process shuts off the diodes in precise sequences, thereby essentially eliminating any remnants of ‘image ghosting’ that had previously been a drawback in some LCD TVs.

With local-dimming LEDs, hundreds of wafer-thin diodes about the width of the eye’s pupil are electronically turned off and on in exacting sequences that respond to movement on the screen – areas only a fraction of what was previously possible with the most prevalent form of TV backlighting – long, thin fluorescent lamps. In black areas of the picture, the diodes can be completely shut off in order to generate total blackness.

Samsung said that its new extreme-contrast LCD panels is now available in Samsung TVs in the U.S., and also will be featured in HDTV’s produced by other manufacturers. The local dimming LED display does not contain mercury.

BEAVERTON, Ore — Nov 28, ‘07 — The Universal Serial Bus (USB) 3.0 Promoter Group is looking for additional contributors to its initial draft of the group’s proposed specification with a goal to have it completed by the first half of 2008.

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 will create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug-and-play capabilities of previous USB computer connection technologies, ports and cabling. The personal USB interconnect is targeting to deliver over 10 times the speed of today’s connection and will be optimized for lower power and improved protocol efficiency.

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group public Web site usb.org/usb30 outlines the process to become a contributor to the specification. A company must be a USB Implementers Forum member in good standing and sign a USB 3.0 contributor agreement.

Once a company has joined, it will obtain access to the current draft of the specification. The site also includes a URL for Contributors to supply comments. The group plans to review the specification with contributors at a meeting in Las Vegas on Jan. 14-15.

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group, consisting of HP, Intel Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, NEC Corporation, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments Incorporated, is committed to preserving the existing USB device class driver infrastructure and investment, look and feel and ease-of-use of USB while continuing to expand this technology’s capabilities. More at USB.org (in pdf)

Tokyo — On Nov 28, Toshiba Corporation announced the latest additions to its market-leading lineup of 2.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD) for automotive applications: an 80GB drive offering the industry’s largest capacity, and a 40GB drive.

The drives will be used in such applications as car navigation systems, and will be released in industrial and retail versions. Sample shipping of the drives has started and mass production will start in March 2008

Toshiba’s line of automotive HDDs enable a variety of applications, such as GPS navigation, digital music and video, and other telematic systems. With an altitude specification of 5,500 meters, the rugged MK8050GAC and MK8050GACE drives meet the operating extremes of a road environment. More at Toshiba here and here.

TOKYO — On Nov 28, Toshiba Corporation announced, it has developed and delivered the world’s first operational weather radar system that replaces electron tubes in the transmitter with a high-power semiconductor module.

The new radar is only one sixth the size of conventional equipment but offers comparable output power, along with improved waveband efficiency and enhanced features.

The first unit of the new system has been installed at the Hydrospheric Atmospheric Research Center at Nagoya University, Japan. The Nagoya radar operates in the 9GHz frequency band (X-band) and is the first solid-state weather radar to go into practical operation.

While the new weather radar is much more compact and offers much higher performance than conventional systems, it maintains the same level of output power by adopting a combination of gallium nitride (GaN) power field effect transistors (FET) and pulse compression technology, which strengthens peak output power.

Toshiba will market the new high-power semiconductor-based weather radar in both 9GHz band (X-band) and 5GHz band (C-band) versions, both in Japan and overseas, including sales of individual modules that build the system. More at Toshiba.

STOCKHOLM — Nov 29, ‘07 — Reuters is reporting on a US law firm Labaton Sucharow LLP filing a class action suit against telecom equipment maker Ericsson, alleging false and misleading statements by the company, citing the law firm’ Web site.

“Ericsson, the world’s biggest mobile network maker, stunned the market in October with a profit warning, sending its shares down 30 percent, shortly after presentations to investors in September that the market had considered upbeat.” More at Reuters.

Statement from Labaton Sucharow:

“Labaton Sucharow filed a class action complaint on November 28, 2007 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, on behalf of persons who purchased or otherwise acquired publicly traded securities of Ericsson LM Telephone Co. (“Ericsson”) between February 2, 2007 and November 20, 2007.

If you purchased Ericsson securities between February 2, 2007 and November 20, 2007, you may qualify to serve as a Lead Plaintiff in this action. To inquire about serving as Lead Plaintiff, please click “join this action” and complete a plaintiff certification.”