Daimler launches first German hybrid car

Mercedes Benz S Class cars move on an assembly line at the Mercedes plant in Sindelfingen, southern Germany. The world's best-selling limousine, a favourite of world leaders, the Mercedes Benz S Class, is now available in Europe with two motors, one electric and the other petrol (gasoline), to save fuel and cut pollution. (AFP/DDP/File/Michael Latz)

German luxury car maker Daimler launched its first hybrid model last week, almost 10 years after the market leader, Toyota.

The world's best-selling limousine, a favourite of world leaders, the Mercedes Benz S Class, is now available in Europe with two motors, one electric and the other petrol (gasoline), to save fuel and cut pollution.

The "CO2 champion of luxury cars," as Mercedes bills it, nonetheless cranks out 186-189 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre, remaining one of the biggest polluters on the road, well above the European average of around 160 grams.

A comparable S model with a normal engine can spew out as much as 234 grams, Daimler counters.

A spokesman added that "we want to launch at least one hybrid model per year."

It is by all accounts a mini revolution in the German auto sector, which generally produces big, powerful cars by brands including Mercedes, Porsche, BMW and Audi.

Porsche plans to roll out a hybrid version of its Cayenne sports utility vehicle in late 2010, and BMW is preparing a saloon (sedan) from its Series 7 line this year, even though it is "too early to speak of full distribution," according to a BMW spokeswoman.

Auto expert Gerd Lottspiesen from the environmental association VCD told AFP that the German car industry "has been asleep for several years."

"It repeatedly dismissed hybrids. If it is finally waking up, it's pretty late" compared with Toyota, which sold its first hybrid Prius model in Europe nine years ago.

Lexus, the luxury line from Toyota, has offered a hybrid system for four years.

"For years, the German automobile sector did not believe hybrids had a chance ... but at a certain point, under market pressure, the industry changed its mind," said Stefan Bratzel, professor at a specialised auto centre in the western city of Bergisch Gladbach.

German companies mainly focused on diesel engines, the specialists noted.

As a result, the German market is dominated by diesels, while hybrids represented only 0.2 percent of the market last year with the sale of 6,500 Toyota, Lexus or Honda hybrids, according to national registration figures.

Since its launch, Toyota has sold 22,000 Prius in France and around 17,000 in Germany, which has a market three times bigger, according to Toyota data.

"The Prius has never been a best-seller here," a spokeswoman for the Japanese group acknowledged.

Germans, who are strongly attached to their national brands, could begin to switch over if domestic hybrid models are available however.

"The environmental trend is becoming dominant," said Frank Schwope, an auto analyst at the NordLB bank.

Daimler is a good example.

Until now it has been considered one of the most resistant to environmental trends.

But in the past few months, Daimler has begun to highlight its determination in the area.

It recently acquired a battery company and a 10 percent stake in the US electric car maker Tesla.

A sign for auto specialists that Germans could be at the leading edge of the next big step, fully electric automobiles.

(Agencies)

Swiss team unveil pioneering solar plane

View of the unveiled airplane Solar Impulse on Friday, June 26, 2009, in Zurich-Duebendorf, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Winfried Rothermel)

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard explains on Friday, June 26, 2009, Solar Impulse, an innovative airplane in Zurich-Duebendorf, Switzerland. (AP Photo/Winfried Rothermel)

View of a model of the airplane Solar Impulse on Friday, June 26, 2009, in Zurich-Duebendorf , Switzerland. (AP Photo/Winfried Rothermel)

Round-the-world balloooning pioneer Bertrand Piccard unveiled his solar-powered aircraft in Switzerland on Friday, ready for another trend-setting circumnavigation of the globe powered solely by the sun.

The wasp-shaped prototype of Solar Impulse, with the wingspan of a jumbo jet, was rolled out before some 800 guests at an airfield near Zurich after six years of development.

Ten years after Piccard and Briton Brian Jones achieved the first non-stop flight around the globe in the Orbiter balloon, the Solar Impulse team are aiming to demonstrate that reliance on renewable energy is not a pipedream.

"If an aircraft is able to fly day and night without fuel, propelled solely by solar energy, let no one come and claim that it is impossible to do the same thing for motor vehicles, heating and air conditioning systems and computers," Piccard said.

Although computer simulations have been tried out, the prototype HB-SIA will make its maiden test flight by the end of this year.

Its mission is to test the feasibility of a complete flight sequence through two days and one night, propelled only by solar energy, and pave the say for a second aircraft's bid to fly around the world in five stages in 2012.

The Swiss adventurer -- who is again joined by Jones -- said the idea emerged after that 19 day hot air balloon trip, when Orbiter was partly kept aloft by fuel canisters even if the wind ensured its progress eastwards.

"That historic success could have turned sour because of the lack of fuel," Piccard said at the Dubendorf airfield.

"That's why we took the decision to to attempt a trip around the world without relying on fossil fuels," he explained.

The seemingly flimsy carbon fibre concentrate of new technology has a 63.4 metre wingspan but weighs little more than a medium sized car.

Some 12,000 solar cells spread over its slender wings are meant to keep it aloft, fuelling four tiny ten horsepower electric motors and 400 kilogrammes of batteries that are, unusually, meant to keep it going overnight.

Wedged in the narrow cockpit, the lone pilot will also be helped to fly Solar Impulse by some novel control technology.

"Those are the wings of hope. They are immense, as is the challenge we have to meet in climate protection," said Swiss Transport, Energy and Environment Minister Moritz Leunberger.

(Agencies)

US, Russia in dispute over computer attacks: report

Less than two weeks before President Barack Obama's visit to Moscow, the United States and Russia cannot agree how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet, according to The New York Times.

Citing an unnamed senior State Department official, the newspaper said that both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground, and the two sides are expected to address the subject when Obama visits Russia next month and at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November.

Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year, the report said.

Meanwhile, the United States argues that a treaty is unnecessary and instead advocates improved cooperation among international law enforcement groups, the paper noted.

"We really believe it?s defense, defense, defense," The Times quotes as saying the State Department official, who asked not to be identified. "They want to constrain offense. We needed to be able to criminalize these horrible 50,000 attacks we were getting a day."

According to the paper, any agreement on cyberspace presents special difficulties because the matter touches on issues like censorship of the Internet, sovereignty and rogue actors who might not be subject to a treaty.

US officials say the disagreement over approach has hindered international law enforcement cooperation, particularly given that a significant proportion of the attacks against US government targets are coming from China and Russia, the report said.

Recognizing the need to deal with the growing threat of cyberwar, many countries, including the United States, are developing weapons for it, like "logic bombs" that can be hidden in computers to halt them at crucial times or damage circuitry, "botnets" that can disable or spy on websites and networks, or microwave radiation devices that can burn out computer circuits miles away, the paper said.

Obama is due to visit Russia on July 6-8 in a bid to improve relations with Russia that were badly strained under the administration of his predecessor, George W. Bush.

(Agencies)

First solid-state quantum processor created

WASHINGTON, June 28 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers said Sunday they had created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor and used the super conducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms.

The findings, which appeared Sunday in Nature's advanced online publication, are seen as another step toward the ultimate dream of building a quantum computer.

"Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms and photons," said Professor Robert Schoelkopf of Yale University.

"But this is the first time they've been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor," Schoelkopf said.

Unlike regular processors, which store information in the form of digital bits that each possess a value of either 0 or 1, quantum processor use qubits, or quantum bits, which can hold values of 0 and 1 at the same time.

Qubits in this "superposition" of both values may allow many more calculations to be performed simultaneously than is possible with traditional digital bits, thus allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

The Yale team made their device out of two qubits, each of which is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms.

The device processed a simple search algorithm, also known as the reverse phone book search, where someone's number is known but not the name. The processor essentially reads all the numbers in the phone book at once to find the right number.

"Instead of having to place a phone call to one number, then another number, you use quantum mechanics to speed up the process," Schoelkopf said. "It's like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all ... numbers, but only goes through to the right one."

These sorts of computations, though simple, have not been possible using solid-state qubits until now in part because scientists could not get the qubits to last long enough.

While the first qubits a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, Schoelkopf and his team are now able to maintain theirs for a microsecond -- a thousand times longer, which is enough to run the simple algorithms.

To perform their operations, the qubits communicate with one another using a "quantum bus"-- photons that transmit information through wires connecting the qubits -- previously developed by the Yale group.

Next, the team will work to increase the time the qubits maintain their quantum states so they can run more complex algorithms. They will also work to connect more qubits to the quantum bus.

The processing power increases exponentially with each qubit added, Schoelkopf said, so the potential for more advanced quantum computing is enormous.

But he cautions it will still be some time before quantum computers are being used to solve complex problems. "We're still far away from building a practical quantum computer, but this isa major step forward."

EU mobile phone producers agree to provide single charger

BRUSSELS, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Mobile phone producers in the European Union (EU) agreed on Monday to provide a single charger to users in the 27-nation bloc, bowing to pressure from the European Commission.

In a memorandum of understanding handed over to the commission, EU mobile phone makers took a self-commitment to ensure the compatibility of new data-enabled mobile phones on the basis of the Micro-USB connector as the interface to provide charging support.

"I am very pleased that industry has found an agreement, which will make life much simpler for consumers. They will be able to charge mobile phones anywhere from the new common charger," said commission vice president Gunter Verheugen, responsible for enterprise and industrial policy.

Incompatibility of chargers for mobile phones is a major inconvenience for users and also leads to unnecessary waste. Therefore, the commission has requested the industry to come forward with a voluntary commitment to solve this problem so as to avoid legislation.

Following the voluntary commitment, which was made by Apple, LG, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, the commission is coming forward with a new EU standard. It said a single charger will not only reduce the number of chargers and allow users to enjoy an easier life with their mobile phones, but also have a positive environmental impact.

It is expected that the first generation of new inter-chargeable mobile phones will reach the EU market from 2010 onwards.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs returns to work

In this Oct. 14, 2008 file photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs smiles during a product announcement at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Apple on Monday, June 29, 2009 said CEO Steve Jobs is back at work a few days a week and working from home other days. Jobs, a cancer survivor, had been on leave since the end of January. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, file)

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Steve Jobs, Apple Inc's chief executive officer (CEO), is back to work after taking a medical leave for nearly six months, U.S. media reported on Monday.

"Steve is back to work," Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, was quoted by the Bloomberg newswire as saying.

According to Dowling, Jobs is at Apple a few days a week and working at home the remaining days.

Jobs, 54, disclosed in August 2004 that he had been treated for a rare form of pancreatic cancer, saying the tumor was diagnosed in time and he had undergone surgery to remove it.

In the following years, the thin, almost gaunt appearance of Jobs constantly inspired speculations about his health.

In early January this year, Jobs said his apparent weight loss is caused by a treatable hormone imbalance. But about a week later, he announced that the issue was more complex than he had thought and he would be taking a medical leave until the end of June.

On June 23, Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in the U.S. state of Tennessee confirmed that Jobs received a liver transplant at the institute and "is now recovering well and has an excellent prognosis."

But Apple remained silent about the surgery, stirring a new round of criticism that the company's disclosure of its CEO's health conditions was too little and too late.

Facebook names new CFO

SAN FRANCISCO, June 29 (Xinhua) -- Facebook, the world's most popular social networking website, on Monday announced that it has selected David Ebersman as the company's new chief financial officer (CFO).

Ebersman was a former vice president and CFO of Genentech, the pioneering U.S. biotechnology firm which was acquired by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche in March.

Founded in February 2004, Facebook is now a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Ebersman will replace Gideon Yu, Facebook's former CFO who left in March. Facebook then said it was looking for a successor with "public company experience."

"We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates," Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook, said in a statement.

"We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech's CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook," he added.

Facebook said Ebersman will formally start at the company in September and "will oversee Facebook's finance, accounting, investor relations and real estate functions."

Jackson's death unleashes barrage of online scams

Minutes after any big celebrity dies, Internet swindlers get to work. They pump out specially created spam e-mails and throw up malicious Web sites to infect victims' computers, hoping to capitalize on the sudden high demand for information.

Michael Jackson's death was no different, and security experts say the fraud artists are just getting started.

The scams started cropping up almost instantaneously as Jackson's death was still hitting the news. As days have gone by, they've gotten more sophisticated 鈥?and dangerous.

Jackson's death "took a lot of people by surprise 鈥?the spammers, too," said Dermot Harnett, principal analyst for anti-spam engineering at Symantec Corp., a security software maker. "It might take them some time to really pounce on this issue. They are catching up pretty quickly, though."

Any major world event, such as the recent protests in Iran, triggers a barrage of Internet attacks. Security experts say the malicious traffic associated with Jackson's death will likely match and perhaps exceed those of other big spamming campaigns, such as those connected with the swine flu outbreak and Saddam Hussein's execution.

Spam is the most common way for fraudsters to find victims after these types of events. They can use a shotgun approach with a boilerplate message about Jackson, taking advantage of people's interests in the topic to improve their batting average over their usual spam campaigns.

By enticing users with such messages and tricking them into clicking on e-mail attachments, scammers can easily infect victims' computers and take command of them for more nefarious activities.

The spam about Jackson's death gets more convincing every day.

One message promises a YouTube video showing the exclusive "last work of Michael Jackson." Instead, victims get a malicious program that steals their passwords. Another promises to show the "latest unpublished photos" of Jackson if you click on a link 鈥?one that also tries to install a password-stealing program on your machine.

Others purport to be from legitimate news outlets and may contain accurate enough information to convince viewers they're real enough to click on. Others promise access to secret songs.

The effects of specific spam campaigns, like the one surrounding Jackson's death, are hard to quantify, though. Spam levels are already so high that there might not be a noticeable increase in overall spam levels, Harnett said. By some estimates spam accounts for more than 90 percent of all e-mail sent around the world, though the bulk of the messages get filtered out before ever reaching the user.

Celebrity deaths are a gold mine for criminals because lots of people go online looking for news. Google Inc. says the spike in searches for news stories about Jackson's death was so sharp the company initially mistook it for an automated attack.

Many of the information-seekers can be tricked, via e-mail, into visiting malicious Web sites. That opens the door to all kinds of nastiness, like spying on what someone's typing or using the hijacked machine to send spam.

There are also so many more Web sites about celebrities after their deaths that it's hard to figure out which ones are legitimate fan sites, and which ones were created by criminals.

Registrations of domain names related to Jackson have spiked since the pop icon died Thursday afternoon. A leading registration company, GoDaddy.com, said it registered about 7,500 such names since then. Actress Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day, got about 100 domains in the same period. GoDaddy said, however, that it had yet to get any complaints that any of those addresses were used for scams.

Within minutes of Jackson's death hitting the news, scammers started sending out spam e-mails with links purportedly to provocative news stories or videos about Jackson. The news stories, of course, never appear. Instead, people who click on those links are often directed to sites that try to install viruses.

Another thing to remember: It's not wise even to just "check out" a link you're interested in if you suspect the site might be bogus. Sometimes just visiting a malicious Web site is enough to get you infected, and you don't need to actively download anything at all.

Many scams do ask people to download a video player or other piece of software 鈥?supposedly so they can see the video or hear the audio 鈥?that winds up being a piece of malicious software.

The lesson for users is, as always, avoid unsolicited links from senders you don't know, and don't install any programs that an unknown site is telling you need.

(Agencies)

Comcast rolls out wireless Web

Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, said on Monday it is introducing a wireless service for subscribers to access the Web beyond their homes anywhere within the United States.

The so-called fourth-generation (4G) wireless service, is the first execution of a partnership between Comcast, Clearwire Corp and other companies that use the emerging WiMax high-speed mobile technology.

Many consumers already update their blogs and watch videos using their mobile phones. Cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable Inc do not want to become irrelevant by restricting subscriber access to the home.

The new service, called "Comcast High-Speed 2go," is expected to deliver data to laptops, netbooks and other devices over a wireless network at faster speeds than has been commonly available to date.

Comcast said it will offer download speeds of up to 4 megabits per second. Existing 3G wireless networks typically offer download speeds between 1 and 1.5 megabits a second.

Cablevision Systems Corp offers mobile Internet service via Wi-Fi, a short range service typically limited to a home, restaurant or "hotspot." The operator is providing Wi-Fi service to its digital subscribers throughout its market in the New York metropolitan area.

Comcast High-Speed 2go launches officially in Portland, Oregon on Tuesday and is expected to expand to Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia before the end of the year, Comcast said.

A Metro version of the data card, which is typically installed into a laptop to allow wireless Internet access, will cost $49.99 a month when bundled with home Internet service. The Metro version will only work within the 4G metropolitan coverage area.

A nationwide version for $69.99 a month will allow subscribers to access the Internet via Sprint Nextel Corp's 3G network where the 4G network is not available.

WiMax is expected to blanket entire cities with Web access for mobile devices at speeds up to five times faster than traditional wireless networks, but the technology is still unproven.

After previous stumbles, such as a collapsed partnership with Sprint, cable companies are hoping that Clearwire, founded by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw will help them resolve their long-running wireless conundrum.

The cable industry is also trying to figure out ways to make more video available beyond traditional TV sets.

Last week Comcast and Time Warner Inc said they start testing ways to allow people to watch more TV shows over the Web, while making sure they keep paying for their traditional cable or satellite TV services.

Comcast will likely try to market the new wireless service as a way for subscribers to watch their favorite shows wherever they are in the United States.

(Agencies)

Google unveils SMS service for Africa

Google on Monday unveiled a new service designed to provide information via SMS text message to mobile phone users in Africa, where cell phones are prevalent but Internet penetration is low.

"At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people -- not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home," the Mountain View, California, company said in a blog post.

"It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty," Google said.

The Internet search and advertising giant noted that Africa has the world's highest mobile phone growth rate and that mobile use on the continent is six times higher than Internet penetration.

"Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS," it said.

Google said Google SMS, which will be available first in Uganda, would provide information, via SMS, on a number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather and sports.

Google also said that it is also launching a service called Google Trader, an SMS-based application that helps bring together buyers and sellers of product or services, from used cars to livestock to jobs.

Google said another service, Google SMS Tips, enables a mobile phone user to have a Web search-like experience. A user enters a text query and Google returns relevant answers after searching a database.

Google said Google SMS Tips and Google Trader were developed in partnership with several organizations, including the Grameen Foundation, an offshoot of the pioneering Grameen bank founded by Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus.

(Agencies)

Mean, green machine - future of motor racing

The WorldFirst Formula 3 racing car drives down the straight of a test track at Bruntingthorpe near Lutterworth, in Leicestershire. The steering wheel is made from a polymer derived from carrots and other root vegetables while the seat is flax fibre shell, soy bean oil foam and recycled polyester fabric. (AFP/Adrian Dennis)

Cars powered by chocolate, steered by carrots with drivers sitting on soybean oil foam seats - it's motor racing's cheap, cheerful and environmentally-friendly series of the future.

While Formula One stables have not hesitated to spend millions of dollars on the latest thing in ultra-high technology to gift the likes of Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button a few milliseconds per circuit, researchers in Britain envisage an organic future for motor racing.

The biodiesel WorldFirst F3 car, designed as a riposte to Formula One's "carbon excesses," is the brainchild of researchers at the Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre, who developed the prototype for just 220,000 dollars.

The team, led by researcher James Meredith and investigators Dr Kerry Kirwan and Dr Steve Maggs, say they are determined to show the racing fraternity in credit-crunched times that "it is possible to build a competitive racing car using environmentally sustainable components".

Some of those components come from the unlikeliest of places.

"At the moment we use all sorts of waste to turn in to biodiesel - including excess fat trimmed from operations," Meredith explains.

Green elements are "creeping out of the woodwork" all the time, Meredith told AFP, as the motor industry mulls everything from electric vehicles, hybrids and hydrogen-powered cars but sponsorship is not proving easy to come by despite, or even because of, the current trials and tribulations of the car industry.

"It's been difficult to get people involved but we're trying to get companies expertise and keep costs down," says Meredith.

"But we have the advantage now of being quite high-profile. We have had chats about sponsorship but there are no direct offers of cash yet.

"We hope to get further funding on the basis of a number of future research grant applications."

The WorldFirst team insist there there is no need to compromise on performance while at the same time "effectively managing the planet's resources."

The car, based on a 2005 Lola B05/30 body, has a biodiesel engine which runs on vegetable oil and fuel from waste chocolate.

Green credentials are further enhanced by a radiator coated in an emission-destroying catalyst, reducing the spread of ground-level ozone.

Meredith says it is hard to quantify in absolute terms how green the car is, given the dependence on variability and sustainability of supply of the green produce.

"We have set this up with the intention of making a racing car out of green materials which is competitive," Meredith told AFP, adding some elements are already in mass production.

These include the soyabean seat, though he accepts that "many green materials are not as good as carbon fibre materials" because of their additional weight.

"Certainly no F1 team is going to use them unless you legislate for their use," he opined.

Nonetheless, with initial interest stirred by the car's public appearance - later this month it will hit the track at Britain's Goodwood Festival of Speed - and the fact the vehicle is 95 percent biodegradable the research team are now out to show the world that a chocolate-and-carrots-flavoured future has arrived.

(Agencies)

Apple iPhone proves too hot for some

BEIJING, June 30 (Xinhuanet) -- First reported by Internet users in France, the Apple iPhone has run up against some bad publicity after some users say their device had overheated.

Launched less than a week ago, the new 3GS iPhone has been plugged as a major step forward by the company that makes it, but some users are less than happy and have suggested the S is an abbreviation for "scorched," "smoulder" and other less savoury acronyms.

One French website showed pictures of a discolored iPhone resulting from an overheating battery. Use of the GPS (Global Positioning System) in conjunction with the 3G wireless connection appears to be behind many of the complaints.

While discoloration only seems to affect white units, even owners of the black 3GS device have reported overheating. There has as yet been no official word from Apple and some bloggers have dismissed much of the discussion as negative hype.

But overheating may only be the latest in a series of problems to hit the much hyped iPhone. Users of older devices have also complained of poor battery life, high frequency noises and software problems.

One proud user of the phone said he was initially very happy with his "new toy." But Martin Dalton, from Essex in southeast England, said he was "very unimpressed" when, on upgrading his firmware, all the data including phone numbers and pictures on the gadget were wiped.

(Agencies)

Global IT spending to drop nearly 11锛?in 2009: Forrester

SAN FRANCISCO, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Global spending on information technology (IT) may fall 10.6 percent in 2009, more sharply than the 3-percent decrease projected at the beginning of the year, market research firm Forrester said on Tuesday.

Forrester said it lowered the forecast because of the large drop in business technology investment during the first quarter this year and possible similar poor results in the current second quarter.

However, the weak results in the first half of 2009 also mean that the worst declines may be over and the market will hit bottom sooner, Forrester noted.

Forrester now expects growth of IT investment in the United States to resume in the fourth quarter of 2009, followed by revival of IT buying in other markets in 2010.

According to Forrester's latest outlook, IT spending in the United States is expected to shrink 5.1 percent in 2009, compared with the 3.1-percent decline previously predicted.

"While Q1 2009 saw a scary drop in purchases in the U.S. tech market, ironically that is good news for the long run and we expect to see a stronger rebound sooner," Andrew Bartels, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester, said in a statement.

"The big drops are not precursors to further declines; rather, we think they are evidence of a temporary pause in U.S. tech purchases, which we expect to start recovering in Q4 as businesses realize that they overreacted in the first quarter," he added.

Bartels said Forrester also expects that "tech markets in Europe and Asia will start to recover in the first half of 2010."

Govt delays order on porn filter software

People use computers at an internet bar in Beijing in June 2009. (AFP/File/Liu Jin)

In a last-minute move, the government said last night that it will delay the mandatory installation of the controversial "Green Dam-Youth Escort" filtering software on new computers that was scheduled to start today.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which oversees the software installation, told Xinhua News Agency that the delay came after "some computer producers said such a massive installation demanded extra time".

It did not set a date for when the order to install the software would come into force.

But the ministry will continue to provide free downloads of the software and equip school and Internet bar computers with it, said a spokesman for MIIT.

The ministry reiterated yesterday that the software is designed to block violence and pornographic content on the Internet to protect minors but users have repeatedly raised concerns about invasion of privacy.

"I would certainly not like such a program installed on my new PC," said a 30-year-old art researcher, as he scrolled through the news item published by major news portal Sina.com last night at an Internet bar in Beijing's Chaoyang district.

"I assume the move is a result of mounting pressure in recent days," he added, without revealing his real name.

In the interview with Xinhua, the MIIT defended the filtering software as "an act for public good" and said it "conforms to WTO rules".

The ministry held some foreign media and groups responsible for "untrue reports" about the software, which they described it as "spyware" that hinders freedom of online access.

The ministry also said that if any copyright dispute were to arise, the issue would be dealt with according to the law.

California-based Solid Oak claims the Green Dam has ripped off its CyberSitter software and it has threatened action in China.

Neither of the two developers of the filter - which cost the government 417 million yuan ($60 million) - was available for comment last night.

Domestic and overseas PC makers have voiced concern about the short notice given to them for the software installation as well as security loopholes which could be exploited by hackers.

Manufacturers in China including Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Sony did not respond immediately to the MIIT decision.

Chinese maker Lenovo said last night it has "not been informed on the issue".

Sony has reportedly begun shipping personal computers equipped with Green Dam which include a disclaimer that the company is not responsible for damage from the software.

"The delay is not a surprise. Web users in China have been calling for it all along," said Lu Benfu, director of the Internet Development Research Center affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Lu said there might be three reasons behind the MITT's "second thoughts".

One is the filter software's technical loopholes had not been plugged; the bid process for the software was not transparent enough; and the online community has been concerned with privacy and legal rights.

"The product itself is not mature," said Fang Binxing, a well-known Internet expert.

"So, now should be the time for trials, not mandatory installation and wide use of it There is no need for the authorities to take extreme action."

The president of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications suggested that authorities work with the developers to decide the best option for the filtering software.

Public hearings should be held to determine the rights of the citizens, said Lu.

Last week, US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said the software rule may violate World Trade Organization regulations.

Yesterday in Beijing, the European Chamber of Commerce said the software mandate "poses significant questions in relation to security, privacy, system reliability, the free flow of information and user choice".

Some Chinese web users had called for a boycott of all online activities today, before the announcement of the installation delay.

Report: Worst may be over for US tech market

As bad as the technology market fared in the first quarter of this year, the worst may be over, at least in the United States, Forrester Research said in a report Tuesday.

The research firm nonetheless revised its forecast for 2009. It now expects the U.S. technology market to shrink by 5 percent this year. In March, Forrester had predicted a smaller 3 percent decline in spending on technology products and services.

The recession and the big drops businesses made in investments 鈥?and technology investments in particular 鈥?are the reasons for the decline. Businesses and governments overreacted to the global recession and credit crisis, Forrester said, by cutting back too much on spending in the past nine months. As companies realize that the recession is not as deep, or as long-lasting, as they feared, they will resume technology spending.

"The good news is that it is in the past. We are not going into a terrible terrible downturn," said Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels.

The research firm expects the U.S. tech sector to hit bottom in the third quarter and to begin its recovery in the fourth.

Every sector of the tech economy has been hit by the recession. Forrester expects 2009 spending on communications equipment to drop by 11 percent this year as businesses are spending less on network equipment, mobile gadgets and video conferencing technology. Growth will resume in 2010, when Forrester expects telecom spending to grow by about 7 percent.

Spending on computer products is also expected to decline by 10 percent this year, though it will increase by nearly 12 percent next year. Even so, in terms of billions of dollars, 2010 spending will still be below 2007 levels, Forrester said.

Outsourcing is the only technology sector expected to see growth this year 鈥?and even that is only estimated at 2 percent.

The global tech market is faring worse than in the U.S. Forrester now expects 2009 spending to decline by 11 percent, far below than the 3 percent decline it had predicted in December. A worsening worldwide economy, along with currency fluctuations (the strengthening dollar), are big reasons for this.

(Agencies)

Dell developing pocket Web gadget: report

Dell Inc, the worlds No.2 PC maker, is developing a pocket-sized device for tapping into the Internet, the Wall Street Journal said citing people familiar with the company's plans.

The gadget would run on Google Inc's Android software, the people told the paper.

According to the paper, two people who saw early prototypes described the device as slightly larger than Apple Inc's iPod Touch, which is similar to the iPhone but does not have cellphone capabilities.

Another person who was briefed on the company's plans told the paper that Dell may begin selling the device later this year, though this person said the plan could be delayed or scrapped entirely.

A Dell spokesman declined to comment to the paper on any plans for the product category.

Dell may use chips based on designed licensed from ARM Holdings PLC, people familiar with the company's plans told the paper.

Dell could not be immediately reached for a comment by Reuters.

(Agencies)

Roaming phone charges to fall in EU from Wednesday

Making a telephone call, sending a text message or reading emails on a mobile phone from across the European Union will cost less from Wednesday.

The tariff cuts, which complete a European Union ruling from 2007, were proposed by the EU's executive arm at the end of 2008 and won approval by the European Parliament and member states.

Following the new price curbs, which take effect on July 1, it will be up to 60 percent cheaper to send mobile phone text messages while traveling in the EU or to surf the Web by laptop.

"All Europeans making calls or sending texts with their mobiles can experience the EU's single market without borders. The roaming rip-off is now coming to an end," EU Telecoms Commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement.

Operators will be allowed to charge customers a maximum of 11 euro cents (15 U.S. cents) per roamed text message (SMS), excluding sales tax, compared with current prices of about 28 cents.

As of July 1, prices for making a roamed mobile call will be capped at 43 euro cents per minute versus 46 cents previously, and at 19 cents, down from 22 cents, for calls received abroad.

The caps will further fall to 39 cents for calls made and 15 cents for calls received while roaming from July 1, 2010 and to 35 cents and 11 cents from July 1, 2011.

Downloading data while roaming will cost a maximum of 1 euro per megabyte from Wednesday at the wholesale level compared with about 1.68 euros today.

Operators must also introduce per-second billing after 30 seconds for roamed calls made and from the first second for calls received abroad.

Until now, consumers paid up to 24 percent more than the time actually used making or receiving calls.

The European Commission wants to end "bill shock," when business travelers or holidaymakers return home to huge charges for checking emails or surfing the Web while away by introducing a cut-off mechanism once the bill reaches 50 euros.

The GSM Association, which represents major mobile operators, has said the latest measures -- when they were introduced -- were unnecessary and that data prices were already falling.

(Agencies)

Cybercrime spreads on Facebook

Cybercrime is rapidly spreading on Facebook as fraudsters prey on users who think the world鈥檚 top social networking site is a safe haven on the Internet.

Lisa Severens, a clinical trials manager from Worcester, Massachusetts, learned the hard way. A virus took control of her laptop and started sending pornographic photos to colleagues.

鈥淚 was mortified about having to deal with it at work,鈥?said Severens, whose employer had to replace her computer because the malicious software could not be removed.

Cybercrime, which costs US companies and individuals billions of dollars a year, is spreading fast on Facebook because such scams target and exploit those naive to the dark side of social networking, security experts say.

While News Corp鈥檚 MySpace was the most popular hangout for cyber criminals two years ago, experts say hackers are now entrenched on Facebook, whose membership has soared from 120 million in December to more than 200 million today.

Scammers break into accounts posing as friends of users, sending spam that directs them to websites that steal personal information and spread viruses. Hackers tend to take control of infected PCs for identity theft, spamming and other mischief.

Facebook manages security from its central headquarters in Palo Alto, California, screening out much of the spam and malicious user-targeted software to make Facebook a safer place to surf than the broader Internet, but criminals are relentless and some break through Facebook鈥檚 considerable filter.

The rise in attacks reflects Facebook鈥檚 massive growth. Company spokesman Simon Axten said that as the number of users has increased, the percentage of successful attacks has stayed about the same, remaining at less than 1 percent of members for five years.

But ultimately Facebook says its members are responsible for their own security.

鈥淲e do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it,鈥?Facebook says in a warning in a section of the site on the terms and conditions of use, which members might not bother to read.

鈥淧eople implicitly trust social networking sites because they don鈥檛 understand the real threats and dangers. It鈥檚 like walking down the street and trusting everybody you meet,鈥?said Randy Abrams, a researcher with security software maker ESET.

(Agencies)

DELL may release Android gadget

BEIJING, July 1 (Xinhuanet) -- Rumors are rife that Dell the number 2 computer manufacturer in the world may be set to launch itself into the mobile phone market, again.

It will not be the first time Dell has attempted to stake its place in a lucrative by highly competitive market. But each of the last three times the company has failed to tread water.

Many technological experts and commentators are skeptical that the manufacturer will fair any better this time.

The proposed pocket sized internet capable device is widely believed expected to run on Google鈥檚 Android software. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) two prototypes have been seen one built on a similar design to the popular Apple iPhone, though neither device was said to be capable of making phone calls.

There are suggestions the device may be launched later in 2009. But one source told the WSJ the plans to build the device may be shelved or scrapped altogether.

(Agencies)

Sony struggling as Walkman hits 30th anniversary

A Sony Corp's employee walks by a special display commemorating the Walkman's 30th anniversary that opens Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at Sony Archive building in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

Sony Corp.'s employee Rumi Yamaguchi smiles in front of a special display commemorating the Sony Walkman's 30th anniversary that opens Wednesday, July 1, 2009, at Sony Archive building in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

Sony Corp. employee Rumi Yamaguchi looks at Sony Walkman products including the first Walksman, top shelf, second from left, at a special display that opens Wednesday, July 1, 2009, commemorating the handy music player's 30th anniversary at Sony Archive building in Tokyo, Japan. (AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama)

When the Sony Walkman went on sale 30 years ago, it was shown off by a skateboarder to illustrate how the portable cassette-tape player delivered music on-the-go 鈥?a totally innovative idea back in 1979.

Today, Sony Corp. is struggling to reinvent itself and win back its reputation as a pioneer of razzle-dazzle gadgetry once exemplified in the Walkman, which Wednesday had its 30th anniversary marked with a special display at Sony's corporate archives.

The Japanese electronics and entertainment company lost 98.9 billion yen ($1.02 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 鈥?its first annual loss in 14 years 鈥?and is expecting more red ink this year.

The manufacturer, which also makes Vaio personal computers and Cyber-shot cameras, hasn't had a decisive hit like the Walkman for years, and has taken a battering in the portable music player market to Apple Inc.'s iPod.

Sony has sold 385 million Walkman machines worldwide in 30 years as it evolved from playing cassettes to compact disks then minidisks 鈥?a smaller version of the CD 鈥?and finally digital files. Apple has sold more than 210 million iPod machines worldwide in eight years.

There is even some speculation in the Japanese media that Sony should drop the Walkman brand 鈥?a name associated with Sony's rise from its humble beginnings in 1946 with just 20 employees to one of the first Japanese companies to successfully go global.

"The Walkman's gap with the iPod has grown so definitive, it would be extremely difficult for Sony to catch up, even if it were to start from scratch to try to boost market share," said Kazuharu Miura, analyst with Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo.

Miura believes Sony can hope to be unique with its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable video game consoles, but it has yet to offer outstanding electronics products that exploit such strengths.

The Nikkei, Japan's top business newspaper, reported recently that Sony set up a team to develop a PSP with cell-phone features. But Miura said the idea was nothing new, since the iPhone, another Apple product, has gaming features, and Sony isn't likely to have such a product soon.

Earlier this year, Sony Chief Executive Howard Stringer announced a new team of executives and promised to bring together the hardware electronics and entertainment content divisions of Sony's sprawling empire 鈥?an effort that he said will turn around Sony and restore its profitability.

But Stringer, and his predecessors, have been making that same promise for years.

When the iPod began selling like hotcakes several years ago, a Japanese reporter asked Shizuo Takashino, one of the developers of the original Walkman, why Sony hadn't come up with the idea. Afterall, the iPod seemed like something that should have been a trademark Sony product.

Takashino had been showing reporters the latest Walkman models, which played proprietary files. Sony has been criticized for sticking to such proprietary formats. One major reason for the iPod's massive popularity was that it played MP3 files, which are widely used for online music and compatible with many devices.

In a special display at Tokyo's Sony Archive building, opening Wednesday to commemorate the Walkman's 30-year history, an impassioned Akio Morita, Sony's co-founder, speaks to employees in a 1989 video to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Walkman.

"We can deliver a totally new kind of thrill to people with the Walkman," said the silver-haired Morita, proudly wearing a gray factory-worker jacket and surrounding himself with dozens of colorful Walkman machines. "We must make more and more products like the Walkman."

Morita acknowledges in the video that the Walkman doesn't feature any groundbreaking technology but merely repackaged old ones 鈥?but did so in a nifty creative way. And it started with a small simple idea 鈥?enjoying music anywhere, without bothering people around you.

The original Walkman was as big as a paperback book, and weighed 390 grams (14 ounces). It wasn't cheap, especially for those days, costing 33,000 yen ($340).

But people snatched it up.

Other names were initially tried for international markets like "soundabout" and "stowaway." Sony soon settled on Walkman. The original logo had little feet on the A's in "WALKMAN."

Many, even within Sony, were skeptical of the idea because earphones back then were associated with unfashionable, hard-of-hearing old people. But Morita was convinced he had a hit.

The archival exhibit shows other Sony products that have been discontinued or lost out to competition over the years 鈥?the Betamax video cassette recorder, the Trinitron TV, the Aibo dog-shaped robotic pet.

The Walkman exhibit, which runs through Dec. 25, shows models that are still on sale, some about the size of a lighter that play digital music files.

Also showcased are messages from Morita and his partner Masaru Ibuka, who always insisted a company could never hope to be a winner by imitating rivals but only by dashing stereotypes.

"All we can do is keep going at it, selling our Walkman, one at a time," said Sony spokeswoman Yuki Kobayashi. "Thirty years is a milestone for Sony. But we hope the Walkman won't be seen as just a piece of history."

(Agencies)

Facebook plans to simplify privacy settings

(File photo)

Facebook is overhauling its privacy controls over the next several weeks in an attempt to simplify its users' ability to control who sees the information they share on the site.

Privacy has been a central, often thorny issue for Facebook because so many people use it to share personal information with their friends and family and beyond. But as the 5-year-old social networking service has expanded its user base and added features, its privacy controls have grown increasingly complicated.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said Wednesday that the new settings will give people greater control over what photos, updates and personal details they share with their friends, family and strangers on Facebook and, eventually, the wider Internet.

To make the settings easier, Facebook is consolidating its existing six privacy pages and more than 30 settings onto a single privacy page. It will also standardize the options for each setting so the choices are always the same, something that hasn't always been the case.

That means that for various pieces of content, users will be able to click on a lock icon to choose whether to show it to everyone, only their friends, friends of friends, members of professional or school networks or people on a customized list.

Previously, users had to navigate page after page to exclude, if they want, bosses or co-workers from seeing their photo albums, status updates or shared links. And because the privacy settings were dispersed on different pages, even after making a profile visible to friends only, the photos on that profile could remain public.

Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, said in a conference call with reporters that the changes don't have anything to do with advertising or the information Facebook is going to make available to advertisers.

Rather, he said, the site wants people "to be able to share information with as many or as few people as they choose."

One of Facebook's most notable privacy mishaps was a tracking tool called "Beacon," which in late 2007 caught users off-guard by broadcasting information about their activities at other Web sites, including their purchase of holiday gifts for those who could see the information. The company ultimately allowed users to turn Beacon off.

Other changes, too, have often met with user uproar. Earlier this year Facebook let its users vote on the site's guiding principles after tens of thousands joined online protests over who controls the information they share on the site.

To prevent another backlash, Facebook will gradually roll out the latest changes. Facebook will start by testing them out on small groups of users and tweak the final version of the controls based on feedback. Facebook said it would take more than three weeks to reach every user.

"They are learning how to listen carefully to their users," said Jules Polonetsky, co-chairman and director of the Washington-based Future of Privacy Forum and former chief privacy officer at AOL. He added that Facebook has learned from the past that suddenly making big changes, whatever they are, has not been the most effective approach.

The privacy changes come as Facebook tries to become a broadly used destination, competing not just with other social networks like Twitter and MySpace but also more established hubs like Google and Yahoo.

To do this, Facebook needs its 200 million-plus users to share content and interact with more people than their close friends and families.

"To be lots of things to lots of different kinds of people," Polonetsky said, Facebook needs to give its users, who come from different cultures, age groups and career levels, more control over what they share on the site.

The site will soon let users assign different privacy settings to each piece of information they make available, including photos, contact information and work info, as well as status updates, links and photos.

In another big change, the site is also getting rid of its regional networks. Facebook said those separate zones have led to too much confusion over which information can be widely seen or kept relatively private. In the past, someone who joined a New York network, for example, could inadvertently make personal information available to everyone else in that network, including complete strangers.

Facebook will continue to have social networks related to schools and work.

(Agencies)

YouTube doubles video file size to 2G

Video-sharing site YouTube announced on Wednesday that it was doubling the size limit for uploads to its website to allow users to post more high-definition (HD) video.

YouTube, in a blog post, said the size limit for uploads to the site was being doubled -- from one gigabyte to two gigabytes.

"The increase means you can upload longer videos at a higher resolution as well as large HD files directly from your camera," YouTube said.

"The changes allow you to share links directly to the HD version of your video, as well as embed the HD version on your blog or website," it said.

HD video is increasingly popular but the higher resolution results in larger files.

A YouTube spokesman told AFP that while file size for individual videos was being increased to two gigabytes, the 10-minute length restriction for videos posted on the site remains in place.

(Agencies)

Gizmodo, Engadget founder launches new gadget site

The founder of two of the most popular gadget sites on the Web, Gizmodo and Engadget, launched another destination for technology junkies on Wednesday.

GDGT.com, the latest creation of Peter Rojas, describes itself as a social platform for lovers of computers, mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, videogame consoles and other items.

"GDGT is a new kind of technology site -- a social gadget platform that enables you to connect with the community through your gadgets, and connect with your gadgets through the community.

"It's a place for you to engage with your devices and hang out with people who are as passionate about their gear as you are."

GDGT allows users -- the community -- to discuss and post their own reviews of the latest electronics and features detailed specifications and pictures of the items broken down into categories.

The site drew so much traffic on its launch on Wednesday that it crashed.

"We are working furiously to get this damn site working again," the GDGT team said in a message on their Twitter feed. "We're adding new servers right now."

GDGT eventually overcame its teething problems and was back online.

(Agencies)

Microsoft's Bing search wins share from Google

New search engine Bing helped Microsoft increase its share of the search market in the United States in June but, still lags behind Yahoo! and Google, a Web analytics firm reported Wednesday. (AFP/File/Arko Datta)

Microsoft Corp's new Bing search engine gained U.S. market share in its first month in operation but still trails dominant rival Google Inc, according to data released on Wednesday.

Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter.

Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.

Bing's share peaked in the first week of June at 9.21 percent, falling away in the middle two weeks before coming back at 8.45 percent in the last week of June.

The results may give heart to Microsoft, which is investing heavily in its loss-making online services business and is refusing to cede the market to Google.

"At first sight, a 1 percent increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," StatCounter Chief Executive Adohan Cullen said in a statement.

The world's largest software company may yet strike an online search partnership with Yahoo to make itself a credible competitor, but talk of such a deal has quietened down.

StatCounter, based in Dublin, says its data are based on 4 billion pageloads per month monitored through a network of websites. Other data research firms such as comScore are not expected to release figures on Bing's share until mid-July.

(Agencies)

Review: New guide gives Twitterific advice

Sometimes Twitter can make newcomers feel like twits because the online messaging service isn't as simple as it sounds.

The idea of sharing information in 140-character snippets is easy to grasp, but it can be confounding to navigate the communications crossfire while trying to learn Twitter's etiquette and idiom. Then there's the befuddling matter of trying to figure out whom you should follow and which Twitter tools you should use.

It all starts to make sense after reading "The Twitter Book," a primer co-written by two of the messaging service's early evangelists, Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein. It's worth the suggested retail price of $20, though Amazon.com was recently selling the book for $13.59.

The 234-page guide is so helpful that many readers no doubt will tweet its praises and thank "(at)timoreilly" and "(at)sarahm" 鈥?the authors' Twitter handles 鈥?for helping people understand why Twitter is emerging as the Internet's most powerful communications vehicle since e-mail.

If you really want to spread the word, you'll RT recommendations for the book. (If you don't know "RT" is shorthand for retweeting someone else's message, then you definitely should get this book.)

Even if you know what "RT" stands for, you probably could benefit from the book's suggestions 鈥?such as how to retweet properly to ensure the message's author gets due credit.

There are also smart tips on how to post information and observations that are more likely to be retweeted and expand your influence in the Twitterverse. Some of the advice is just commonsense, but didn't occur to me until I read the book. For example, if you are setting out to be retweeted, you probably should use less than the 140-character limit to leave room for someone to insert the RT and your username in their retweet. The book suggests limiting yourself to about 125 characters to encourage retweeting.

If you want to reach the biggest audience, the book recommends posting your pithiest material during Eastern Time business hours, especially on Tuesdays through Thursdays, when traffic is the heaviest.

Among other things, the book will teach you: the significance of a hashtag (the pound sign), which is inserted in messages tied to specific topics; how to pass along excerpts from an eavesdropped conversation (put an "OH" for "overheard" before the quote); and maybe even how frequently you should tweet (the average is four per day but those looking attract a lot of followers tend to tweet more than 20 times a day).

"The Twitter Book" is well timed, given that most of the service's users hopped on this year and probably are still trying to learn the do's and don'ts. Twitter's worldwide audience has soared from nearly 4.4 million in December to more than 37 million in May, according to the Internet research firm comScore Inc.

Apparently, a lot of these folks wouldn't mind some hand-holding; more than 60 percent of Twitter's newcomers stop using the service after the first month, according to another research firm, Nielsen Online.

With so many people trying Twitter, there are all kinds of tools designed to make the service easier to use. These peripheral services can display photos through Twitter (twitpic.com), organize your Twitter priorities (Twhirl and TweetDeck), recommend smart people to follow (mrtweet.net, whoshouldifollow.com) and monitor what people are discussing (twitscoop.com) and why (whatthetrend.com).

"The Twitter Book" touches on these services too, making it easier for even high-tech dodoes to fit in with the rest of the flock.

(Agencies)

Robots face off on football pitch, in kitchen at RoboCup 2009

A group of students of robotics setup a football robot on June 30, 2009 on the eve of the "RoboCup" the world largest robotic event, hosting 408 teams with 2300 scientists and students in Graz some 200 kilometers southwest from Vienna. (AFP/File/Dieter Nagl)

RoboCup 2009, the world's largest robotics event, kicked off Wednesday in the southern Austrian city of Graz, with some 400 teams and 2,000 robots ready to compete in sports and rescue operations.

On two or four legs, with wheels or virtually on a screen, robots of all sizes will battle it out on the football pitch -- the most popular event -- but also face off in a dance competition and domestic chores.

Participants from 44 countries are split into two categories, juniors and seniors, with the former dedicated to robots programmed by young people aged between 10 and 19.

Suitably for the occasion, robots performed the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Wednesday, marking the opening of the five-day event, which is organised by the Graz University of Technology.

Local officials were taken to the event in a driver-less bus using a sophisticated electronic system of lasers to scan the surrounding area and choose the appropriate route, organisers said.

More than just an entertainment event, RoboCup is also a scientific project, said the president of the 2009 edition, Manuela Veloso.

Besides the robot competitions, experts and electronic engineers can also attend conferences as part of the RoboCup symposium.

Among the participants, Iran sent the most teams with 50 in the running, followed by Germany and Japan, according to the organisers.

The event, which runs until July 5, was first organised in 1997 in Nagoya, Japan, and has since been held in Stockholm, Melbourne and Suzhou, China.

(Agencies)

Microsoft starts officially tweeting in Bing search results

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- It's Twitter day at Microsoft as the company announced that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results Thursday.

Bing is a solid product. Apparently, Bing will update these Twitter results every minute. But it鈥檚 important to note that Bing will not be crawling every tweet that runs through Twitter. Instead, it will focus on only those from people it deems important based on follower counts and volume of tweets.

What else is a bit odd about Bing鈥檚 addition of tweets is that apparently they鈥檒l only show up for very specific searches. So, for example, if you search for 鈥淛anny Jackson tweets鈥?you鈥檒l find them in the results, but presumably you won't if you just search for 鈥淛anny Jackson.鈥?

Google has been doing things in recent months such as adding Google profiles and Facebook profiles prominently in search results. But so far it has shied away from highlighting tweets in their results. Even if these tweet results are rather pointless, this will be seen as Bing doing something Google cannot. And that may just give a few more people a reason to use Bing.

Microsoft is using the main/microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it.

There's probably not much to read into Microsoft's love-fest with Twitter today, but you never know. After all, rivals have been snooping around, flirting with the service.

(Agencies)

Tech that could save your life

Funding for newfangled health devices is on the rise. You could be the beneficiary.

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BURLINGAME, CALIF. -- Jim Sweeney is on a mission to make hospitals safer--through technology.

The longtime entrepreneur, who started companies including prescription-benefit management firm Caremark and CardioNet, a maker of devices to diagnose hearth arrhythmias, is now at the helm of IntelliDOT Corp. The San Diego start-up makes handheld devices that mainly scan bar codes on drug labels and match them to patient wristbands. That helps nurses give the right patients the right dose of their medicine and avoid harmful interactions. The devices have some other uses, like guarding against patients getting the wrong type of blood in a procedure.

But Sweeney has big plans to widen the company's scope: He wants to create a new technology platform, leveraging wireless technologies such as RFID, to improve patient safety throughout hospitals.

In Sweeney's vision, nurses and patients armed with wireless devices or tags could synch up with each other to make sure patients are prepped for the correct surgical procedure and that babies go home with the right parents. The new system would continue to monitor patient drug doses and interactions--drug errors are a major cause of death in hospitals--and even prompt nurses to wash their hands. Sweeney envisions radio-frequency identification devices embedded in hospital-room soap dispensers. They could catch nurses who didn't scrub up before touching patients. (Nurses would have RFID tags on their name badges.)

Hospital errors now kill at least 120,000 Americans every year, Sweeney says. He's trying to raise about $30 million to build his high-tech hospital platform and re-brand IntelliDOT as Patientsafe Solutions.

I believe this system will be in every hospital bed in America in five years, if we can get this going," he says. Right now, IntelliDOT's devices are being used by only about 70 hospitals. But new Medicare rules that block reimbursement when hospitals make some medical errors--such as amputating the wrong limb or making a mistake that leads to a post-surgical infection--should spur hospitals to clean up their act, he believes.

Sweeney isn't the only entrepreneur forging ahead with innovative medical devices targeted to aging baby boomers and others.

Venture capital investments in medical gadgets has been surging over the last five years. Funding for such devices hit $3.44 billion last year, up from $1.62 billion in 2003, according to Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association. Investors are also responding to the public's desire for less invasive treatments for conditions like obesity and glaucoma, and new therapies that don't have the side effects associated with many popular drugs.

A Palo Alto, Calif., company called Satiety, for example, is hoping to gain FDA approval soon for a stomach-stapling device that doesn't require surgery. The instrument is inserted through patients' mouths and is pulled out once the job is done. The patient is left with a smaller stomach that feels full after a small meal, the company says, but no nasty scars. The procedure is an alternative to gastric-bypass surgery, which can be risky to many patients, says Robert "Robin" Bellas, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, which invested in Satiety.

More precise cancer detection is also in vogue. Mauna Kea Technologies, based in Paris but backed by U.S. venture firm Psilos Group, is already selling a device that helps doctors pinpoint cancers inside the body and essentially diagnose them there, without having to do multiple biopsies to find the exact site of the troublesome tissue. Mauna Kea makes a tiny, flexible microscope that fits on the end of a probe and is inserted into a patient's gastrointestinal tract with an endoscope.

The microscope does a good job of catching early cancers and diagnosing them immediately, without having to wait days or more for a pathology report, says Mauna Kea Chief Executive Sacha Loiseau. It's especially useful in getting into tiny bile ducts, he adds. The only catch: The procedure is approved for use in the U.S. but isn't yet covered by U.S. insurance codes. So Mauna Kea is working to prove the device's effectiveness and its ability to cut hospital costs as cancers are diagnosed and treated earlier.

Other life-saving devices have been around a while, but still aren't very well known. Easy-to-use, portable defibrillators used to shock people's hearts back to life have been around for nearly 15 years. But lots of people don't know where to find them or are afraid to use them.

"In fact, these devices can't hurt anyone," says Richard A. Lazar, a Portland health care technology entrepreneur who previously consulted for the portable defibrillator industry. "They can only help ... you can't hurt the person if they're dead. All you can do is bring them back to life."

Most of the newer "automatic external defibrillators," which can cost as little as $1,200 or $1,300 apiece and are found in places like offices, airplanes and gyms, come with step-by-step voice prompts that instruct good Samaritans how to use them. They're made for non-physicians. Earlier this year, such a device was credited with reviving a North Carolina state legislator, Becky Carney, who collapsed at her desk with sudden cardiac arrest.

Cardiac arrest is "the leading cause of death in this country," Lazar says. Disseminating high-tech defibrillators more broadly in public places could help change that.

(Rebecca Buckman, Forbes.com)

The tiger-resistant laptop

Don't believe manufacturers' claims. We put Panasonic's Toughbook through real survival tests.

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BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Call it the James Bond of laptops.

We dropped the Panasonic CF-30 "Toughbook," kicked it, stood on it and tried to back over it with a Volkswagen JettaTDi. (That left a mark--on the pavement.)

We poured Diet Coke on the keyboard. Then we used the lid to crush the can.

You might think this is unnecessary testing for a laptop. Advertising is always brimming with over-the-top claims. We've heard about "durable" notebooks before. But the ones we lug to press conferences seem to be as touchy as a bunch of squirrels. Surely, Panasonic's claims of toughness are, well, over-the-top.

We found, however, that Panasonic's Toughbook performed as promised. Fair enough. So we came up with some tests that were decidedly unfair.

We used the Panasonic Toughbook to serve Doritos. Then we crushed the chips to dust between the keyboard and the screen, the same screen we used as a dartboard. The darts poked holes in the screen's protective coating, but the display underneath remained undamaged. Not a single dead pixel.

So we presented the $3,460 Toughbook to Nalin, a white tiger who lives at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom in Vallejo, Calif. Nalin treated it like a cat toy, knocking it to the ground, gnawing on the screen and licking every inch of its surface. He must have smelled those Doritos.

The tiger chewed off five keys, but that turned out to be just cosmetic. We could still type without them, and were able to glue four back on later (we made sure Nalin didn't swallow anything). The fifth just snapped back into place.

Next, Liz, a 10,000-pound Asian elephant, stepped on it, stood on it, dropped it onto a concrete slab, stood on it again--balanced on three legs--and then tossed it around some more. Liz put two small cracks in the laptop's magnesium alloy lid and popped the hard drive out.

The drive slid right back in to the Toughbook's chassis, which rebooted without a glitch. The screen was undamaged, although it was hard to see through the tiger hair and congealed drool.

That's when we remembered: We're allergic to cats.

Five days later, we turned from tests to something better described as execution: We took the laptop to the Jackson Arms firing range in South San Francisco to shoot it with a Ruger Mark III .22 pistol from 15 yards.

Dell declined to loan us a rugged laptop to shoot, saying they didn't have the 鈥渋nventory excess to participate this time around.鈥?/p>

Panasonic, meanwhile, was about to have one less notebook. We removed the battery to minimize the mess, and aimed.

Goodbye, Mr. Toughbook.

Or so we thought. We put a bullet through the laptop. Then we booted it up. We were able to log in. Our test file was still there. The screen had a hole in it, but was still usable.

Spooky. Panasonic has built a laptop that was starting to look more like Grigori Rasputin than James Bond. It took cyanide, a stabbing, a beating and four bullets before the Russian mystic was finally drowned in the icy River Neva. Anyone got some holy water?

Don't call the Toughbook the anti-Christ, however; call it the anti-netbook. Panasonic's customers, typically cops and firefighters, the military and businesses want to keep their ownership costs low over the entire lifetime of their gear. No matter what.

As a result, the CF-30 is the product of a business model that's the opposite of that behind today's wave of cheap, disposable netbook computers.While the $300 machines you'll find for sale at Best Buy are available in a wide array of colors and styles, they all come from the same place: low-cost contract manufacturers.

Panasonic, by contrast, was an electronics manufacturer long before it got into the computer business. It builds many of the components you'll find in other companies' laptops, including displays and batteries, says Rance Poehler, who leads Panasonic's North American computer business.

So rather than outsourcing, Panasonic can put its factories to work building not just tough laptops, but tough parts for those laptops. The Toughbook 30's hard drive, for example, is itself a minor marvel of engineering: It's designed to withstand being ripped out at a moment's notice in the field and is encased in a padded metal shell all its own.

That kind of durability costs more, but customers say it pencils out well enough that they'd buy a Toughbook over a typical notebook. Morris Materials Handling, which sells and services overhead cranes for heavy industry, buys refurbished Panasonic 18s that have seen use in the military for a little more than half the price of new ones. The laptops aren't indestructible--a 50-foot drop from a crane did one in--but the technician was able to pop out the hard drive, slap it into a new unit, and get back to work.

Durability, however, is about more than taking a drop or a surviving an elephant attack. Henry King at ArborMetrics Solutions, which keeps trees and other foliage out of the way for utilities across the U.S., has deployed 70 Toughbooks. Just the road vibrations caused by putting a laptop in a car and driving 40,000 to 50,000 miles a year to service its customers' infrastructure has killed many laptops, King says. By contrast, Panasonic's hard drives can suck it up.

As for our test laptop, it had been through enough. It was time to put the beast down. The Toughbook CF-30 is elephant- and tiger-resistant. It can take a .22 at close range and continue working. We needed something that would leave a bigger hole.

So we borrowed a Springfield 1911 in .45 ACP. Most cops use comparatively dinky 9-millimeter pistols. This classic 39-ounce piece is more hand cannon than handgun.

A shot with the 1911 from 15 yards took the Toughbook down. To be sure it didn't stagger back up, we followed up with a .44 magnum revolver and a solid lead slug from a 12-gauge shotgun. Then we packed up the Toughbook and sent it back to Panasonic.

(Brian Caulfield, Forbes.com)

Have cellphone, will shop

Shopping via mobile phone is taking off. New apps are helping.

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These are dreary days for retailers. As consumers hold back on spending, many vendors are feeling pinched. Yet among the gloom there is a bright spot: Online spending is growing. And another development may spark even more shopping--mobile commerce.

Shopping by mobile phone is still a nascent development. Of the 45 million U.S. cellphone users who take advantage of their phone's Internet connection, just 6.4 million bought something through phone this year, according to research firm Nielsen. U.S. consumers are just now getting the hang of shopping via cellphone, thanks to easy-to-use, mostly-free applications available on smart phones like Apple's iPhone and gadgets running Google's Android software system.

ShopSavvy, an Android app, is just one example of how consumers can use their phone to shop.

This is how it works: The user scans a product's barcode through his phone's camera. Once the ShopSavvy application reads the barcode, it can show the user other local and online outlets that carry the product, and how much each of them is charging. The user can either request that the product be put on hold for local pick-up or order it to be delivered to a specified address. About half of its 1 million users--75% of whom are male--scan consumer electronics. Other popular items are DVDs, videogames, books and groceries.

Big In Japan, the Dallas-based developer behind ShopSavvy, has created a similar application for Apple's iPhone, set to launch in July. ShopSavvy apps for Research in Motion's BlackBerry smart phones and the Palm Pre should be released this fall.

ShopStyle.com--an aggregator of fashionable e-commerce boutiques that was acquired by Bay Area-based, women-focused media firm Sugar, Inc., in 2007--released an iPhone app in May that allows users to easily search and compare prices on their favorite of-the-moment items, be it an Yves Saint Laurent handbag or a pair of Oliver People's sunglasses. The ShopStyle app links directly to the particular item's e-commerce page for a fairly easy purchase.

Price comparison sites are great for bargain shoppers, but individual retailers are also realizing that mobile phone applications not only draw in more customers, they also raise brand awareness. For example, in May athletic footwear company Reebok released Your Reebok, an application for the iPhone that allows users in the U.S. and U.K. to create and purchase personalized sneakers in a variety of colors and materials.

While Reebok may not see a large boost in sales from this app, the company will be noticed by a new group of potential customers. "This is a loyalty device," says Paula Rosenblum, a managing partner at Retails Systems Research, a Miami-based firm that focuses on retail technology. "It's not just about sales; it's also about marketing, promotions and getting closer to the customer."

1-800-Flowers Mobile Gift Center allows BlackBerry and iPhone users to order flowers for all occasions. And Amazon has created a Kindle app for the iPhone that allows users to download over 300,000 books onto their iPhone. If you do have both a Kindle and an iPhone, it automatically syncs your last page read between devices.

From clothing to concert tickets to electronics, consumers can buy pretty much anything on their phone these days. Who said impulse purchasing was a thing of the past?

(Lauren Sherman, Forbes.com)

Facebook to simplify privacy settings

BEIJING, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Facebook plans to simplify the way in which it offers privacy options to give users more control over the information they share, media reported Thursday.

In a blog post on Wednesday, chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said Facebook is in the process of streamlining its privacy settings over the next few weeks.

To make the settings easier, Facebook is consolidating all of its existing six privacy pages and more than 30 settings onto a single privacy page. It will also standardize the options for each setting so the choices are always the same, something that hasn't always been the case.

Right now, Facebook privacy controls are too scattered across multiple settings pages and they lack uniformity, creating confusion among members, Kelly said during a press conference.

"It's too complex at this point," Kelly said.

Privacy has been a central, and often thorny issue for Facebook because so many people use it to share personal information with their friends and family and beyond.

Facebook hasn't managed that issue very well in recent years as efforts to monetize the free service have led to privacy oversights.

Its Beacon social advertising scheme, for example, created considerable controversy in 2007 for violating user privacy. The uproar eventually prompted an apology from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a shift to an opt-in system.

(Agencies)

China's Compass expected to rival GPS

China's global navigation satellite system, Compass, will provide regional service in 2011 with a constellation of 12 satellites, a navigation industry insider said Thursday.

China aims to make Compass a navigation satellite system of 35 satellites by 2020, which can offer global service.

Compass, or Beidou (Big Dipper) in Chinese, is expected to rival the US-developed GPS, the EU's GPS and Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System, earlier reports said.

Officials representing the four systems are now in negotiations to make their civilian-use technologies compatible, Hu Gang, vice-president of Beijing BDStar Navigation Co Ltd, said during a two-day national geological information industry summit that ended yesterday.

"This could possibly allow a civilian user of global navigation satellite system to have access to more than 120 navigation satellites in the future, which will assure stability and improve accuracy," he said.

The 12 satellites that will be part of the Compass program's first phase will "improve the positioning accuracy of the satellite navigation system greatly", he said.

Only two Compass satellites have been reportedly launched into orbit so far - one in 2007 and the other in April this year, he said.

According to the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, which sponsored the summit, the satellite navigation industry is estimated to generate 50 billion yuan ($8 billion) in China by 2010, up from the 12 billion yuan in 2006.

Cao Chong, chief engineer of the China Electronics Technology Group Corp, said the car industry and the cell phone industry will be the major players of satellite navigation applications.

"China still has a huge potential for satellite navigation application, as only less than 5 percent of cars have installed navigation devices," he said.

Users warned of "Michael Jackson" email virus

Computer security firm Sophos issued a warning about an Internet virus transmitted from a mass e-mail claiming to contain secret songs and photos of Michael Jackson. (AFP/File/Carl de Souza)

BEIJING, July 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Computer security firm Sophos warned Thursday that an virus is floating around the Internet and told people not to open an email claiming to contain secret songs and photos of Michael Jackson.

The email has a subject line of "Remembering Michael Jackson" and is sent from "sarah@michaeljackson.com," Sophos said in a statement sent by its Asia office in Singapore.

According to Sophos, the email tells recipients that an attached file titled "Michael songs and pictures.zip" contains secret songs and photos of the pop music icon, who died of a heart attack in the United States on June 25.

Sophos advised users not to open the email.

"By opening the attachment, computer users are exposed to infection. Once infected, a computer will begin automatically spreading the worm onto other Internet users," Sophos said.

Sophos said the virus is also capable of spreading as an Autorun component on USB memory sticks.

Expo on geographic information applications kicks off in Beijing

A female presents a stylish portable inter-communicative onboard navigator, during the National Exposition on Geographic Information Applications and Maps, which opens at the Beijing Exhibition Center, in Beijing, July 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Chen Xiaogen)

Visitors watch a novel model of drone aircraft, during the National Exposition on Geographic Information Applications and Maps, which opens at the Beijing Exhibition Center in Beijing, July 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Chen Xiaogen)

A flat television shows the 3-dimensional geographic informational service system for China Shenzhou Travel, during the National Exposition on Geographic Information Applications and Maps, which opens at the Beijing Exhibition Center, in Beijing, July 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Chen Xiaogen)

Visitors catch the sight of the urban 3-dimensional scene through the polarized light spectacles, during the National Exposition on Geographic Information Applications and Maps, which opens at the Beijing Exhibition Center, in Beijing, July 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Chen Xiaogen)

Visitors watch the ADS40 digital orthophoto map of Taiyuan City, during the National Exposition on Geographic Information Applications and Maps, which opens at the Beijing Exhibition Center, in Beijing, July 1, 2009. (Xinhua/Chen Xiaogen)

The exposition, on the motif of intensifying the service of geographic information application and promoting its industrialization, epitomizes its application in national economy, social development and people's livings since the 60 years of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Renault to test electric cars in Paris, Milan

An electric cable is attached to the side of a car. Renault-Nissan will hold large-scale tests for its new electric cars in the Paris and Milan regions next year ahead of planned mass production from 2012, the Franco-Japanese auto group said Thursday. (AFP/Getty Images/File/Alex Wong)

Renault-Nissan will hold large-scale tests for its new electric cars in the Paris and Milan regions next year ahead of planned mass production from 2012, the Franco-Japanese auto group said Thursday.

The tests include a try-out in the Paris region of a new car charging network being developed in conjunction with French electricity giant EDF.

"One hundred electric cars from the Renault-Nissan alliance... will be tested from September 2010 for a year by individuals, companies and local authority employees" around Paris, Renault-Nissan and EDF said in a statement.

People testing the cars will be able to recharge them in their homes, at their workplace, in car parks and along roads, the companies said.

Renault-Nissan also announced a separate agreement with Italian energy group A2A to launch electric car tests in Milan's Lombardy region in 2010.

Renault-Nissan and EDF paired up last year to develop an "electric mobility operator" -- a full network providing charging spots and battery exchange stations for electric vehicles across France.

(Agencies)

Conviction reversed in web hoax that led to suicide

A camera operator covers Lori Drew as she leaves the federal courthouse in Los Angeles Thursday, July 2, 2009, after a federal judge tentatively threw out the convictions of the Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Lori Drew leaves the federal courthouse in Los Angeles Thursday, July 2, 2009, after a federal judge tentatively threw out the convictions of the Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

A woman who was convicted of computer fraud in an Internet hoax that led to the suicide of 13-year-old girl was tentatively acquitted Thursday by a federal judge.

Lori Drew, 50, drew national scorn after it was revealed that she helped create a fictional boy on MySpace to befriend the girl and pump her for information about her on-again-off-again friendship with Drew's daughter.

Megan Meier, who was being treated for depression, hanged herself in 2006 after the fictitious boyfriend dumped her and told the Missouri girl that "the world would be a better place without you."

In November 2008, jurors acquitted Drew of the more serious charges of using a computer to intentionally inflict emotional harm but convicted her on three misdemeanor counts of illegally accessing a protected computer.

Judge George Wu said his decision to reverse the verdict is tentative and will not become final until he issues a written ruling.

Prosecutors had urged the judge to send Drew to federal prison for three years.

But her attorney argued that she should not even have to pay a fine because she had already suffered as a result of the bad publicity surrounding the case.

At a previous hearing, attorney Dean Steward argued that the facts used to support Drew's conviction on illegal access -- that she violated the website's terms of service by creating a false account -- do not constitute a criminal offense and there is no evidence she even knew the rules existed.

"This is conduct done every day by millions and millions of people," Wu said Friday in apparent agreement.

"How many times do people get on these 'match' sites and pretty much lie about everything? What is the crime here?"

The trial was held in Los Angeles because MySpace's servers are located in Beverly Hills.

Prosecutors in Missouri had declined to bring a case against Drew.

(Agencies)