LONDON: Liberty Global, a U.S. owner of cable television systems, said Monday that it was considering a bid for Virgin Media, one of the biggest pay-TV companies in Britain.

“We see it as our duty to evaluate all opportunities in broadband cable, including this one,” Bert Holtkamp, a spokesman in Europe for the company, said.

Liberty Global, based in Englewood, Colorado, and owner of the UPC broadband and TV service in Europe, is the second potential bidder and the first cable company to express an interest in Virgin Media.

Virgin Media put itself up for sale this month, saying that its bankers, Goldman Sachs, were evaluating an offer that had been received and would carry out a wider review of options.

“Liberty has a substantial expertise in running cable businesses and that would be important for Virgin Media,” said Chris Wynn, an analyst at Informa Telecoms, a research company in London. “It's a very strong asset and this shows it's not the case where it will just be private equity players now.”

Virgin Media has declined to name the initial bidder, but two people with direct knowledge of the talks said July 2 that Carlyle Group had approached Virgin Media about a possible $10.8 billion bid.

Shares of Virgin Media, traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, rose more than 3 percent following Liberty's announcement to trade around $25.50 in New York, giving the company a market value of about $8.24 billion.

In May, Virgin Media posted its seventh straight quarterly loss as subscribers defected to its larger competitor, British Sky Broadcasting. Virgin Media is involved in two disputes with BSkyB.

BSkyB bought an 18 percent stake last year in the British broadcaster ITV, blocking a bid attempt by Virgin Media. Richard Branson, a large shareholder in Virgin Media, said that BSkyB's media influence was “verging on dangerous” and that its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, was a “threat to democracy.”

In March, some BSkyB channels were dropped from Virgin Media's system after the two companies failed to agree on terms to extend their deal.

Virgin Media a month later sued BSkyB, saying it took advantage of its dominance in the media.

“In the past, we have not shown that much interest in the U.K. because of Sky's dominant role,” Holtkamp said. Liberty, a “consolidator in cable,” looks at all such assets, he said.

Liberty Global's interest was reported earlier by The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. Georgina Briscoe, a spokeswoman for Virgin Media in London, declined to comment.

Virgin Media's revenue reached £3.6 billion, or $7.3 billion, last year.

In Europe, Liberty Global already owns Cablecom in Switzerland, Telenet in Belgium, and Chellomedia, which owns 22 TV channels.

In the United States, it owns interests in QVC and Starz Entertainment.

continue reading.....

An Aqua Bounty Technologies worker with a genetically engineered salmon and a smaller, nontransgenic one of the same age. (Paul Darrow for The New York Times)

This little piggy's manure causes less pollution. This little piggy produces extra milk for her babies. And this little piggy makes fatty acids normally found in fish, so that eating its bacon might actually be good for you.

The three pigs, all now living in experimental farmyards, are among the genetically engineered animals whose meat might one day turn up on American dinner plates. Bioengineers have also developed salmon that grow to market weight in about half the typical time, disease-resistant cows and catfish needing fewer antibiotics, and goats whose milk might help ward off infections in children who drink it.

Only now, though, do U.S. officials seem to be getting serious about drafting rules that would determine whether and how such meat, milk and filets can safely enter the nation's food supply.

Some scientists and biotechnology executives say that by having the Food and Drug Administration spell out the rules of the game, big investors would finally be willing to put up money to create a market in so-called transgenic livestock.

“Right now, it's very hard to get any corporate investment,” said James Murray, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who developed the goats with the infection-fighting milk. “What studies do you need to do? What are they looking for?” he said, referring to government regulators. “That stuff's not there.”

But some experts caution that even if the clears the regulatory path in coming months, investors and agribusiness companies might still shy away. Many fear that consumers would shun foods from transgenic animals, sometimes referred to as genetically modified organisms, or 's.

“The companies we have spoken to have gone organic, and they are very concerned, at least up to the present time, of having associated with their name,” said Cecil Forsberg, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who helped developed the “Enviropig” with the cleaner manure. Smithfield Foods, for one, the world's largest hog producer and pork processor, says it is doing no research on genetically engineered animals.

Critics say changing the genes of animals could lead to potentially harmful changes in the composition of milk or meat, like the introduction of a protein that could cause allergic reactions. They say there could also be risks to the environment if, for example, extra-large salmon were to escape into oceans and out-compete wild salmon for food or mates. Some also say that some of the processes used to create transgenic livestock can harm the animals themselves.

The U.S. guidelines would come after more than 15 years of talks and false starts at the , a delay irking not only developers of the transgenic animals but also critics of biotechnology.

“The fact that the agency has sat there for years staring this problem in the face and really hasn't come up with a clear way to regulate this is abdicating its responsibilities,” said Joseph Mendelson, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group.

Even now, the will not say when the rules will be ready.

“We want to get it out, but we also want to get it right,” said Julie Zawisza, a spokeswoman for the agency, which declined to make any other officials available for comment.

Some industry executives and former and current government officials say one reason for the delay was that some government officials, in part because of a preference for fewer regulations, wanted less stringent rules than the is considering.

Meanwhile, the biotechnology industry is actually pushing for the tougher standards.

“Our overarching goal is to have public confidence in our products,” said Barbara Glenn, the managing director for animal issues at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group. “We won't have that unless we have a very strong review process.”

The is turning to transgenic animals after having tentatively declared in December that milk and meat from livestock that is cloned — but not otherwise genetically manipulated — was safe for people to eat.

The considers clones to be less biologically radical than genetically engineered animals — which instead of being mere replicas of naturally occurring animals are given foreign DNA, usually from another species.

Larisa Rudenko, a senior biotechnology adviser in the 's veterinary drug division, said in a May presentation at the biotechnology industry's annual convention that each new type of genetically engineered animal would require approval for use in the food supply. That will be done, she said, under the umbrella of existing rules for drugs used in treating animal diseases.

continue reading.....

An AMD executive described the EU's action as “a moment of truth” for the industry. (Matthias Rietschel/The Associated Press)

PARIS: In a case reminiscent of their legal battle with Microsoft, European Union antitrust regulators on Friday accused Intel of abusing its leading position in the market for computer chips to try to drive out competitors.

The European Commission said it had sent a charge sheet, known as a statement of objections, to Intel, asserting that the company used big cash rebates and other incentives to customers to try to undermine its main rival, AMD. Both companies, which are based in Silicon Valley, have big operations in Europe.

The rebates were “such a quantity, of such an amount” that they forced efficient rivals to price below cost, an EU spokesman, Ton van Lierop, said in Brussels.

“We think that the actions of Intel are bad news for competition and for consumers,” he said, according to news agencies.

The commission in 2004 found Microsoft guilty of abusing its dominant position with the Windows operating system and ordered changes that went well beyond an earlier settlement with the U.S. Justice Department.

An EU court is expected to rule on Microsoft's appeal of that decision in September.

Competition lawyers contrasted the commission's assertive stance with a more laissez faire attitude in the United States, saying the EU position underlined a desire to be seen as a defender of the consumer by shifting attention from merger reviews to more of a focus on monopoly and cartel issues.

“They have being saying for several years that they are going to be getting tougher on these types of matters and they have dedicated more attention to these types of issues,” said Dennis Oswell, managing partner of Oswell & Vahida, a law firm based in Brussels and specializing in anti-trust issues.

“Preventing mergers between big companies doesn't really make the average European citizen feel like their interests are being looked after - it's far too esoteric. I think there is an aspect of this that makes the commission seem a bit closer to the public.”

On Friday all leading parties in the dispute claimed to be acting on behalf of computer buyers, including Intel, which said its conduct was “lawful, pro-competitive, and beneficial to consumers.”

Jens Drews, the AMD director of government relations for Europe, responded, “For Intel to present itself as the champion of the consumer is like the fox saying he's the natural guardian of the hens.”

The charges announced Friday are the culmination of a lengthy inquiry which led to dramatic dawn raids in five countries in 2005.

The European Commission said Intel, the world's largest maker of microprocessors, had deliberately offered computer manufacturers inducements to favor its products over those from AMD as part of “a single overall anti-competitive strategy.”

In a statement, the commission said its preliminary conclusion was that Intel had given rebates to customers who bought its goods and had offered incentives to those that delayed or canceled the introduction of product lines incorporating chips made by their rival.

In addition it said that Intel had offered microchips for computer servers at prices below cost.

While Intel did not dispute the existence of a discount program, it maintained that it was not illegal and did not distort competition. In fact, Intel said that the discounts helped consumers by offering them lower prices.

Intel has 10 weeks to respond to the allegations and can request an oral hearing. If judged guilty, fines up to 10 percent of annual turnover could be levied.

Bruce Sewell, senior vice president and general counsel for Intel, said that his company's focus “will be to educate the commission as to why these particular discounts are not anti-competitive but are legitimate ways in which competition unfolds in this industry.”

He added: “We are not disputing that the discounting program exists. But the discounts are not exclusionary. When AMD has good products it quickly gains in the market. When we have better products we are rewarded.”

But the AMD president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Giuliano Meroni, described the commission's action as “a moment of truth for the entire IT industry.”

“We are confident that this statement of objections will be a catalyst in opening the global microprocessor markets for the benefit of consumers and PC companies alike,” he said.

Both companies have manufacturing operations in Europe. Around 3,000 people work for AMD in Dresden; Intel says it employs more than 5,000 people “directly and indirectly” at its plant in Leixlip, Ireland.

Sewell argued that the commission's tough stance resulted in part from fuzzier standards in Europe than in the United States as to what constitutes abuse.

continue reading.....

TOKYO: Sony reported a doubling of quarterly profit Thursday after strong digital cameras sales and the box-office success of “Spider-Man 3″ helped offset losses from the PlayStation 3.

Sony said net profit in the three months to June 30 was ¥66.5 billion, or $554 million, up 105.8 percent from a year earlier. The gain was in stark contrast to the January-to-March quarter, when Sony reported its worst quarterly loss in four years.

The results issued Thursday were the latest sign that Sony was faring better against South Korean and Chinese rivals, which have taken global market share from the Japanese electronics industry with lower-cost products.

The rosy picture was marred by the poor performance of PlayStation 3, a flashy but expensive game console that Sony had been counting on to be its next global hit. Sony said the loss at its games division grew to ¥29.2 billion from ¥26.8 billion last year.

Sony reported robust sales of its Bravia flat-panel televisions and Cyber-shot cameras, evidence that it is persuading world consumers to pay more for the Sony brand.

Sony also said it had benefited from a favorable yen exchange rate and cost-cutting by its first non-Japanese chief executive, Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born American. Since taking the helm at Sony two years ago, Stringer has laid off employees, closed factories and shed unprofitable businesses like a Parisian chain of restaurants in Japan.

Stringer has also pledged to raise Sony's operating profit margin to 5 percent this year, a target the company reached in the quarterly results announced Thursday. The target is low by American standards but about par for less shareholder-friendly Japanese corporations.

Reviving Sony's electronics division, which accounts for about three-quarters of the company's sales, has been central to Stringer's turnaround strategy. Sony had been losing ground not only to low-cost Asian competitors but also to nimble rivals like Apple, whose iPod ended the Sony Walkman's two-decade dominance of portable music players.

Nobuyuki Oneda, chief financial officer at Sony, said Thursday that it still expected to lose money this year on televisions, one of Sony's main products. Sony was late to switch from tube TVs to newer technologies like liquid-crystal displays, falling behind its South Korean rivals Samsung and LG.

For the current fiscal year, ending in March 2008, Sony kept its forecast for net profit unchanged at ¥320 billion.

Analysts said Sony appeared to have misread the direction of the video game market, surrendering an early lead to rival Nintendo's cheaper and simpler Wii console. The two consoles went on sale in late 2006, a year after Microsoft released the Xbox 360.

continue reading.....

Phil Laak, a professional poker player, taking on Polaris, a computer program developed by a team of researchers. (Farah Nosh for The New York Times)

VANCOUVER, British Columbia: For anyone stuck to a casino stool playing hours of video poker, rest assured: Humans can still beat a computer. But computers may soon dominate on the felt-top table, as they have on the chessboard.

In a match of wits between man and machine this week, a software program running on an ordinary laptop computer fought a close match but lost to two professional poker players.

The match, which was billed as the “First Man-Machine Poker Championship” and offered prize money totaling $50,000, pitted Phil Laak and Ali Eslami against Polaris, a program written by a team of artificial-intelligence researchers from the University of Alberta.

University of Alberta researchers created a program that first won the world checkers championship in 1994, and this month they said they had developed a program that could not lose, and at best could be tied, at checkers.

In 1997 Deep Blue, a supercomputer-based system for playing chess, developed by IBM researchers, beat Garry Kasparov, the then world champion.

Poker is thought to be a more difficult challenge for software designers than games like chess and checkers, because in poker, information is hidden from the players. The game requires different strategies and algorithms to deal with the uncertainties introduced by the hidden cards held by each player, as well as with difficult-to-quantify risk-taking behaviors like bluffing.

Research interest has shifted to games like poker in recent years, in part because chess is no longer of keen interest and in part because rapid progress is being made in developing new algorithms with broad real-world applications in areas like negotiation and commerce, said Tuomas Sandholm, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist.

The version of poker used in the match Monday and Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement Artificial Intelligence was a popular game called Texas Hold'em, heads-up limit poker, a two-player game in which some cards are hidden and others are playable by both sides.

Each hand is played in four rounds during which each side can bet or fold. After four rounds of 500 hands each, the player with the most money is declared the winner. Players are not permitted to bet their entire stake.

A crowd of up to several hundred people watched half of the match in the hotel conference room, while the second half of each round was out of view in a hotel room at the Hyatt Regency hotel. Each round lasted about four hours and the outcome was only known when the scores of each side - measured in dollars won - were added together.

The contest had to be designed to accommodate the computer. In an effort to minimize the effect of “the luck of the draw,” which is a dominating factor in poker, the contest was structured as four duplicate matches of 500 hands each, in which the two human players battled the Polaris program simultaneously from different rooms in the hotel. The hand dealt to the human in one room was identical to the hand dealt to the computer in the other room.

The format also eliminated one of the crucial aspects of traditional poker, called “the tell” - subtle clues like facial ticks or timing that may help players make accurate guesses about the hidden cards held by their opponent. That was less of a concern, the organizers said, because of the growing popularity of online poker, which permits humans to mask their emotions.

The human team reached a draw in the first round even though their total winnings were slightly less than the computer's. The match rules specified that small differences were not considered significant because of statistical variation. On Monday night, the second round went heavily to Polaris, leaving the human players visibly demoralized.

“Polaris was beating me like a drum,” Eslami said after the round.

continue reading.....

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of Facebook, is accused by the owners of a rival Web site of stealing their ideas. (Noah Berger for The New York Times)

BOSTON: The owners of a rival social networking Web site are trying to shut down Facebook.com, charging in a lawsuit that Facebook's founder stole their ideas while they were students at Harvard.

The three founders of ConnectU say that Mark Zuckerberg agreed to finish computer code for their site, but repeatedly stalled and eventually created Facebook using their ideas.

The lawsuit against Zuckerberg alleges fraud, copyright infringement and misappropriation of trade secrets. It asks a court to shut down Facebook and give control of the company and its assets to ConnectU's founders.

A hearing on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit was scheduled for Wednesday in a U.S. District Court in Boston.

Facebook started in 2004, a few months before ConnectU went online, and now has 31 million users from various age groups, compared with about 70,000 users for ConnectU, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. Last year, Facebook turned down a $1 billion takeover offer from Yahoo.

A spokeswoman for Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, declined comment, citing the pending litigation.

In court filings, Facebook's attorneys say ConnectU has no evidence for “broad-brush allegations” against Zuckerberg and deny that he pilfered his ideas for Facebook from his fellow Harvard University students.

“Each of them had different interests and activities,” they wrote. “Only one of them had an idea significant enough to build a great company. That one person was Mark Zuckerberg.”

Facebook and ConnectU connect college students and others online. Both allow users to post profiles with pictures, biographies and other personal information and create extended networks of people with similar interests.

ConnectU originally filed a lawsuit in September 2004, but it was dismissed on a technicality in March and immediately refiled. The lawsuit claims that in December 2002, the ConnectU founders - Cameron Winklevoss, his brother Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra - began to develop a social networking site for the Harvard community called Harvard Connection.

In November 2003, the three asked Zuckerberg to complete software and database work on the site. They repeatedly asked him to finish before they graduated in June 2004, and Zuckerberg assured them he was working hard to complete it, the lawsuit says.

“Such statements were false and Zuckerberg never intended to provide the code and instead intended to breach his promise,” the lawsuit said, alleging that he “intended to steal the idea for the Harvard Connection Web site, and in fact he did so.”

Facebook has hired a former chief financial officer of YouTube to oversee its books, providing the latest indication that the second-most popular social networking site on the Web is preparing to remain independent instead of selling to a larger company, The Associated Press reported from Palo Alto, California.

Facebook's hiring of Gideon Yu, confirmed Tuesday, represents the start-up's second significant coup in the last two weeks.

The company last week added the engineers Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt by buying their startup, Parakey. Ross and Hewitt are two of the creative forces behind the initiative that created Firefox - the second most-used Web browser after Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Yu succeeds Mike Sheridan, who quit for unspecified reasons, as chief financial officer. Facebook is second only to News Corp.'s MySpace.

continue reading.....

SAN FRANCISCO: Friendfinder sounds like the quintessential investment prospect for venture capitalists. Based in Palo Alto, California, the company operates social networking sites that boast 140,000 new registrants per day, and $200 million in annual revenue.

But the company's main site, Adult Friendfinder, helps people meet for the purpose of having sexual liaisons. The content, including explicit photos and Adult sex sites language, has been a turn-off to mainstream investors.

“Over the last 10 years, we've met with a dozen venture capitalists,” said the company's founder, Andrew Conru, who holds a doctorate in engineering from Stanford University. “The conversations end fairly quickly.”

Times and investment tastes may be changing. Conru said that in recent months he has gotten more sustained interest, and follow-up calls, from potential investors. More generally, mainstream venture capitalists and private equity funds are starting to show interest in companies that make and distribute pornographic entertainment, and sexually related products and services.

Several former investment bankers now are specializing in matching Wall Street and technology investors with sex-related companies. Separately, a handful of venture capitalists have already financed start-ups that get a big chunk of revenue from making or distributing sexual content or products, and others are considering such investments.

JimmyJane, a San Francisco company that sells designer sex toys, has among its investors six individual venture capitalists. The company's chief executive said he was near to closing a $3 million to $5 million round of funding with one or more funds - not merely individual venture capitalists but marquee funds.

“It will be a watershed,” said the Jimmyjane chief executive, Ethan Imboden, formerly a design consultant to Nike, Motorola and other mainstream brands. He said the deal could be among the first major venture fund investments in an overtly sexually themed business.

The involvement of mainstream investors in companies like this still is very much in its infancy, and even those with a vested interest say it may not evolve further. There are considerable hurdles to its growth, chiefly and simply the discomfort that many investors have being affiliated with products and services they deem immoral or that they think could tarnish their reputations.

But there also are some forces compelling greater interest, according to venture investors and investment bankers, like P. Holt Gardiner, a partner at Ackrell Capital, a boutique investment bank that focuses largely on the high-technology industries but also has a growing practice in matching investors with makers and distributors of triple-X content.

Gardiner said that investors are intrigued that the digital era is permitting a range of new distribution models - from the Internet to digital television - that are creating numerous opportunities to profit from the manufacture and delivery of pornographic content. Those may include technical or payment startups, such as those that allow micro-payments.

More broadly, Gardiner noted that there is such an enormous flow of dollars into the venture and private equity business that investors are looking for creative ways to put it to work. He said that triple-X companies can be purchased at a discount, because there is less competition from prospective investors driving up the price.

Investor reticence about the sex industry “is changing - dramatically,” Gardiner said.

But he conceded that for the most part, the interest has yet to translate into many actual deals. He said that he has been involved in a number of discussions with venture capital firms that show interest in a sexually related company, do due diligence, sign off on the deal, and then show it to their limited partners - the foundations or well-heeled individuals that invest through venture capitalists.

“Invariably, one of the limited partners balks,” Gardiner said. “It has happened four or five times.”

Imboden, the chief executive of Jimmyjane, said that he believed what attracts venture capitalists to adult-oriented companies is what usually attracts them: the opportunity to fund innovative products that can change or takeover markets. Their expertise can be valuable, Imboden said.

“They understand innovation in consumer products and branding,” he said.

Not everyone is convinced the interest among mainstream investors will make a long-term impact.

Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, a company that publishes information about the pornography trade, said he believed that the time was ripe for mainstream investment. But, he noted, talk of mainstream investment had always been mostly that - just talk.

“For five years we've been talking mainstream, mainstream, mainstream,” Fishbein said of the pornography trade. “But it still sits on the periphery.”

continue reading.....

An Apple user trying out a Mac Pro in a New York store. (Andrew Burton/Bloomberg News)

SAN FRANCISCO: Strong sales of Macs and iPods helped Apple increase quarterly profit by 73 percent, beating Wall Street forecasts and alleviating some concerns about early sales of the iPhone.

Profit in the company's third quarter rose to $818 million from $472 million a year earlier. Analysts had forecast on average a profit of $645.6 million, according to Thomson Financial.

Investors were spooked Tuesday when AT&T, which provides service for the phone, said it had activated just 146,000 iPhones in the day and a half between the cellphone's U.S. introduction and the end of the quarter, far fewer than some analysts had expected. That sent Apple's stock down 6 percent.

But Apple executives said Wednesday that the company actually sold 270,000 iPhones in that period, a number that seemed to calm investors' fears. The executives said Apple expected to sell one million iPhones this quarter and reiterated its goal of selling 10 million phones by the end of 2008. The company plans to release the phone in Europe in the fourth quarter.

“Our view is the starting gun has been fired, and we're off to a great start,” Timothy Cook, chief operating officer, said. “Our primary focus is not on initial sales but on creating a third business for Apple.”

By comparison, Apple executives said, it was nearly two years before Apple sold its one millionth iPod music player.

The company shipped 1.76 million Mac personal computers during the latest quarter, 33 percent more than a year earlier, and 9.82 million iPods, a 21 percent increase. Those increases helped lift revenue to $5.41 billion from $4.37 billion last year, beating Apple's own projection of $5.1 billion.

“The upside was clearly the health of the Mac business,” said A.C. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “Apple's in a really attractive position, where the Mac's component prices are falling but they're able to charge the same prices.”

Qualcomm posted a 24 percent increase in quarterly profit and raised its annual earnings and profit estimates on strong demand for cellphones that surf the Internet and download music and video, The Associated Press reported from San Diego.

The company earned $798 million in its third quarter, which ended July 1, up from $643 million and beating most analysts' forecasts. Sales rose 19 percent to $2.33 billion.

Qualcomm, based in San Diego, is the second-largest supplier of chips for mobile phones after Texas Instruments.

The company also makes money from licensing its patented technology but is embroiled in several high-stakes trade and legal disputes. In June, the U.S. International Trade Commission banned imports of many new phones that carry Qualcomm chips after finding that the company infringed on a patent that protected the technology of its rival Broadcom to conserve battery power.

Symantec, the maker of Norton security software, reported a higher-than-expected quarterly profit on strong sales of backup software and cost cuts, Reuters reported from Boston.

While net profit in its quarter through June fell 5 percent from a year earlier to $95.2 million, profit excluding special items was equivalent to 29 cents a share, topping the 20 cents a share analysts had on average forecast.

Revenue rose to $1.4 billion from $1.26 billion.

Analysts said the results showed that the leading maker of security software was succeeding on two fronts: cutting costs and resolving issues that have hurt sales in its various business units over the past few years.

“In this one quarter you had all the businesses show some positive progress,” said Todd Weller, an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus.

The company attributed the better-than-expected results partly to about $200 million worth of sales of Symantec's Backup Exec software.

James Beer, the chief financial officer, said that the company was ahead of schedule in implementing a restructuring plan.

continue reading.....

BRUSSELS: The European Union called Wednesday for more radio spectrum to be opened up to Internet phone services, saying that using lower frequencies would cut operators' costs and allow them reach customers over a wider area.

The proposal would widen access of the 900-megahertz and 1,800-megahertz frequencies - which have been allocated exclusively to the GSM standard of mobile phone services - to other technologies, particularly third-generation service, or 3G, which provides mobile Internet services as well as voice calls. That access would make it easier and cheaper for mobile operators in the bloc to offer wireless services, said the European Commission, the EU's executive body.

“In the EU we must remove regulatory barriers and facilitate the deployment of mobile communications by allowing new technologies to share spectrum with existing ones,” said Viviane Reding, the EU's telecommunications commissioner.

The change would mean that companies could use fewer cellular towers to reach more people, letting more customers use their phones to go online to check mail or stream video clips.

The move would cut network costs by 40 percent over five years, the EU said, citing an estimate by the wireless communications industry.

The proposal must receive backing from EU national governments and legislators to become law.

“We expect this to happen quickly, by the end of the year,” Reding's spokesman, Martin Selmayr, said during a news conference.

The commission's proposal would abolish 20-year-old EU legislation that allocated the 900-MHz and 1,800-MHz frequencies to operators of the older mobile standard, GSM.

The law “is out of date as it prevents more advanced, next-generation wireless technologies from using the spectrum currently reserved for GSM services,” the commission said.

In a strategy for radio spectrum introduced this year, the commission said it wanted frequencies not needed by mobile phone operators, or those freed up through the switch to digital broadcasting, to be opened to other businesses.

The EU executive also wants to talk to member states, most of which regulate the distribution of spectrum to businesses, about how that allocation process could be made less restrictive.

“At the end of the process, in the commission's view, we'd like to see a system where most services can be offered in any band at the choice of the operators with the technology they want,” Selmayr said.

“That could be the end result,” he added, “and we'll make more far-reaching legislative proposals to this end in the course of the autumn.”

continue reading.....

David Pogue reviews the latest pen scanners

For baby boomers now in middle age, high-technology spy stuff has always been part of the cultural landscape. Remember the ads for X-Ray Specs at the back of comic books? The shoe phone in “Get Smart?” The miniature wonders that James Bond was issued before each mission?

Those were all fictional, but that's not to say that cool, supertiny, spyish gadgetry does not exist. Take pen scanners, for example. Here are machines not much thicker than a Sharpie. You can slip one out of your shirt pocket to scan a book, article, magazine, catalogue, receipt or top-secret enemy dossier - and then dump the results, as fully editable, typed text, into a computer through a USB cable.

Sometimes the purpose of using a pen scanner is surreptitious. A researcher might use one, for example, to crib quotes from some precious library volume that is not allowed to be checked out. At other times, the point is just to avoid having to retype stuff. In either case, a pen scanner is so tiny and portable, it goes where no bulky flatbed scanner has gone before.

Pen scanners have been around for years, but recent tweaks in hardware and software have improved them quite a bit. A sampling of three - from WizCom Technologies, IRIS and Planon System Solutions - illustrates how many variations you can find on the same idea.

Most pen scanners work like highlighter pens. That is, you roll the tip across one line of text at a time, in either direction - a handy solution for scanning receipts, a few lines of a magazine article, numbers off a phone bill, and so on, but incredibly tedious for entire pages.

That's why Planon's DocuPen RC800 ($270) is so clever. The scanning eye on this eight-inch, or 20-centimeter, rounded, blue plastic rod is not at the tip; it's the entire flat edge. You place the DocuPen flat on the piece of paper, parallel to the text, and scrape it downward. Rollers measure your progress across the page to compensate for small variations in your hand speed.

The built-in eight megabytes of memory can hold 100 pages of black-and-white text or two full-page color scans; you can upgrade the storage with a MicroSD memory card.

Later, you connect the pen to a Mac or Windows computer to view the results of your document capturing - and to recharge the built-in battery, which goes through about 35 scans per charge.

You might think that, given its far greater speed (about five seconds a page), the DocuPen would wipe the floor with its rivals. The fact that it can scan photographs and other color documents ought to make it even more desirable.

But the DocuPen sets users up for some serious frustrations. One is that the document you are scanning must be utterly, completely flat. Receipts, printouts and magazines are all fair game, but bound books are nearly impossible to scan with this gizmo. And you can't scan anything wider than the pen itself (about seven inches, or just under 18 centimeters).

If all you want to do is capture snapshots of documents that you store as graphics files, Planon's own DocuPen program for Mac or Windows is perfectly adequate. But if you are hoping to convert those scans into typed, editable text - that is, to have your computer perform optical character recognition, or OCR - then you must install another, Windows-only program, called PaperPort.

This program is good at organizing and manipulating scans, and its built-in OCR software is very easy to use - you just drag the thumbnail of a scan onto the Microsoft Word icon. But PaperPort is not perfectly suited for the DocuPen. For example, you're repeatedly told to turn on the DocuPen itself, even when it is already on. Then, after importing the scans from the pen - by clicking, nonintuitively, a button called Scan, and then another called Download - they are still not really in PaperPort; you have to select their icons and then hit Transfer.

The OCR accuracy isn't great; even on a crisp, perfectly clean laser print of “The Star-Spangled Banner” lyrics, two of the eight opening lines came out garbled (”Oh say can you see by ~h dawn1s early light”). Photo scans, meanwhile, come out murky and oversaturated. Sometimes, spies have to sacrifice quality for portability.

WizCom's InfoScan 3 Lite costs about a third as much ($92); it, too, offers an ownership experience filled with highs and lows. It is a highlighter-style pen, which means that you must scan one line at a time, and it is solely for text, not graphics.

continue reading.....