US, EU agree: OK to buy trademarked terms on AdWords
Advertisers in Europe will soon be able to buy other companies' trademarked terms using Google AdWords. Google announced Wednesday that it was changing its AdWords policy in Europe to align more closely with its policies elsewhere, meaning that a trademark owner won't be able to lay claim over all ads that use the same words.
Additionally, a judge in the US said that selling trademarked words to other companies wasn't likely to create confusion about where to find the real product.
Too much confusion here?
Google's decision to change up its European AdWords policy follows a high profile win in court saying that Google wasn't responsible for policing trademarks. Luxury retailer Louis Vuitton had originally won a lawsuit against AdWords in France because the search giant had allowed retailers selling fake LV wares to buy keywords like "Louis Vuitton replicas" and "Louis Vuitton fakes." Google appealed the ruling and took it to Europe's highest court, and eventually got a ruling in March of this year in its favor.
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Can you buy me now? Apple and the war for the mobile market
The short history of the computer industry is dominated by two well-known stories of business triumph and defeat. The first is the story of how mainframe makers failed to take the personal computer seriously until it was too late. Most of them faded away, and those that didn't still failed to dominate the PC industry.The second is the story of how Apple Computer, Inc. refused to license its innovative new operating system to other hardware makers in the early days of the PC revolution and ended up ceding the market to Microsoft, which licensed its operating system far and wide.
The temptation to fit every new computer industry business conflict into one of these two molds is strong, and frequently surrendered to. For a modern example, look no further than the current battle for the mobile market between Apple, Google, RIM, and others. The first story may end up applying in the case of RIM, which might have waited a bit too long to recognize the primacy of the touchscreen and the mobile application marketplace. Or perhaps it applies to Microsoft, which refused to let go of the idea of shoehorning Windows onto a phone until very recently (or not).
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Android phones selling faster than iPhone, closing in on RIM
Two separate mobile marketshare reports that emerged this week—one from NPD and one from Nielsen—show that adoption of Google's Android mobile operating system is growing rapidly and has outpaced sales of Apple's iPhone in the United States. The reports disagree, however, about whether Android-based devices have displaced RIM's BlackBerry as the country's dominant smartphone operating system.Nielsen's study found that BlackBerry still holds the top spot, with 33 percent marketshare among recent smartphone buyers. It shows Android devices in second place with 27 percent and Apple in third place with 23 percent.
NPD's statistics indicate that Android has taken the lead with 33 percent, followed by RIM with 28 percent and Apple with 22 percent. Although both studies are focused on recent purchases, the Nielsen study covers the past six months, whereas the NPD study focuses only on Q2.
It's also worth noting that these statistics are focused on consumer smartphone purchases. NPD says explicitly that it doesn't track enterprise mobile purchases, which means that its statistics are likely under-representing the total number of BlackBerry devices.
Nielsen says that roughly a quarter of mobile phone subscribers are using smartphones, a notable increase over the 16 percent that Nielsen recorded a year ago. The company predicts that smartphone sales will outpace feature phone sales in the United States next year.
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700 pieces, 5 hours, 1 Elder God: Hands-on with Arkham Horror
Arkham Horror is a board game played with over 700 pieces. You can play with up to eight players, all of you working together to beat one of the Ancient Ones and playing against the board itself. You see, the monsters get a turn, and the card pulled during that phase controls how they move, where the gates to the Other World appear, and how close you are to the Great Old One waking. If that happens, you have a choice: fight or be devoured.
Although, if you fight, you will still probably be devoured.
The last time my group played, the game lasted around five hours; brevity is not one of its strengths. And you can't get too upset if you lose, as the chances of victory are slim when still learning the rules. That being said, in our last session we closed the final gate with two turns left before our Great Old One awoke, narrowly winning.
Sounds like a game for masochists? Well, it's not for the faint of heart, but Arkham Horror is a great board game for those with the time to play.
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A separate peace: Google, Verizon making net neutrality deal?
Major news outlets are disclosing a development that, if true, could influence the course of broadband economics for the foreseeable future.The New York Times reports that Google and Verizon are close to a deal that "could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content's creators are willing to pay for the privilege." Furthermore, Google "would agree not to challenge Verizon's ability to manage its broadband Internet network as it pleased."
The Wall Street Journal's dispatch suggests that an agreement may be forthcoming that both companies "hope could be used as a model for legislation aimed at preventing telephone or cable companies from delaying or blocking Internet traffic."
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Achtung! Test safety of laser pointers with paper cups, webcam
In recent years, handheld green lasers have become the hardware of choice for everything from delivering lectures to entertaining cats, in part because the human eye detects their light more efficiently than their red counterparts. But researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have found that shoddy manufacturing processes can result in these lasers emitting up to ten times as much infrared light as they produce in the visible spectrum, creating a potential hazard.
The NIST document describing these results starts out as a primer in laser physics, then turns into an exercise in homebrew hacking as the researchers describe a test for IR emissions that involves CDs, paper cups, and a webcam.
The physics of green
We'll do as the authors did, and cover the physics first. Right now, it's possible to make red and infrared diode lasers that are power-efficient enough to run on a pair of AAA batteries. At the moment, however, we do not have any such green diode lasers (although that may be changing). So how did these tiny green lasers come to market?Read the comments on this post
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Poll Technica: Will you buy a 3DS? At what price?
We enjoyed the system when we played with it at E3, and the line to catch a glimpse of the 3DS enjoyed multi-hour waits. The game library is already filling up with new games and 3D re-releases of Nintendo classics. It has almost universally positive buzz around the Internet.Still, it's a new handheld from Nintendo released while people are still enjoying their DS units, and it's in 3D. Will you be buying?
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UK government: Upgrading away from IE6 costs too much
The UK government is not yet interested in ditching Internet Explorer 6, saying the costs required to do so outweigh the benefits. Six months ago, an online petition started in hopes that the UK would abolish all use of the world's most-loathed browser. The petition debuted soon after the German and French governments began to advise their citizens to use a different browser than IE in the wake of the Chinese-Google hack attack. It closed on June 6 after gathering 6,223 signatures; on July 30, the government gave an official response. Here's the crux of it:
Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers will make users more secure. Regular software patching and updating will help defend against the latest threats. The Government continues to work with Microsoft and other internet browser suppliers to understand the security of the products used by HMG, including Internet Explorer and we welcome the work that Microsoft are continuing do on delivering security solutions which are deployed as quickly as possible to all Internet Explorer users.The UK government is correct in saying that Microsoft will continue to keep IE6 updated and secure. In fact, the software giant has promised to do so until April 2014, which is when Extended Support for Windows XP (which includes IE6) ends.
That said, Microsoft trash talks IE6 every chance it gets, promoting the increased security of IE8 at the same time. Furthermore, as IE flaws are discovered, IE6 and IE7 are affected more often than not, while IE8 usually remains unaffected.
The true reason the UK government doesn't want to upgrade becomes clear in the last paragraph of its explanation. It doesn't want to spend the money:
It is not straightforward for HMG departments to upgrade IE versions on their systems. Upgrading these systems to IE8 can be a very large operation, taking weeks to test and roll out to all users. To test all the web applications currently used by HMG departments can take months at significant potential cost to the taxpayer. It is therefore more cost effective in many cases to continue to use IE6 and rely on other measures, such as firewalls and malware scanning software, to further protect public sector internet users.On some level, this makes sense; not every benefit is worth the costs. But such testing will have to be done eventually, and not even Her Majesty's Government can stick with IE6 indefinitely.
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Microsoft and Salesforce.com settle patent lawsuit
Microsoft and Salesforce.com have settled the patent infringement cases they each brought before the US District Court. "We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies," said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. The cases have been settled through a patent agreement in which Salesforce.com will receive broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for its products and services as well as its back-end server infrastructure during the term; Microsoft, in turn, will receive coverage under Salesforce.com's patent portfolio for its products and services. The details of the agreement have not been disclosed, but the parties did indicate that Microsoft is being compensated by Salesforce.com based on the strength of Microsoft's leading patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Incidentally, Microsoft took the time to underline that Microsoft Dynamics CRM garnered recognition as a leader from two leading independent research firms: Gartner and Forrester Research. Is it a coincidence that Microsoft chose today to issue a press release (linked below) on the topic?
Two months ago, Microsoft filed a federal lawsuit against Salesforce.com, claiming that the online CRM software company infringes on nine patents awarded to Microsoft between 1997 and 2007. Redmond claimed that it first notified Salesforce.com of its infringement over a year ago, and Salesforce.com's January SEC filing warned that Microsoft had been approached by a "large technology company" with allegations that it was infringing on patents. The original complaint asked for temporary and permanent injunctions, monetary damages, and asserted that the infringement is willful.
Microsoft often finds itself on the receiving end of patent lawsuits, but when the company believes that others are infringing it traditionally seeks to reach a licensing agreement with the other party rather than get the courts involved. Microsoft says it has reached more than 600 licensing agreements since launching its intellectual-property licensing program in December 2003.
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The Sorcerer's Apprentice, but with money: another look at HFT
"Why don't you know BATS [the third largest equity market in the world]?," Bernard Donefer, a finance professor and HFT expert at CUNY's Baruch College, asked me rhetorically. "Because there's nothing to look at. It's based in Kansas; the computers are in Jersey City." -- The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed tradingIn the opening part of my first article on the bizarre and fascinating world of high-frequency trading, I went to some lengths to debunk the notion that "the stock market" looks anything like those still-popular press and movie images of gel-haired, frantic young traders screaming at each other across a large, open trading pit. Today's markets are essentially electronic networks, where humans and machines trade against each other via terminals and server racks.
But just because the markets are electronic doesn't mean you can't take a picture of them. Market analysis firm Nanex has produced some very compelling visualizations of the type of sub-second trading that goes on in our electronic exchanges. A number of the pictures are from BATS—a fully electronic exchange that consists of a bank of computers in Jersey City—but others cross multiple exchanges.
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Wave cancellation: Google gives up on next-gen messaging platform
Google announced today that it will discontinue development of Wave, its experimental, Web-based messaging platform. The company cites lack of adoption as the key reason for shelving the ambitious project.Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. Wave displays messages to other participants nearly in real-time, to the extent that you can see text characters appear as the other users are typing. The service is also extensible, in the sense that third-party software components could be used to embed additional kinds of interactive rich media elements within individual messages (called "blips" in Wave's terminology).
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Inside the final Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview
The fourth and final Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9 was released today, along with a raft of new HTML5 demos and tests. Though a full beta of the new browser is expected next month, Microsoft promised to release previews every eight weeks or so. With this new release, Redmond has kept its promise.The message is still "the same markup": Internet Explorer 9 is a browser built for HTML5, and pages built to target Web standards will work properly—or, at least, degrade nicely.
As has been common throughout the preview period, Microsoft is touting the new browser's substantially improved performance, both relative to its predecessor and, thanks to its hardware acceleration, relative to other HTML5-capable browsers. The new version leapfrogs Safari 5 in the SunSpider benchmark, though still marginally trails behind Chrome 5 and 6, and Opera 10.60. Still, the mere fact that Internet Explorer 9 is competitive is a vast improvement.
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Torchlight 2 coming spring 2011, bringing online co-op
Torchlight was a wonderful surprise, a single-player Diablo-style dungeon crawl with strong graphics and fun gameplay, released digitally for a low price. It wasn't just a critical hit—it sold 500,000 copies to gamers—and Perfect World Entertainment purchased a majority share of the game's developer for $8.4 million. Now, after a long tease on their official site, the secret is out: Torchlight 2 is coming in Spring 2011, and it's bringing a few upgrades from the original.Yes, finally, co-op is coming. The gods are truly smiling. What else can we expect?
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Dropping Game Center support for older iPods is a bad idea
Apple released the third beta of its upcoming iOS 4.1 update to developers on Tuesday evening, and most of the changes revolve around Game Center—the Apple-developed social network for iOS games—and the corresponding GameKit APIs. In the release, Apple has dropped support for the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touch, which could severely limit Game Center's adoption by game developers.When Apple first announced iOS 4 in early April, its Game Center social network was one of its major new features. Several developers had already built similar networks to connect players and offer leaderboards and challenges, including OpenFeint, Plus+, and Crystal. These networks have dedicated followers among both developers and gamers but, according to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, developers had requested that Apple build its own service.
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Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures
Today's issue of Nature contains a paper with a rather unusual author list. Read past the standard collection of academics, and the final author credited is... an online gaming community.
Scientists have turned to games for a variety of reasons, having studied virtual epidemics and tracked online communities and behavior, or simply used games to drum up excitement for the science. But this may be the first time that the gamers played an active role in producing the results, having solved problems in protein structure through the Foldit game.
According to a news feature on Foldit, the project arose from an earlier distributed computing effort called Rosetta@home. That project used what has become the standard approach for home-based scientific work: a screensaver that provided a graphical frontend to a program that uses spare processor time to solve weighty scientific problems. For Rosetta, that problem was the task of figuring out how proteins, which are composed of a chain of chemicals called amino acids, adopt their final, three-dimensional shape.
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New Syndicate trademarks filed by EA! WHAT COULD IT MEAN?
It's been a good long while since we've seen a new entry in the Syndicate series. The last game in the real-time tactical franchise was released back in 1996, leaving fans without a fix for more than a decade. While people like Peter Molyneux have expressed interest in revisiting the series, we haven't heard much in the way of news. Until now.
Of course, longtime fans shouldn't get too excited. Not only is this not definitive proof of a new Syndicate game, but even if one is in development, it may not be be like the Syndicate you remember. Just look at what happened to X-Com.
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Intel settles FTC antitrust suit, stops punishing AMD buyers
The antitrust suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission against Intel last December may be at an end, with the parties having reached a tentative settlement agreement.The suit against Intel alleged that the company had illegally stifled competition in the processor market. Specifically, it said that the chip maker threatened PC makers (including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM) who wanted to source processors from AMD, then rewarded them for remaining loyal to Intel. The settlement prohibits Intel from making such threats and offering rewards in return for exclusivity—the company can no longer punish PC makers for buying processors from AMD.
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Why Clear's 4G iSpot is cheap: it's limited to iOS devices
Cell carriers that are not AT&T continue to try and piggyback on iPhone and iPad success by offering wireless hotspots marketed towards users of those devices. Clearwire is the latest to take that angle with its newly announced iSpot. The iSpot goes further than similar offerings from other carriers, though, as the hotspot only works with Apple's iOS devices for a very attractive monthly price.The iSpot can share Clear's 4G WiMAX connection via WiFi with up to eight different devices simultaneously, and for an "initial" monthly service price of only $25 with no contract. Comparable plans from Verizon and Sprint, for the MiFi and Overdrive 4G, respectively, (both of which offer only five simultaneous connections) are $60 per month with a two-year contract.
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Microsoft seeking good WinPhone 7 apps
Microsoft has launched Mobile App Match, a new website that aims to bring together the people who build Windows Phone apps with the people who use them. Developers can post their apps (or video demonstrations of them) so that users can give them feedback before the first Windows Phone 7 devices even ship, while end users can submit their app ideas for developers to build for the new platform.
The site has four main categories: "News" is an amalgamation of various Windows Phone blog posts from various Microsoft employees, "Ideas" is where all the submissions and discussions take place, "Apps" is supposed to showcase various applications (currently there's just one featured), and "Video" is full of user submissions either giving input or asking for it.
Users can start conversations, exchange ideas, post apps for both feedback and promotion, and vote on new ideas as well as finished apps.
The website is part a larger effort by Microsoft to make sure the Windows Phone Marketplace is full of quality apps in two months when Windows Phone 7 launches. Microsoft has been enticing OEMs and developers from other mobile platforms to give Windows Phone development a shot. The company has also been ramping up efforts to get its own employees onboard by giving each of them a Windows Phone 7 device and by loosening the restrictions so they can easily create apps for the platform.
Just last week, Microsoft updated its Windows Phone Development documentation on MSDN and posted two new design-focused downloads: UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 v2.0 and Design Templates for Windows Phone 7. Please, says the company to developers, won't you build some apps?
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Miserable pile of secrets: XBLA Castlevania misses the mark
Castlevania: Harmony of Despair takes backgrounds, settings, and monsters from past games in the series, then invites you and a number of friends to enter each level and wipe them out. It's not a bad concept, but the execution doesn't live up to the promise.What could have been a game about exploration and loot has been turned into a joyless grind with no story, no real reason to continue playing, and a learning curve that's more of a punishment than an enticement. The more I played, the more I wondered if this was all the game had to offer. Sadly, it never took a turn, it never redeemed itself, and it never made its case for existence.
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It's official: Saudi Arabia bans BlackBerrys
The rumors are true: Saudi Arabia has become the second country inside of a week to block access to Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices on grounds of national security.The ban goes into effect on August 6 after a "grace period" in which local wireless companies were unable to bring BlackBerry devices (and their encrypted e-mail) into compliance with kingdom rules.
Saudi Communications and Information Technology Commission said that it informed local providers STC, Mobily, and Zain yesterday that they would need to terminate BlackBerry service in a few days. Zain Saudi Arabia, which is headed by His Royal Highness Prince Dr. Husam bin Saud bin Abdul Aziz, announced only two weeks ago that its profits in the kingdom were up dramatically and that business was booming.
The Saudi government laid blame for the situation on the providers and on RIM, which is famously protective of customer messages.
The encryption used by RIM was good enough to thwart the security service in nearby United Arab Emirates, which earlier this week also blocked BlackBerry service until it could get access to people's messages.
These are relatively small markets for RIM, of course, but they aren't negligible; Arab News estimates that the UAE already has 500,000 BlackBerry devices in use, with another 750,000 in Saudi Arabia.
Rumors continue to swirl that India is also putting heavy pressure on RIM, and for the same reasons, though no similar ban has yet been announced.
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