Microsoft database revamp

Microsoft has just introduced a lower cost version of its database software, a move that could lead to further price cuts in the database market.

The New York Times reports (24 Feb.) that Microsoft plans to introduce SQL Server 2000 Workgroup, a version for small businesses priced at US$3,899 per processor, in the first half of this year. It will also add several features to the upcoming SQL Server 2005 update, which is due in the US summer, and extend a reselling relationship with Dell, which will allow its customers to get support from the PC maker.

Microsoft had previously planned to ship SQL Server 2005 in the second half of last year. It had to push back the delivery date of the update and an accompanying Visual Studio 2005 development tool to this summer. The company plans to initiate a third beta, or testing, program for the overhauled database by the end of March. The beta will be open to all.

The paper reports that Microsoft has said that the lower-priced product and features were driven by customer requests rather than as a reaction to competitors. Customers and partners were seeking a database that was more functional than its free product but less expensive that the standard edition of SQL Server. Microsoft also sought to make high-end features more broadly available. But, he said that Microsoft is comfortable competing on the overall value of its database.

According to the NYT., an Oracle representative was not immediately available for comment and IBM declined to comment.

Britain launches internet virus alert service

Britain has just launched a web site aimed at helping computer users avoid damage from internet viruses and other online threats.

The New York Times/Reuters report (24 Feb.) that the government-funded IT Security Awareness for Everyone site (www.itsafe.gov.uk) will give free advice on data protection and issue virus alerts to those who sign up.

E-mail or text alerts will direct users toward step-by-step guides on how to deal with any problem, says the paper/Reuters, and the site will use information provided by the National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Center (NISCC).

The NYT says more than half of UK households had a home computer in 2002, according to the Office for National Statistics, and in the third quarter of 2004, 52 percent of UK households could access the internet from home, compared with just nine percent in the same quarter of 1998.

Apple adds new models to iPod line

Apple Computer has introduced new versions of its hugely popular digital music player, including an iPod mini that can store more songs, and also cut the price of the current iPod mini model in a bid to boost its share of the market.

The New York Times/Reuters report that Apple now has a range of iPods addressing the full spectrum of the digital music player market, from its US$99 iPod Shuffle player to its US$449 iPod photo model with a color screen.

California-based Apple unveiled a new ``iPod mini'' that holds 6 gigabytes of music -- or about 1,500 songs -- and will sell for about US$250, while it cut the price of its 4 gigabyte or 1,000-song model, introduced about one year ago, to about US$200.

According to the NYT., the company said the 4 gigabyte model's US$200 price, down from its previous price of about US$250, will appeal more broadly to consumers. The new mini also has improved battery life of up to 18 hours.

But, the paper says Some analysts have expressed concern that with an increasing percentage of total sales coming from iPod sales, it could hurt Apple's profit margins because the iPods are less profitable than its signature Macintosh computers.

But others have said overall margins should remain steady, helped by declining component costs. In Apple's most recent quarter, sales of the iPod, songs from its iTunes online music store and iPod accessories accounted for 40 percent of total sales.

Apple also introduced an "iPod photo" model with 30 gigabytes of memory at around US$350, and offered an add-on that allows users to transfer pictures from a digital camera directly into the music player, which has a color screen.

Apple is the No. 1 seller of portable digital music players -- often called MP3 players -- that allow users to carry thousand of songs on a device smaller than a wallet. According to Banc of America Securities, Apple's share of the MP3 player market rose to 40.2 percent in the December quarter, up from 37.5 percent in the September quarter.

While Apple doubled its market share in the last year to about 60 percent from about 30 percent, according to market research firm NPD Group, the market is becoming ever more crowded and competitive, according to Apple executive and reported by the NYT.Apple also debuted an iPod Camera Connector, to sell for about US$30, that transfers digital photographs from a camera to the iPod.

Nokia: China rapidly becoming biggest market

Nokia, the world's biggest seller of mobile telephones, expects China may soon overtake the United States as its biggest market, the company has forecast.

Sales in China now make up 10 percent of the total revenue of Nokia, second only to the United States with 13 percent, but rapid growth will probably push China beyond that, according to Nokia's chief executive who has beden ona visit to Beijing.

The New York Times reports (24 Feb.) that Nokia said that last year, the company's sales in China grew 44 percent, to US$3.6 billion; its exports of telecommunications equipment from China grew 56 percent, to US$3.3 billion; and its share of China's mobile phone market rose to as much as 22 percent, from about 17 percent in 2002.

Nokia told the NYT that it expected that strong growth to continue, adding that China was likely to account for a quarter of new mobile phone users worldwide over the next five years as its subscribers grow to 700 million, from 330 million.

Tech giants in US courts over China IP theft

China's new electronics companies, lured by riches in foreign markets, are feeling the bite of well-honed patent protection systems that have become effective weapons of business war for their competitors, reports The New York Times/Reuters.

The paper says such lawsuits filed in the US would have been considered little more than a nuisance by Chinese firms just two years ago, carrying little or no clout in China.Multinationals are reluctant to file patent lawsuits in China, where intellectual property (IP) laws are new and the courts lack experience handling such cases.

However, the NYT says that with China's exports of machinery and high tech goods reaching US$490 billion last year, up 45 percent from 2003, the threat of being shut out of lucrative western markets has become a potent deterrent against IP theft by Chinese companies, according to experts.

In January, US chip designer SigmaTel sued Zhuhai, China-based Actions Semiconductor in Texas. Weeks later, SigmaTel announced a settlement with Actions co-defendant US-based Sonic Impact, which was using the Chinese firm's chips in its MP3 players.

The NYT further reports that attorneys said the number of IP lawsuits in the US was relatively small, in the dozens each year, but they added the number was growing quickly as companies try to nip new competition from China in the bud and avoid losing market share the way they did to aggressive competitors from Japan and later South Korea starting in the 1970s.

In one of the most high profile cases to date, and one at the head of the recent wave, Cisco Systems in 2003 sued Chinese rising tech star Huawei Technologies in Texas for alleged IP theft. The two companies settled the case later that year.

Sony puts pizza ordering in videogames

Demonstrating a deep understanding of what its computer-gaming audience, Sony has built the ability to order pizza into its latest online multiplayer game.

The New York Times/AP report (24 Feb.) that if a user of the Sony gadget types the command "/pizza" while playing Everquest II, a fantasy game with 330,000 active players, and gets the Pizza Hut Web site, they can place orders for delivery.

Sony Online Entertainment, said it believed this is the first time a game accepts orders for real-world items, and it plans to integrate the pizza function more tightly into the game, so players can charge pizza to their monthly game subscription bill.

Spam costing world $64 billion

Spam is burning a US$50 billion ($64 billion) hole in the global economy, a US-based research firm has said.

The AustralianIT reports that spam's financial impact would result from worker productivity losses and resources set aside by IT departments to deal with the problem, according to a new report from Ferris Research.

Spam erodes productivity becuase workers are forced spend time scanning their email boxes for spam or may incorrectly delete messages, the report says.

However Ferris researchers said that advances anti-spam technology had helped defray the cost of spam, reported The Australian.

The paper reports that Ferris said that spam costs were expected to highest in economies where labour was most expensive. Among the world's largest economies, the US, Canada and Germany suffered the greatest impact from spam.

Ferris estimated that the United States - which is losing $US17 billion per year as a result of spam - would spend $US59 per capita to deal with the unsolicited email. Canada and Germany suffered the next highest spam costs paying $US51 and $US55 per head respectively.

$12m Vic contracts stay with Unisys

IT services group Unisys has re-secured Victorian government managed services contracts worth $12 million over three years.

The AustralianIT reports that Unisys had been the incumbent supplier to the Departments of Treasury and Finance and Premier and Cabinet, but secured the work for another three years after a competitive tender process.

The new agreements will see the range of services provided by Unisys expanded to include disaster recovery, process improvement and consulting, according to the paper.

The paper says the agreement also sees Unisys continue to provide support to around 1300 users across five sites in central Melbourne.

Dell decides against AMD, sticks with Intel

Dell considered building PCs with chips from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) but now says it aims to keep Intel as its sole supplier.

The New York Times/Reuters report (24 Feb.) that Dell dashed expectations that the company would eventually use both Intel and AMD chips in its personal computers.

For now, Dell remains the only major PC maker worldwide to build PCs exclusively using Intel microprocessors, says the paper.
The NYT says AMD, which made its name as a supplier of inexpensive Intel clones, gained momentum last year by introducing technologies ahead of its arch-rival. It was also helped by a string of missteps by Intel, which had to delay, cancel and recall products after design and manufacturing glitches.

Those gains had led many on Wall Street to expect Dell would eventually budge and begin to sell PCs based on AMD's chips.

The paper says Intel, however, has regained its footing, and is on track to introduce several important new features in its chips ahead of schedule.

A Dell spokesman said that Intel has responded and had played catch up over the past year to match innovations introduced by AMD. That was now beginning to put the company's customers more at ease that they don't need to make a shift.

The NYT also reports that, as evidence of the company's strength, Dell separately announced that it was beginning construction of its third major manufacturing facility in the United States.

The plant, in North Carolina, makes it unique among PC makers and most other US manufacturers. Dell said it plans to hire 1,500 workers at the plant within five years.

The NYT reports that Dell is expanding domestically while most US manufacturers race to set-up facilities in lower-cost regions of the globe such as China or Mexico.

Google unveils movie showtime search

Google has just announced that movie showtimes are now available on its leading web search engine and can be accessed via personal computers or mobile phones and other wireless devices that use short-message service.

The New York Times/Reuters report (24 feb.) that the new feature also provides information such as theatre locations and reviews, and enables users to search for movies by title, plot or genre.

Competitor Yahoo, which is making a big move into entertainment, offers such data as movie showtimes, theatre locations, reviews and ticketing purchasing through its Yahoo Movies section, reports the paper

Users of web-enabled mobile phones also can use Yahoo Movies to search by movie name or to find out what's playing at nearby theaters.

The NYT report says Google, Yahoo and most recently Microsoft's MSN internet unit are battling to offer the most comprehensive Web search products since those services fuel fast-growing advertising revenues.

US breach: flaws in privacy laws

The recently disclosed privacy breach at the US data collection giant ChoicePoint, in which con artists gained access to the Social Security numbers, addresses and other personal data of nearly 145,000 people, has exposed the shortcomings of the laws governing the data-mining industry and consumer privacy.

The New York Times reports (24 Feb.) that the company has mailed notification letters to the people whose privacy is known to have been compromised, and at least one lawsuit has been filed seeking class-action status for consumers whose information was leaked. And a Nigerian man in Los Angeles has been sentenced to 16 months in California state prison for his role in the fraud after pleading no contest to a single count of unlawful use of personal information.

But, says the NYT., whatever the specific legal fallout of the ChoicePoint breach, the bigger effect may be its exposure of the patchwork of sometimes conflicting US state and federal rules that govern consumer privacy and commercial data vendors. In recent days, state and federal regulators and lawmakers have started calling for an updating of those rules, which never envisioned the current power of data gatherers to amass and distribute vast digital dossiers on ordinary citizens.

The paper says that if a person has held a job, held a lease, obtained a driver's license, carried a credit card, been fingerprinted, taken a drug test, gone to court, or simply received mail - odds are that those and many other of his or her recordable details are now stored in one or more consumer databases and available for sale. Beyond fraud artists, the buyers might be landlords, prospective employers or other customers of ChoicePoint, LexisNexis and the other big data brokers that offer one-stop shopping for clients seeking background data on tens of millions of individuals.

Critics say the current laws, in focusing too closely on industry-specific uses of information, like credit reports or medical data, rather than on protecting the privacy of the individuals in the databases, have failed to keep pace with the emergence of such data miners, according to the paper.

The NYT says that in the seven years since the founding of ChoicePoint, the company has gobbled up dozens of smaller data-collection companies, expanded its client base by tens of thousands, and compiled billions of details on American consumers. The company had net income of US$242 million last year on revenue of US$919 million.

But ChoicePoint's 19 billion public and private records are aimed at - and accessible, in varying degrees - to a relatively wide client base that includes insurance agencies and corporate employee screeners, check-cashing companies, media outlets (including The New York Times), private investigators, law enforcement officials and even the United States government. The company also markets low-cost, online public-records access to individuals.

No one law or government authority oversees the commercial collection and distribution of such diverse information, adds the paper.

Cyber attacks hit Japanese government

A series of cyber attacks disrupted Japanese government computer networks this week, although no damage was reported, Japan's top government spokesman has said.

A report by The New York Times/AP (24 Feb.) says that the attacks, seen three times each on Tuesday and Wednesday, targeted the Prime Minister's Office and the Cabinet Office, causing computers to freeze up under a deluge of data and made it impossible for anyone to access the two Web sites.

But, the paper quotes a government spokesman as saying there was no significant damage, since the attacks were not designed to destroy key programs, and the government networks have returned to normal operations.

Officials are investigating who launched the attack, but are having trouble tracking the data and determining whether the attack came from inside or outside the country, the NYT reports.