09
April
2009
|
19:55 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Newswatch: Who Went Down Rabbithole Manhole And Switched Off Silicon Valley's Internet?

Friday 8am Silicon Valley news report:

Phone service restored after vandalism shuts it down in Gilroy, Morgan Hill, Santa Cruz County - SiliconValley.com


...it was as if time turned back a generation. No landlines. No cell phone service. No Internet connection or working ATMs. If people had emergencies, they were told to run outside and flag down passing patrol cars or drive to the nearest fire station.


The A.P. Was the First Web 2.0 Company - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com


...it provided information to its clients with the express permission to edit, modify, remix and combine its content with other information and opinion to create a product of interest to an audience in a particular place or of a particular political point of view.


Microsoft cuts Live Labs in half, narrows focus in tough economy -Techflash


The remaining Live Labs team will focus on Internet search and other Web interaction technologies, such as data exploration and information retrieval. Live Labs founder Gary Flake will continue to lead the unit, reporting to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect.


EETimes.com - Sun loses top CPU architect


Rock CPU leader Tremblay joins Microsoft...Last year, Sun lost its co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim who returned to the startup world.


EETimes.com - IBM Fellow: Moore's Law defunct


... eventually exponential growth always comes to an end," said Anderson.


Ex-Officer Fires Back At Motorola - WSJ.com


...he grew concerned in late 2008 that "the executives within the Mobile Devices business were, intentionally or recklessly, materially misstating its 2009 forecasts...


WPP Merges Agency Built for Dell - WSJ.com


...Enfatico, the agency it built as a one-stop shop for all of Dell's advertising and marketing business, into its Young & Rubicam Brands ad firm, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is a retreat from one of the most ambitious projects on Madison Avenue...


Rejected By VCs, Rescued By Angels - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ.com


What surprised him during the year-long funding process was not that angels were willing to invest when venture firms were not, but the widely divergent attitudes about investing in new businesses.


FCC opens effort to boost broadband to nation -Reuters


A report for the United Nations out this week said the U.S. has fallen to 17th from 11th in a survey of nations' advanced use of information and communications technology, which took into account adoption, speed and literacy.


Time Warner’s Unlimited Bandwidth Plan: $150 a Month -NYTimes


Perhaps the most interesting tidbit in the announcement is the price that Time Warner set for its coming super-high-speed service, which uses technology known as Docsis 3. It will offer service with 50-megabit-per-second download speeds and 5 Mbps upload speeds for $99 per month. That is cheaper than Comcast, which charges $139 a month for the same speeds where it offers them.


IBM's Data Hot Potato -Forbes


Unlike traditional supercomputing, IBM's system, integrated into its Infosphere software, doesn't start with a static problem pre-loaded into a system's storage. It pulls in data on the fly, splits it along separate paths, and moves the data from one processor to the next like a part on an assembly line. New data can be integrated at any time, giving the system the ability to deal with fast-changing market analysis.


French Lawmakers Reject Bill to Curb Internet Piracy -WSJ


French lawmakers unexpectedly rejected a bill that would have established a "three-strikes" law under which people who repeatedly pirate music, movies or TV shows could have their Internet connections cut off for as long as a year.


BBC Gets Ready for BitTorrent Distribution


Today the BBC published the first episode of R&DTV, a Creative Commons licensed show that users are allowed to remix, redistribute and share. The first episode of the monthly technology show features Digg’s Kevin Rose, among others. The BBC hopes to use BitTorrent for the distribution of future episodes.


Yahoo's plan: create community from isolated sites -Reuters


Yahoo is turning up the volume on many of its communications and community features and building bridges between the collection of Yahoo sites that have at times operated like virtual islands.


Conficker and What Really Confounded Silicon Valley -WSJ


But early Thursday morning researchers at Kaspersky Lab, a security company, noticed that some of the machines infected with Conficker downloaded some new software, including something billing itself as SpywareProtect2009. SpywareProtect2009 “finds” a virus on the infected computer and then offers to remove it for $50.


Yahoo partners with Berkeley, other universities on cloud computing -SF Business Times


The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Sunnyvale-based Yahoo's (NASDAQ:YHOO) cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research and explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.


Yelp Will Let Businesses Respond to Web Reviews -NYTimes


Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive, Jeremy Stoppelman, has said that to protect the voice of the consumer, the voices of businesses, many of which advertise on the site, had to be muted.


Teen survey makes Microsoft's Zune seem futile -cnet


According to the survey, now in its eighth year, 92 percent of students own some sort media player--up from 87 percent a year ago--and of those who do own a media player, 86 percent own an iPod. Only 4 percent of the 600 students interviewed for the survey owned a Zune.


Time for an audit of Microsoft's 'Apple Tax' -cnet


The document, posted on Microsoft's Windows Blog on Thursday, compares the cost of a PC and Mac purchase, making the case that buyers can save more than $3,000 in buying two Windows PCs as opposed to two Macs. The "tax return" is based on a Microsoft-paid-for white paper (PDF) from technology analyst Roger Kay.


California biologist seeks volunteer bee-counters -Reuters


Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor at San Francisco State University with a fascination for bees, is studying bee colony collapse and an apparent decline in honey bee populations across North America, and for a project that big, she says, she needs help.


Phil Bronstein =ComedyCentral


Phil Bronstein suggests a jail term for people who don't pay for the news. (06:51)