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“People expect their phones to deliver the best experiences from PCs and the Web right to their pockets,” Todd Peters, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for its Mobile Communications Business, said in a release Thursday. “Investing in the right solutions from companies like MobiComp will extend the capabilities of Windows Mobile and Windows Live to help us provide the most innovative and seamless way to stay connected.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. MobiComp, which is based in Braga, Portugal, will become part of Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business division.

MobiComp has developed an array of products: MobileKeeper Backup & Restore, MobileKeeper Sharing & Communities, and Active mTicker. They’re used by companies to back up data stored on mobile phones, submit content from mobile phones to social networks like Facebook, and access news and other mobile media.

The acquisition will be used to bolster a number of services on the Windows Mobile smartphone platform as well as the Windows Live Web services division.

Microsoft announced Thursday it has made plans to acquire MobiComp, a mobile-data company founded in 2000

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Google didn’t invent open-source programming or pioneer the mobile-phone software market, but when it comes to its Android project, don’t accuse Google of playing follow the leader.

The company is working on the hand-off to the outside world. Android already is a project whose development is distributed among the Open Handset Alliance members collectively backing Android, for starts, as well as among multiple international Google offices. “We’re learning how to do a large-scale distributed effort,” Rubin said.

Google’s closed start doesn’t sit well with Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens, whose company is among the most aggressive advocates of open-source software.

Andy Rubin, the Google engineering director leading Android, likens today’s chaotic hodge-podge of mobile phone software to the early days of personal computers. In mobile phones, though, Microsoft has begun offering integrated software ranging from office applications and a Web browser at the high level down through the operating system kernel at the low level, and that full suite has a powerful appeal to phone manufacturers.

“Initially their approach was almost like a proprietary product approach,” said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer of Linux seller and Android partner Wind River. “I think they have adjusted all elements of that strategy as they go. It’s much more open-source friendly, more developer friendly.”

Google is hardly the first company to try using open-source software to shake up the industry. What’s notable is Google’s willingness to ruffle feathers in the open-source world, including those of potential allies such as Red Hat, with its approach.

(Credit:
Google)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

Andy Rubin, head of Google's Android project.

Closed first, then open
But that open-source release will be complex. Depending on how it manages the task, Google could face praise or scorn later this year when it unleashes that code upon the world. The hardest part is not just sharing the code, but in integrating outside developers into a project that’s been growing within a company’s confines.

Of course, giving back is precisely one of the intents of the license, which Richard Stallman initially wrote to govern a clone of Unix that couldn’t be made proprietary; many companies have embraced the GPL, including initial skeptics such as Wind River. And other embedded-computing efforts are using GPL software more widely.

“If it passes, then they get to use the Open Handset Alliance Android trademark name,” Rubin said. “We’re not saying you can’t branch. We’re saying you don’t want to branch.”

There’s nothing technically wrong with an open-source project that’s solely run by a single company, but it’s rarely any company’s open-source goal. It’s not likely to attract outside coders who want to make a name for themselves by adding important new features or corporate allies that might fund their own contributions.

The open-source hand-off
Google has its reasons for the closed start.

Google is bucking some open-source conventions by avoiding the fashionable General Public License (GPL) to govern the software and creating the software internally before involving outsiders. At the same time, though, it’s been easing gradually into the mainstream open-source fold.

“People think publishing the source code is the hard part, but the harder thing by far is having open participation in the decision-making–distributing authority outside your four walls,” Schroepfer said. “Where some of these really go wrong is when people aren’t empowered and their voices don’t matter, they’re not going to do participate.”

The software components that constitute Android.

Android is massive open-source project–or at least it will become one when the first phones start shipping later this year. The recent version 2.6.24 of the Linux kernel has about 8 million lines of code, but about 8.6 million lines of Android’s 11 million are open-source, Rubin said.

Google won’t face the challenges of full-on proprietary software going open-source, though, said Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady: the open-source move is part of the Android plan, not a development that arrived years later.

“It’s a pretty conservative interpretation,” Bruggeman said of Google’s GPL stance.

For that matter, don’t expect Rubin’s present thoughts to be the final word. The company has shown itself willing to change.

Licensing choices
Google has been criticized for not working with existing open-source projects. In addition, Sun Microsystems has expressed concern that Google’s development of Dalvik could fragment the Java world so that Java software for running Android applications wouldn’t work on other Java phones and vice versa.

(Credit:
Google)

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, added that in general, corporate attempts to make open-source projects out of proprietary software are often hampered by an unwillingness to share control.

And though Google’s path might be somewhat different, the company has a decidedly ordinary open-source destination in mind: building a broad, cooperative community to thwart a Microsoft hegemony.

Google also is taking a community-centric approach to defining what Android is. Project maintainers get to accept or reject contributions, as is common in the open-source realm. What’s new is that Google will offer a certification test suite that’s based on those maintainers’ work in order to maintain compatibility among different versions of Android.

Although the company has long used open-source software within its internal operations, Android is Google’s highest-profile attempt so far to use the collaborative programming method to change how computing is done outside the company’s walls.

“Here’s what I think. No. 1, they’re learning as they go,” Bruggeman said. “No. 2, they learn really fast.”

“The thing that worries me about GPL is this: suppose Samsung wants to build a phone that’s different in features and functionality than (one from) LG. If everything on the phone was GPL, any applications or user interface enhancements that Samsung did, they would have to contribute back,” Rubin said. “At the application layer, GPL doesn’t work.”

Google’s team under open-source project manager Chris DiBona, combined with some from the Android project, will work with outside programmers, Rubin said. “The developers I have on core development of this, when it gets open-sourced, will move over and will be coding for the open-source tree,” or code base, he said.

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

But Google chose to go it alone with Dalvik and some other projects for one big reason, Rubin said: it wanted to avoid the GNU General Public License (GPL). The pioneering license that serves in effect as the manifesto of the Free Software movement requires that software projects derived from a GPL product also be released under GPL. That concept in effect requires reciprocity: if you use GPL code and distribute the resulting software, you must contribute your changes back to the GPL code base.

“I think that decreases their chance of success more than it increases it,” Stevens said. “It’s preventing the participation of many smart developers who want to get involved in the development of the Android platform…The community comes at the early inception of a product, not when you decide you’re ready to ship a product.”

“We want to get to the point where it’s stable enough,” Rubin said. Then, after the open-source change, “We want it to be thriving.”

Open-source advocates long have wrestled over whether it’s better to permit companies to make code proprietary, as the Apache License permits, or to compel them to keep it open, as the GPL requires. Even though Android uses the Linux kernel, which is governed by the GPL, don’t expect Google’s position to put an end to this debate.

“It’s a repeat of what happened in the PC industry. We want to make sure there’s an alternative,” Rubin said. But Google doesn’t want to be the sole gateway to its software. “We wanted to make sure there’s not a single source, (so) if a carrier or user or third party encountered a problem, they could fix it themselves.”

The company also has a team more 10 strong working on external developer relations for Android, Rubin said. That team that will grow larger once the code is released and absorbs the Google “maintainers” in charge of Android components, such as its Dalvik virtual-machine software for running applications written in Java.

Android components that will emerge as open-source software include Nuance’s speech-recognition software and PacketVideo’s music and audio decoder. Google also has been working to obtain hardware specifications to support mobile-phone chips from Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Sirf, he said. “You’ll see our stuff being the first Linux on Qualcomm,” Rubin said.

Google didn’t want to raise that issue, uncharitably referred to as the GPL’s “viral” nature, for phone makers that might want to add proprietary features as a way to differentiate, so it chose the less confining Apache License, Rubin said.

The deal comes with a price tag of about $300 million in cash and short-term investments, and it is expected to be completed by the second quarter of this year.

Audible, which was founded in 1997 and operates services in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as operations in Germany and France, sells more than 80,000 audio versions of books, newspapers, and magazines, as well as television and radio content.

“Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection, and the broadest device compatibility in the industry,” Steve Kessel, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide digital media, said in a statement from the two companies. “Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience.”

Amazon.com announced Thursday that it has acquired audiobook company Audible.

Amazon’s interest in the digital-content market has become more and more evident in recent months, with the November release of its Kindle e-book reader, which can play audiobooks. Last year, Amazon also launched Amazon MP3, a music store that competes directly with Apple’s iTunes.

Despite this funding challenge and regulatory hurdles, Dow Jones VentureSource sees significant potential. Both consumers and businesses are interested in buying eco-conscious products and, because the energy business is so big, gaining a small amount of market share from incumbents can be very profitable.

More specific to clean tech is a funding gap, sometimes referred to as the “Valley of Death.”

Europe, led by Spain and Germany, saw a 27 percent increase to $360 million in venture capital. China, meanwhile, saw venture investing fall nearly 70 percent to $129 million, although four venture-backed companies went public.

The numbers are in on clean-tech investing in 2007 and, once again, the direction is way up.

The median deal size in the U.S went up slightly to $8 million, which is a bit higher than all industries.

So is this outpouring of venture dollars all good news for energy and environment entrepreneurs? Not entirely.

“The biggest factor driving investment in clean tech today is the huge consumer outcry for change,” contends Canning from Dow Jones VentureSource, who projects more favorable policies for renewable energy after the fall national election.

There is ongoing concern that certain areas within clean tech, notably solar and biofuels, are becoming an over-heated financial bubble that cannot sustain the influx of new companies.

Unlike software or medical devices, energy-related companies require large amounts of capital to prove out their technology as cost-effective. A biofuels plant, for example, can cost more than $100 million–beyond the funding venture capitalists are able to do. Project financiers typically back only well proven technologies, as a report by Ernst & Young noted. Click here for PDF.

U.S.-based firms caught the lion’s share of the money, with 83 percent of the global total. The total in the U.S. was $2.52 billion in 2007, a 79 percent increase.

This is a typical pattern of large investment waves, which are often followed by consolidation among companies and company failures.

Ernst & Young recommends looking to government sources of money, reducing technology risk, and using debt selectively for financing.

“Our data shows that 59 percent of all U.S. investment in the sector is going toward companies in the product development phase, which suggests that funding for clean technologies is likely to continue as these companies continue to develop and start generating revenues,” said Jessica Canning, director of global research, in a statement.

The biggest raising last year was $200 million for Project Better Place, the Shai Agassi-led company to set up a network of services stations with batteries for electric
cars.

Dow Jones VentureSource on Friday said that venture capitalists plowed a record $3 billion last year in clean-tech companies, a 43 percent jump from the year before. The number of deals rose from 173 in 2006 to 221 last year.

We were already pretty sure that September would bring new iPods, but Apple might have something more ambitious up its sleeve. MacRumors, MacDailyNews, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog are all saying a tipster spilled the beans about a $129-a-year iTunes service that would piggyback on Apple’s MobileMe service.

The iTunes Store might soon have a yearly subscription option for $129 a year.

The reports are all eerily similar, suggesting that accurate or not, all the sites heard from the same source. Under the new service, Apple would offer unlimited access to half of its iTunes Store–as of an October launch–for $129 a year, or $179 for an iTunes/MobileMe combo deal, in the U.S. only. If you’re already a MobileMe subscriber, you’ll only have to fork over $99.99 for the subscription service, perhaps as a mea culpa for this summer’s disastrous MobileMe launch.

Three
Mac rumors sites have received anonymous tips that Apple is getting ready to introduce a subscription iTunes service in September.

This service introduction would also reportedly include an expanded MobileMe service that would let you access “the cloud” (Apple calls it iDisk) from your
iPhone or
iPod Touch.

While we’re on this track, let me be the first to revive–based on absolutely nothing–the Beatles on iTunes rumors for September. It has to happen one of these days.

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Apple)

Rumors of an iTunes subscription service are not new; I found reports dating back to 2005 that Apple was getting ready to introduce such a thing. CEO Steve Jobs has historically pooh-poohed the idea of rental music–and such services haven’t exactly taken the world by storm–but Jobs has also said he wasn’t crazy about video-playing iPods and Apple-designed mobile phones, either.

On the
Mac side, there were only a couple of demo Macs–and those were just 15 percent off. However, there were copies of .Mac for 40 percent off the standard $99 price as well as the chance to get AppleCare extended warranties for half the usual price. For those who happen to need a MagSafe power adapter, there was a basket of those located several paces from the now-abandoned Apple Shop.

With the CompUSA liquidation in full swing, some of the deals at closing stores have started to get quite interesting.

Included among the Vista copies were several of the Bill Gates-signed limited edition Ultimate version.

Speaking of cables, there was also a section that seemed like the dregs from the repair shop featuring a ton of power bricks, cords, and remote controls. It’s not for everyone, but if you’ve been missing a cord and don’t mind rummaging, there might be something up your alley.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

The hardware was not necessarily much of a bargain. During a recent stroll through the downtown San Francisco store, I found desktops and notebooks discounted 20 percent, and in many cases there was only a well-used demo model for sale. There were also printers (some new in boxes and some demo machines), but I suspect one can get a PC or printer for a better price just by shopping the weekend circulars.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

The real bargains were in the software area. While PCs and printers get used, scuffed, and outdated sitting on store shelves, software stays pretty much the same inside its nearly empty box.

A cage full of Vista and Office copies–all 40 percent off.

There wasn’t a ton of pro software on either the Mac or PC side, though I did notice several copies of Final Cut Studio 2 in one of the cages.

There weren't many Apple accessories, but they did have a bunch of MagSafe power adapters.

If the business of liquidating stores is a science, with its practitioners knowing just when to drop the discounts a little further, buying from such sales is an art. I’m sure there are plenty of artists out there. What was your best find?

It’s worth noting that not all of the CompUSA stores are closing for good. Systemax acquired the CompUSA name and plans to keep open up to 16 of the stores, also rebranding some of its TigerDirect retail stores with the CompUSA name.

There were many varieties of Office 2007 as well as many flavors of Windows Vista–all for 40 percent off. There was even a stack of the special Bill Gates-signed limited edition version of Vista Ultimate. On the Office front, there was everything from Office Ultimate for the Home and Student to copies of individual programs such as Word and OneNote.

…and everything that comes with it.

commentary

Leading this market transformation is Sun Microsystems. Open-source databases (PostgreSQL and, especially, MySQL) may get a significant boost from Sun’s involvement:

Yes, the open-source database market is still relatively small (roughly $200 million in 2007, according to Gartner). But when The Wall Street Journal starts paying attention (subscription required), it’s clear that the opportunity is huge. The Journal doesn’t get paid to be sentimental.

Such improvements now fall to Sun Microsystems Inc., which earlier this year paid $1 billion to purchase MySQL AB, developer of the product. Marten Mickos, senior vice president of Sun’s database group and the former chief executive of MySQL, says Sun is taking a variety of steps so users can add more data, sort it faster and get access to information more quickly.

Regardless, as Arjen Lentz opines,

…(D)isruptive technology tends to not take over the incumbent’s market, but find or develop a completely new market, and indeed take over in that space. The question then is, does the incumbent’s market remain intact, or does it change/evolve naturally and perhaps shrink or even completely disappear over time. Generally, the market-dominant incumbent continues to survive in a niche (where they are obviously dominant, but no longer in the market overall). In short, the market changes and with it its rules and demands.

This is also why Sun is increasingly playing the leadership role in open source. I’ve opined before that MySQL could become the hub of the open-source ecosystem, just as Oracle has built itself into the hub of a significant proprietary ecosystem. Assuming Sun can execute against its ambitions with MySQL (a big “if” right now, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of a doubt), Sun could corral this rising open-source database tide…

The question now is how quickly such (open-source database) products can be enhanced to become credible contenders to take on the biggest jobs in the enterprise. Mr. Slater of LiveOps says he is interested in features from MySQL, for example, the ability to partition data–to create subsections with only specific information categories, such as months or years–which can be faster to search than large database tables storing many kinds of information.

Dow Jones is pitching the service as a generalized tool for analyzing the impact of media coverage, and targeting corporations, as well as political candidates, who need competitive insight. Other services, such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics and BuzzLogic, provide similar kinds of media analysis based on parsing a variety of document types.

Favorable and unfavorable ratings are assigned based on the words in proximity to a candidate's name. Neutral documents are excluded.

via Paul Kedrosky

Differences in domestic issue coverage between Obama and Clinton is negligible, while "terrorism" and "health care" show a noticeable difference. Obama has more mentions in close proximity to terrorism to Clinton's edge in health care.

Dow Jones Insight is applying text analysis to thousands of documents to measure trends, such as favorability and issue coverage of the presidential candidates over time. In the first example below, Dow Jones Insight parsed 26,435 documents, including English language newspapers, magazine, transcripts from broadcasts and news wire services.

(Credit:
Dow Jones Insight)

(Credit:
Dow Jones Insight)

One example: a search for “revolutionary technological developments in history” shows a variety of other searches at the bottom of the page. Among them are searches relating to the American Revolution and the agricultural revolution, neither of which appear in the top 10 results.

“We try to understand what’s the meaning of the query, the context of the query,” Allon said. “We can do a better job of generating refinements that let users hopefully get to results they want.”

“We noticed that people who don’t find what they want in top 10 results tend to use refinements,” Allon said, scrolling up and down and looking beyond the first page of results. With the better search refinements, “We witnessed a significant increase of people who find what they want.”

Google on Tuesday announced it has broadly released changes that it expects will produce better results for complicated searches.

A search for 'revolutionary technological developments in history' shows these other searches at the bottom of the search results.

Allon and Ken Wilder, an engineer with Google’s snippets team, described the changes in a blog post Tuesday.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Though Google’s search refinements appear in a separate section today, Allon didn’t rule out blending the information directly into the search results themselves. “We are working on future development of this, but there’s nothing we can announce today,” he said. “This is not the only improvement we have.”

The changes show the difficulties that contenders in the search arena face in trying to get an edge over Google. Wolfram Research, for example, plans to reveal a search technology called Wolfram Alpha in May that’s specifically designed to handle longer questions people might ask a search engine, and some of Google’s new changes appear to help the company with that sort of query.

In addition, for longer queries, Google is showing more information in the “snippets” of text included with each search result so people can better judge each site.

The technology works by analyzing the content of Web pages that appear related to the query and determining from those pages the “entities” such as people, places, or concepts that are related to the query. Sometimes it would then offer suggested new searches in a “search refinements” section that appears at the bottom or top of the list of results, said Ori Allon, technical lead for the company’s search quality team, in an interview. The processing occurs during the fraction of a second Google takes to return search results.

Google offered search refinements in the past, but mostly only in English. Now they’ll show with “most searches,” and in all 37 languages Google supports, Allon said. The technology helps more with long, complicated queries, but it works on simple ones, too, he added.

“We feel that with longer snippets, you get a better understanding of what the site is about and whether you should click through,” Allon said. “We noticed with longer snippets, people (less often) click and come back because they didn’t find what they want.”

Google has found in its testing that the search refinements help in the real world.

CNET News.com’s Marguerite Reardon contributed to this report.

“Equally as important as the network is the device through which a customer experiences it. AT&T’s handset portfolio in company-owned stores is more than 75 percent 3G-capable–and will be even more enticing with the addition of more 3G-enabled smartphones in the summer and fall of 2008. Additionally, AT&T also has the most compelling set of 3G services, such as AT&T Video ShareSM, which allows users to share live video over wireless phones while on a voice call.”

AT&T has been adding new 3G handsets to its retail lineup to take advantage of the new supercharged network. The company, which is Apple’s U.S. mobile carrier, had this to say:

No mention of the iPhone in AT&T’s press release, but that’s going to be Steve Jobs’ task at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in a few weeks–or at least that’s the rumor.

Update at 8:35 a.m. PDT: More details have been added throughout.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it is only six cities away from reaching its goal of faster 3G uploads in 275 cities. AT&T has already deployed faster 3G download technology in these cities, and by the end of June, these markets will also have the faster upload speeds using a technology called HSUPA, or High Speed Uplink Packet Access. This means that AT&T wireless data subscribers will be able to get downloads of 1.4 megabits per second and uploads of between 500 kilobits per second and 800 kilobits per second.

But AT&T isn’t stopping with 275 markets. By year’s end, it expects to reach 350 cities with these faster upload and download speeds. And as future releases of the HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) 3G wireless technology become available, even faster speeds are expected in 2009.

For some reason, this hasn’t drawn a ton of attention. But AT&T is edging closer to completing a 3G upgrade just in time in for the rumored release of a 3G
iPhone next month.