The Earth’s shadow will creep across the moon’s surface early Tuesday, slowly eclipsing it and turning it to shades of orange and red.
The total lunar eclipse, the second this year, will be visible in North and South America, especially in the West. People in the Pacific islands, eastern Asia, Australia and New Zealand also will be able to view it if skies are clear.
People in Europe, Africa or the Middle East, who had the best view of the last total lunar eclipse in March, will not see this one because the moon will have set when the partial eclipse begins at 4:51 a.m. EDT (0851 GMT). The full eclipse will begin an hour later at 5:52 a.m. EDT (0952 GMT).
An eclipse occurs when Earth passes between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun’s light. It is rare because the moon is usually either above or below the plane of Earth’s orbit.
Since the Earth is bigger than the moon, the process of the Earth’s shadow taking a bigger and bigger “bite” out of the moon, totally eclipsing it before the shadow recedes, lasts about 3 1/2 hours, said Doug Duncan, director of the University of Colorado’s Fiske Planetarium. The total eclipse phase, in which the moon has an orange or reddish glow, lasts about 1 1/2 hours.
The full eclipse will be visible across the United States, but East Coast viewers will only have about a half-hour to see it before the sun begins to rise and the moon sets. Skywatchers in the West will get the full show.
In eastern Asia, the moon will rise in various stages of eclipse.
During the full eclipse, the moon will not be completely dark because some light still reaches it around the edges of the Earth. The light is refracted as it passes through our atmosphere, scattering blue light - which is why the sky is blue - but sending reddish light onto the moon.
“When someone asks why is it (the moon) red, you can say because the sky is blue,” Duncan said.
The next total lunar eclipse occurs Feb. 21, 2008, and will be visible from the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Total Lunar Eclipse Coming Early Tuesday
Acer Aces Gateway Computer Deal
Acer Inc. plans to acquire U.S. computer maker Gateway Inc. for $710 million in a deal that will push the Taiwanese company past China’s Lenovo Group as the world’s third largest vendor of personal computers.
Acer said Monday it is offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 per share in a deal expected to close by December, pending regulatory approvals in Taiwan and the U.S.
The offer price amounts to a premium of 57 percent to Gateway’s Friday closing price of $1.21. Gateway traded at $81.50 in 1999.
The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Gateway and Acer and is subject to standard closing conditions, it said.
The deal will create a multi-branded computer company with over $15 billion in revenues and shipments in excess of 20 million units per year, Acer said in the statement.
“This strategic transaction is an important milestone in Acer’s long history,” said J.T. Wang, Acer’s chairman, in the statement. “This will be an excellent addition to Acer’s already strong positions in Europe and Asia.”
Acer President Gianfranco Lanci said the acquisition will allow Acer to implement an “effective multi-brand strategy and cover all the major market segments.”
The takeover will result in reductions in per unit procurement and component costs, and also create an opportunity for the cross-selling of product portfolios, he added.
Ed Coleman, chief executive of Gateway, welcomed the buyout.
“Joining with Acer will enable us to bring even more value to the consumer segments we serve and capitalize on Acer’s highly regarded supply chain operations and global reach,” he said in the statement.
In the second quarter, Acer was the world’s fourth-largest PC maker behind U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard, No. 2 Dell, and third-ranked Lenovo Group Ltd. of China, according to research company Gartner Inc. Irvine, California-based Gateway is the third-largest PC vendor in the U.S. by market share after Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.
Bryan Ma, an analyst at U.S. market research firm IDC, told Dow Jones Newswires that Acer’s acquisition of Gateway is expected help the Taiwan company’s relatively weak presence in the U.S.
“Acer ranked sixth in the U.S. market, while Gateway ranked third as of the second quarter. Combined, they are expected to double their shipments,” he said.
Citigroup Inc. is the financial adviser for Acer, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is acting as the financial adviser for Gateway.
Companies pay motorists to wrap their cars in ads
Brian Morris, who owns a pool repair company, uses his trucks to advertise. (Jeff Topping for The New York Times)
NEW YORK: Some companies pay millions to have their logos on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s race car, but others prefer to pay Brian Katz $500 or more a month for space on his Ford Expedition.
Katz, 32, of New York is one of the tens of thousands of motorists who have signed up to have their cars and trucks wrapped in advertisements in exchange for a stipend of up to $800 a month.
These offers are becoming so popular that car owners have been willing to limit where they shop and abide by a code of conduct while they are behind the wheel.
Even with the restrictions, a free car or a hefty subsidy is attractive to motorists like Katz. “One of my friends read something about someone giving away free cars for being a moving advertisement, which didn't sound like anything that could actually happen,” Katz said, adding that it struck him as “a little shady.”
The idea is not limited to the United States. In Germany and Austria, for example, a company called LaudaMotion, set up by the former Formula One race car driver Niki Lauda, operates with a similar business model. Customers are provided with Smart cars or other small vehicles on a rental basis, for prices of as little as €1, or $1.37, a day if they agree to drive a vehicle decked out with advertising. LaudaMotion says advertisers have included McDonald's and Visa.
Bayer HealthCare has made about 1,000 cars available to pharmacists in Germany at favorable leasing rates if they agree to display ads for Bayer aspirin on them.
Vehicle wrapping started, by most accounts, in 1993, when PepsiCo bought the rights to paint six city buses in Seattle with its logo.
Pepsi planned to put the buses in a paint shop for six weeks, but Louis Hoffman, general manager for a Seattle printing company called SuperGraphics, persuaded Pepsi to have the buses wrapped instead with a vinyl material made by 3M that could be applied in less than two days. (Now it takes just a few hours.)
3M, which remains the largest producer of the material, uses an adhesive similar to the one on its Post-It notes, enabling installers to place vinyl strips on a vehicle that do not stick until pressure is applied. The material is popular for wrapping race cars, helicopters, planes, boats and even buildings. Far from hurting the paint job, the wrap preserves it.
ARD Ventures, a venture capital firm, has studied the phenomenon of wrapped cars and estimates that a single vehicle's advertising message is viewed by motorists and pedestrians as many as 70,000 times a day.
Katz was matched with his advertisers by FreeCar Media, an advertising agency in Los Angeles that claims to have a database of more than one million car owners who say they are open to wrapping their cars in ads for a fee, according to Drew Livingston, the president of the company.
The sponsor also pays as much as $5,000 a car for the wrap job.
Generally, a car can qualify if it has enough surface area for a sizable ad and is no more than five years old.
“A company like Procter & Gamble will come to us and say, 'We have a new and improved Tide, and our target is stay-at-home moms with two-plus children who live in these 20 markets,' ” said Livingston, whose company then finds drivers in that demographic. “We feel that when you can wrap a mom's car and get it to her PTA meeting or Curves gym, you're getting the acceptance from her social circle.”
The company either gives its brand ambassadors free cars or, more often, pays them as much as $800 a month. In the past seven years, FreeCar Media has hired about 7,000 motorists, who are instructed to park outside whenever possible, refrain from smoking, littering or swearing in their vehicle, and attend a monthly event where they hand out samples or coupons. They also have to send reports frequently with photographs to show where their car has been.
People whose cars were wrapped with ads for two Coca-Cola products - Planet Java, a bottled coffee, and Vault, an energy drink - were cautioned against sipping Pepsi products behind the wheel. Nor could they park at restaurant chains like KFC or Pizza Hut that serve Pepsi exclusively, Livingston said.
Some companies are taking mobile advertising into their own hands.
Brian Morris, the owner of We Fix Ugly Pools, a pool repair and construction company in Phoenix, Arizona, wrapped more than 30 vehicles in his fleet in ads for his company. He monitors how customers find him, and attributes more than $1 million in revenue over the past year to people seeing one of his trucks in a driveway.
Acer to acquire Gateway
TAIPEI: Acer said Monday that it planned to acquire the U.S. computer maker Gateway for $710 million, a move that would push the Taiwanese company past Lenovo of China as the world's third-largest vendor of personal computers.
Acer said it was offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 a share in a deal expected to close by December, pending regulatory approvals in Taiwan and the United States.
The offer price represents a premium of 57 percent to Gateway's Friday closing price of $1.21. Gateway traded at $81.50 in 1999. Gateway shares jumped nearly 49 percent, or 59 cents, to $1.80 Monday afternoon in New York.
The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Gateway and Acer and is subject to standard closing conditions, the companies said.
The deal will create a multibranded computer company with over $15 billion in revenue and shipments exceeding 20 million units per year, Acer said.
“This strategic transaction is an important milestone in Acer's long history,” said J.T. Wang, Acer's chairman, in a statement. “This will be an excellent addition to Acer's already strong positions in Europe and Asia.”
Ed Coleman, chief executive of Gateway, welcomed the buyout.
“Joining with Acer will enable us to bring even more value to the consumer segments we serve and capitalize on Acer's highly regarded supply chain operations and global reach,” he said.
In the second quarter, Acer was the world's fourth-largest PC maker behind Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo, according to the research company Gartner. Gateway, based in Irvine, California, is the third-largest PC vendor in the United States by market share after Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Asustek plans low-cost laptop
Asustek Computer, a leading Taiwanese computer maker, announced Monday that it would begin offering a low-price computer next month, becoming one of the first companies marketing an ultramobile product for the developing world, The Associated Press reported.
Created in conjunction with Intel, the Asustek laptop with a 7-inch screen will also come in a more sophisticated model that will target the developed world, said Jonney Shih, the company chairman.
“It will be a laptop that's easy to learn, easy to play and easy to work with,” Shih said during an interview.
A basic model will have a retail price of $199, while one with more features will sell for $245 to $299, he said.
The laptop will use the Linux operating system and carry the ASUS brand.
Intel and the nonprofit organization One Laptop Per Child have been working to bring inexpensive laptops to the most remote corners of the developing world.
Some analysts expect the ASUS laptop to sell well in the developed world because of its mobility and ease of use.
Micropayments arrive on the Web
SAN FRANCISCO: The idea of micropayments - charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content - was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom.
In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea. Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because “users hate them.”
But wait. Amid the disdain, and without many people noticing, micropayments have arrived - just not in the way they were originally envisioned. The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small Web sites earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.
“Micropayments are here,” said Benjamin Compaine, a consultant and lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston who specializes in media economics. “They just have not evolved in the way that everybody expected.”
From the earliest days of the Web until around the time of Shirky's manifesto, the expectation was that a handful of companies would provide platforms - or perhaps a single ubiquitous platform - that would enable Web users to pay a penny, a dime or a dollar for a bit of content such as a newspaper article, a comic strip or a research report. Simply clicking a link would complete the transaction.
Sellers of content - at the time, newspaper companies - were among the most interested in the idea as they looked for revenue that did not depend on advertising. And the Web, rather than being a threat to their business, would allow them to expand their audience vastly.
But the problems proved insurmountable. Many micropayments companies have shut down, been acquired or changed their business models over the years. Among them: DigiCash, CyberCash, First Virtual Holdings and Peppercoin. They used various systems, but in general users paid into accounts with their credit cards and then drew from those accounts.
The economic and technical challenges were enormous. Consumers were reluctant to pay even a tenth of a cent for something they believed should be free.
“There is a certain amount of anxiety involved in any decision to buy, no matter how small,” Shirky wrote in 2000.
It turns out, however, that consumers are more than willing to pay for certain types of content in certain situations. Consumers “expect to pay for music and movies, but not so much for the printed word,” said George Peabody, an analyst with Mercator Advisory Group, which serves the payments industry.
“Closed loop” systems like iTunes are the most successful, Peabody said. That's where consumers have a continuing relationship with the merchant and usually pay with their credit cards. “Open loop” systems, where the consumer pays many merchants through a single payments processor - the way micropayments were originally envisioned - are much less successful.
“To date, the market has said there is insufficient demand for these services,” concluded a research report Mercator published in April.
But cost is still a problem of closed-loop systems. The fees for every transaction are too high to make tiny payments worthwhile for many online content sellers. For most merchants, according to the report, purchases of less than $1.50 aren't worth it.
One solution is to aggregate purchases, or group purchases over a period of time, and then process the payments in a single transaction. That's how iTunes works. But credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard, which charge fees for transactions, “aren't really happy with that idea,” said Peabody, because it means less money for them.
Visa and MasterCard have recently promoted their efforts to serve the “small payments” market - encouraging consumers to use cards for parking meters, for example. But so far, they have stopped short of widely supporting aggregated-payment systems.
There are “operational challenges,” said Pam Zuercher, Visa's vice president for product innovation. Visa is evaluating such systems, she added.
Merchants can aggregate payments through another company, but that adds to costs and “implementation has been tough,” Peabody said.
Programs like AdSense from Google, which allows even the smallest Web publishers to have relevant ads placed on their sites, make micropayments unnecessary. The program pays Web publishers what are often very small amounts each time a reader clicks on an ad.
Looked at another way, AdSense is based on micropayments. “All the criteria are there,” said Compaine, the Northeastern University lecturer, “but the money isn't coming from the end user; it's coming from the advertisers.”
Samsung, Sprint in WiMax deal for NYC (AP)
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Samsung said in a statement it was chosen by Sprint Nextel to provide infrastructure for New York, part of the Reston, Va.-based wireless provider’s plan to launch the network in several U.S. cities based on an emerging mobile wireless technology called WiMax.
Sprint Nextel had already picked Samsung to provide infrastructure and equipment for similar networks planned for Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston and other cities.
“New York is an important milestone for Samsung as we continue to expand the deployment of (WiMax) technology around the world,” Choi Gee-sung, president of Samsung’s telecommunication network business, said in the statement.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Sprint will “go for a commercial launch of our service starting in Washington in April of next year,” said Barry West, president of the company’s WiMax business.
He added that service in other cities would follow “with New York probably in the fourth quarter of next year.”
Sprint Nextel said two weeks ago it would spend $5 billion through 2010 on the WiMax network, to be sold under the brand Xohm. It also said it expects the network, which promises fast wireless broadband connections and mobile roaming at high speeds, to generate between $2 billion and $2.5 billion in revenue by that time.
The costs could have been higher, but Sprint Nextel last month said it would team up with competing provider Clearwire Corp. to help build the WiMax network, reducing the company’s outlay by up to 70 percent.
Similar to the Wi-Fi technology used in airports and coffee shops, WiMax, short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, can provide coverage to much larger areas.
Besides Samsung and Clearwire, U.S. companies Intel Corp. and Motorola Inc. are cooperating with Sprint Nextel, which has operational headquarters in Overland Park, Kan., to commercialize the technology in the United States.
Sprint Nextel and Clearwire said last month that 100 million people would have access to the service by the end of 2008.
Microsoft to boost charity in India (AP)
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The software donation will be routed through a technology assistance program that India’s NASSCOM Foundation is offering in partnership with TechSoup, a San Francisco-based group that partners in charity work with companies like Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Symantec.
NASSCOM Foundation, the philanthropy arm of the trade body of technology companies operating in India, introduced the program Monday — titled BiG Tech.
BiG Tech is a Web-based program that allows nonprofits to apply for free software online. The foundation will charge a fee of up to 4 percent to the nonprofit groups.
Nearly 35,000 nonprofit groups in India will be eligible for such software donations.
Microsoft sees BiG Tech as another opportunity to push its India strategy that has often tied business moves with philanthropy.
“We think it is going to make a big impact in India,” said Neelam Dhawan, managing director at Microsoft India.
Microsoft is a major donor for TechSoup, which runs or partners similar technology assistance programs across 25 countries outside the United States.
In the fiscal year 2008, TechSoup aims to distribute $55 million worth of software. The group sees “an extraordinary opportunity in India,” said Mike Yeaton, its global director.
Yeaton said the BiG Tech program also offers an opportunity for Indian technology companies to channel their charity through TechSoup to countries in other parts of the world.
U.S. gives Time Warner go-ahead to buy Tacoda (Reuters)
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The Federal Trade Commission said in a statement that officials had looked into the proposed merger and had no objections to it.
The merger, announced on July 24, is the latest acquisition by AOL as it seeks to move away from its Internet access business and instead offer consumers free services supported by ads.
Tacoda's technology allows advertisers to target specific audience segments based on the kinds of sites they have visited on the Web.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed by the companies. A person familiar with the situation said in July that AOL was paying $275 million for Tacoda.
Web media and technology companies have created a lively auction for online ad firms, including Google Inc's proposed purchase of DoubleClick and Microsoft Corp's planned acquisition of aQuantive Inc.
(Reporting by Diane Bartz)
New Version of Yahoo Mail Exits Beta (NewsFactor)
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The new version of Yahoo Mail lets users send free text messages from their e-mail accounts to mobile phones with numbers based in the U.S., Canada, India, or the Philippines, and instant messages to Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger.
The new service includes several speed and productivity enhancements, including advanced search options and new color schemes. Users can right-click on links — such as keywords, dates, or names — and immediately be able to choose relevant shortcuts such as adding events to the calendar or friends to the contact list.
More Social E-Mail
John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo's e-mail service, said that the changes will help Yahoo Mail become "a more social" e-mail experience. In fact, the company is pointing out the Web 2.0 features of the application to emphasize not only its social aspects but also the fact that the service now works more like a desktop application.
The new features include tabbed navigation, a reading pane, an RSS reader, and a more functional calendar. For those users who prefer the old ways, a classic version of Yahoo Mail is still available. Both the new version and the classic version remain free.
The additions to Yahoo Mail are intended to shore up its position against its biggest competitors: Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail. Yahoo competes against those two companies on several fronts, including search, advertising, and various information services.
Yahoo said that as part of its positioning, its new e-mail version will be cobranded with various partners, resulting in Verizon Yahoo, AT&T Yahoo High Speed Internet, and Rogers Yahoo Hi-Speed Internet.
'Leveraging Presence'
Many people currently view e-mail as the main business communication tool for electronic media, said Chris Hazelton, an analyst with industry research firm IDC. But SMS is also a sort of mini-e-mail, he noted, and its integration into Yahoo Mail and other applications could lead people to see it as another form of mobile business communication.
Including IM-sending in an e-mail service without requiring a dedicated IM client is part of a larger trend toward "leveraging presence," Hazelton pointed out. Because IM shows who is online, it begins to give a new, "live" dimension to classic, static e-mail.
As it moves into its second decade, Yahoo Mail's real-time communication features could create new expectations for such services from other companies, as consumers and business users might expect to track or be tracked continually, by IM and other real-time communications.
Pano Logic virtual desktops run without software (InfoWorld)
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The Pano device, a small silver cube announced by Pano Logic, a privately held company in Menlo Park, California, has no CPU, memory, software drivers or OS, the company said. Instead, the device connects a user's keyboard, mouse, display and other peripherals connected by USB (Universal Serial Bus) to a version of Microsoft Corp. Windows Vista or XP running on a remote server.
By reducing the amount of processing and data storage performed on each user's desktop, the approach is similar to thin-client PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co., Wyse Technology and Neoware Inc. and PC blades sold by ClearCube Technology Inc. Those vendors all say that users can increase IT security by storing crucial data on remote servers and save on PC management costs by allowing administrators to update software on a centralized server instead of multiple machines.
Pano Logic says its approach improves on the model by stripping even the most basic processors and local storage devices from the desktop hardware, relying on a virtualized server running software from VMWare Inc. and Pano's server application. Without software, the Pano device is immune to worms and viruses and without a processor it consumes only 5 watts of power, a fraction of the typical PC electric draw, the company said.
Pano Logic is likely to find an audience eager to hear about products that deal with those issues, one analyst said.
"The goal for a lot of companies using products from the virtualization and software-as-a-service sectors is to do more with less, to get greater functionality without burdening the customer and without having so much software to install and maintain," said Jeff Kaplan, managing director of ThinkStrategies Inc.
"There's no question that customers are becoming more aware and more willing to adopt these solutions, because they're seeing that products like can be more secure and more stable than their own in-house applications. So there's a good chance they could be safer and more productive."
Pano Logic could quickly see its market spread beyond traditional thin-client PC users in vertical segments like banking and health care, Kaplan said.
"We're seeing an evolution of the technology; it's been proven to work. And we're seeing an evolution in the way of thinking by customers, as they're willing to try the technology for its benefits in security and cost of management," he said.
Pano Logic will sell the Pano devices beginning in September for subscription prices beginning at US$20 per month.
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