A new type of college football poll (AP)

Now there’s a Web site that is giving fans a chance to have their say in a virtual futures market for college football teams.

recently added college football to its roster of sports this season, giving fans a chance to predict how well teams will do this season.

While there predictably are many similarities between the major polls and ProTrade’s rankings — Southern California and LSU are the top two teams in all three — there are also some major differences.

ProTrade users are more bullish than the pollsters on teams like Wake Forest and Hawaii and more bearish on UCLA and Nebraska.

The most notable difference for now is that of Michigan. The Wolverines fell out of the major polls after losing its opener to Appalachian State, the first time a ranked team has ever lost to a team from the Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA).

But Michigan fell from only fifth to 13th in ProTrade’s rankings as of early Friday — unlike the traditional polls, ProTrade’s rankings can change every minute. Many traders apparently believe the Wolverines can recover from that historic loss and still have a successful season.

“The biggest difference is the AP poll is more about how a team has done up until now, while our market predicts how Michigan will be until the end of the year,” said ProTrade co-founder Jeffrey Ma.

Launched in 2005, San Mateo-based ProTrade treats professional athletes and teams like stocks to be bought and sold in a theoretical currency that can be redeemed for prizes.

After the value of teams or players are set by ProTrade in an IPO of sorts, the price then changes constantly depending on whether the community of traders are looking to buy or sell that stock.

The scoring on ProTrade is simple. Each regular season win, including conference championship games, is worth 15 points. Teams get an additional five points for beating a team in the AP Top 25 and another five if the team is in the Top 10.

A win in a bowl game is worth 20 points and teams that qualify for a BCS bowl get 15 points. Making the BCS title game is worth another 15, and winning it all is worth 30.

The price of a team was set before the season as the company pored over all sorts of data to determine a starting point. After that, it’s up to the traders — and how a team performs — to determine which direction the price goes.

“It’s like an IPO. We set the price and never touch it again,” Ma said.

For example, USC opened at $205.02, peaked at more than $260 — which meant the Trojans likely would have had to go undefeated and win the national championship to earn a profit — before falling back to just more than $220 on Friday.

Ma and co-founder Mike Kerns said interest in the college football has been high, with some users trading teams possession by possession as if they were short-selling stocks. One user learned that the price of teams usually falls when they’re on defense and rises when they’re on offense.

ProTrade also offers markets for the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NBA, the PGA Tour, NASCAR and college basketball. The site originally relied on new-age statistics inspired by Michael Lewis’ best-selling book “Moneyball” to determine values of players and teams.

But when that proved to be too confusing to the average fan, the site switched last year to traditional fantasy sports stats. That helped increase traffic to the site fifteenfold and ProTrade now generates more than 20 million page views a month from its more than 100,000 registered users.

Because of regulatory issues, ProTrade can only use virtual dollars instead of real money. But users can redeem those ProTrade dollars for various prizes, including gift cards, signed memorabilia or the opportunity to play a game of H-O-R-S-E with Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash.

Ma became famous while in college at MIT when and his buddies became so proficient at counting cards in blackjack that they carted away millions of dollars from Las Vegas casinos. Their feats inspired the best-selling book “Bringing Down The House.” (Ma is Kevin Lewis in the book).

Kerns, who is the CEO of the company, came to ProTrade after working for noted sports agents Leigh Steinberg and Jeff Moorad.

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Microsoft streamlines volume licensing programs (InfoWorld)

This week, Microsoft said it was reducing the length of three of its volume-licensing agreements between 10 percent to 50 percent, changes that affect the Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Subscription, Select License, Open Value, Open Value Subscription and Open License volume licensing agreements. Microsoft also has made it easier for customers to navigate license information and sign up online, the company said. The changes will be implemented in the course of its fiscal year 2008, which began July 1.

Microsoft has been amending different aspects of its volume licensing programs over the last several years in an effort to make them less complicated and expensive for customers. Volume licensing is how business customers buy Microsoft products. The company also faces pressure from changing industry dynamics where products are being licensed on a subscription basis rather than through complicated, long-term licenses. Microsoft is keeping up with some of these changes by increasingly offering business software as subscription-based services but still has a history of complex product licensing to contend with.

Specifically, Microsoft said it will reduce the number of price points and SKUs for each of its volume licensing programs, which will simplify customers' search for specific product pricing. Currently, Microsoft has more than 8 million price points worldwide, which makes it confusing for customers to navigate through them. To reduce the number of price points, individual product SKUs with the same pricing will change to one term, called "Single Language," the company said.

For example, a product like the SQL Server database has versions for different languages. If the product is only for one language, such as English, and is priced the same as other versions for other languages, the products now will be listed as "SQL Server Single Language" rather than with each language version listed individually, Microsoft said.

According to Microsoft, just doing this reduces price points in the Select program by 51 percent and the number of product SKUs by 72 percent. In the Open Value program, price points are reduced by 50 percent and SKUs by 51 percent, and in the Open License program, prices points are reduced by 32 percent and the number of SKUs by 33 percent, the company said.

Microsoft also has made some content changes to all of its volume licensing agreements to streamline the language used in them and has added a table of contents and summary titles to agreements to make them easier for customers to navigate.

In addition to the changes, Microsoft also is launching a Volume Licensing Service Center online that will help customers manage their volume licenses. The service center will provide downloads to software that customers are eligible to receive under their agreements, and also allow them to view and request Volume Licensing Product Keys for software in their agreements. Additionally, customers can calculate license statements on the Web site.

AMD seeks server rebound with Barcelona (InfoWorld)

AMD has been shipping the Quad-Core AMD Opteron chip to server vendors throughout August but will use its news conference in San Francisco to publicly announce those partnerships as well as prices and benchmark test results.

The company plans to launch a 1.9GHz, 68-watt Barcelona chip that focuses on power efficiency, and a 2.0GHz, 95-watt version that focuses on price/performance, said Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president for the server and workstation division. In the fourth quarter, the company will follow that with a 2.3 GHz, 120-watt version for high-performance applications, and higher clock speeds for the first two chips.

There is a lot at stake. After launching the original Opteron chip in 2003, the company enjoyed brisk demand as customers applauded the power-efficient performance of that 130-nanometer design process chip. But Intel soon got back in the fight as both companies built smaller, faster components, shrinking their chip scales to 90nm and adding a second core.

AMD has endured disappointing results lately,  and focusing its attention on . At the same time, Intel claimed bragging rights to beating AMD to quad-core architecture and  server chip. .

AMD says is the answer to the Intel challenge. The chip is designed with all four cores on a single die as opposed to Intel's design of joining two dual-core Woodcrest Xeon chips, Allen said.

Even more important, AMD upgraded each core from 64-bit floating point performance to 128-bit and retained its Direct Connect architecture and on-chip memory controller to avoid bottlenecks in data flow, he said.

Thanks to that design, the new chip will provide better performance while using the same amount of power, he said. A customer could upgrade a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant DL 385 server from AMD's dual-core to quad-core Opteron and gain faster operation with the same power and cooling demands.

"Clovertown will look very anemic, especially as we bring out new frequencies. Customers really don't buy nanometers. What they care about is performance and benchmarking," said Allen. "That Direct Connect architecture is very helpful with virtualization, running multiple OSes, and other applications pulling more data than can be held in on-chip memory."

Despite those advantages, AMD has missed out on a spike in market demand driven by a need to upgrade to servers capable of performing virtualization, one analyst said.

"A lot of people view this as six months late or more," said Doug Freedman, managing director for research at American Technology Research. "Expectations got ahead of themselves, and some people viewed this as a potential savior for AMD after their server share topped out at the end of last year going up against Intel's dual-die quad-core. Now the feeling is this launch isn't robust enough in terms of samples shipped, design wins, and the complete food chain."

To recover, AMD will have to quickly increase its production and release faster versions of Barcelona to improve the chip's availability for a range of applications, Freedman said.

Intel executives say they are pressing the lead.

"We are very confident, at least on the DP [dual processor] side, that we will have leadership across most of the benchmarks versus Barcelona," said Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group.

"There are a small percentage of benchmarks which are floating-point based where we know that they have an advantage and that's an area which we will see them talk about a lot…. If you look at the broader spectrum of applications at the enterprise, we have a significant lead today, and we believe we will have that lead with Clovertown, and once we have Harpertown with 45nm we will extend that lead further," Gupta said.

However, some vendors say there is room in the market for both chips. Each processor has its own strengths, said Dell CEO Michael Dell in remarks to financial analysts at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York on Wednesday.

Based on early tests, Dell said, a server using Barcelona chips is faster at running floating-point applications than a computer with Intel's Clovertown chips, but Clovertown is faster than Barcelona at running integer instructions.

"So depending on the applications you run, or your theories of computer science, one of those servers may be the best for you. It is simply unacceptable for a company of Dell's size to have only one of those choices," Dell said.

Scientists: Most Polar Bears Dead By 2050

Vizio emerges from flat-panel TV shadows (AP)

Quietly selling its affordable line of flat-panel sets in wholesale club stores instead of electronics retailers, it knocked its foreign competitors from the top spot in the second quarter to become the largest seller of flat-panel TVs in North America.

It is too early to say the company will bring an American brand back to the top ranks of TV makers for good. But Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio is poised to benefit from a variety of trends, including the rising popularity of flat-panel sets and the need for all Americans to upgrade to a digital TV by the federal government’s February 2009 deadline.

And CEO William Wang’s experience as a supplier and then consultant to PC maker Gateway Inc. convinced him that consumers who might spend big for a feature-laden set for the living room would want a more affordable alternative to replace sets in other rooms.

Aided by a few one-time boosts in retailer inventories, Vizio grabbed 12 percent of the flat-panel market in the second quarter. That was more than four times its share in the year-ago quarter and enough to propel the private company, which had been the nation’s 15th-largest flat-panel TV supplier in the second quarter of 2005, past rivals such as Sony Corp., Samsung and Sharp Corp., according to market researcher DisplaySearch.

Vizio has also broadened its offerings, adding more full-featured sets along with basic models.

Vizio now offers four, 42-inch LCD sets, for instance, ranging in price from $1,399 for a fully loaded set to a $979 model, which offers lower resolution and fewer features.

A 40-inch LCD set from Sony ranges from $1,279 to $2,069 on .

Cory Porter had never heard of Vizio before walking into a Costco in May to look at more established brands. After researching customer comments and reviews online, he decided to take a chance and bought a 42-inch model.

“I wanted to be sure if I decided to go with the cheaper version that it was good quality as well,” said Porter, 31, of Washington, D.C. “I was pretty nervous about that, to be honest.”

Staying No. 1 will be a challenge for Vizio, however.

Analysts wonder whether the company can sustain its performance, especially as rivals take aim at the once nearly invisible competitor.

“They have been really clever, but they also benefited from fortunate timing,” DisplaySearch President Ross Young said.

Even CEO Wang concedes it may be impossible to stay on top.

“I think it’s going to be a major battle for us to maintain our spot,” Wang said. “My goal is to be in the top three for the year. I never expected we would hit the No. 1 spot in the second quarter.”

The cornerstone of Vizio’s strategy has been selling at warehouse club stores such as Sam’s Club and Costco, which can pass volume discounts along to consumers.

By avoiding retailers that typically add as much as 30 percent to the price of a TV, Vizio has escaped the retail-channel conflicts that can shackle larger brands, Young said.

If a major brand sells a flat-panel TV through Best Buy for $1,999, for instance, and then sells the same set at Costco, it can’t pass along a lower margin to consumers without angering Best Buy, Young said.

“Vizio is able to pass along the lower margins at the club channel because they don’t have those conflicts,” he said.

That strategy has led to Vizio steadily increasing its market share over the past two years, according to research company iSuppli.

Still, the sudden jump to No. 1 was the result of one-time events that are unlikely to be repeated.

Some retailers boosted inventory from one week to three in reaction to worldwide flat-panel supply problems.

In addition, Vizio added two huge retail clients in the second quarter — Sears and Circuit City — boosting its normal deliveries by more than 150,000 units.

Meanwhile, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s largest retailer, added new models to its existing line of Vizio offerings.

Wang was a supplier of computer monitors in 1989 when he began selling screens to Gateway Inc.

In 2002, he launched his own company, then called V Inc., with $600,000 from friends and a mortgage on his Newport Beach home.

But instead of immediately entering the TV market, he was persuaded by Gateway co-founder Ted Waitt to serve as an adviser on manufacturing and sales strategies in its bid to sell TVs in its retail stores.

“Being small, you don’t have a lot of choice,” Wang said. “When someone knocks on the door, you say yes.”

When Gateway exited the TV business and shuttered all its retail stores in 2004, Wang struck out on his own. He changed the name of the company to Vizio and adopted the slogan “Where vision meets value.”

What he took from Gateway was the emphasis on marketing to cost-conscious consumers and the strategy of not relying on a single supplier or assembler, but outsourcing widely to keep costs down.

“I’m a geek. I love technology. But I believe technology shouldn’t be super expensive,” Wang said.

Today, the company runs a lean operation, with only 85 corporate employees. About 10 percent of assembly work is done in Mexico, the rest in Asia.

The company plans to do more assembly in Mexico but so far has no plans to bring the work into the U.S., as low-cost rival Syntax-Brillian Corp. has. So in that way Vizio won’t take on the all-American feel of former American TV stalwarts like Zenith or RCA.

Last year, Vizio spent about $5 million on marketing to build its brand. The company has boosted its ad budget to $35 million to lure sports fans, who are big buyers of high-def sets.

Vizio has also broadened its line, offering high-definition sets in the highest quality and adding the kind of high-tech features normally found on more expensive name-brand sets.

Wang believes Vizio will benefit as cable and satellite companies boost their high-def content and consumers replace their analog TVs with digital.

“I believe we’ll still enjoy the growth rate we’ve been having the last 12 months because this segment will explode,” Wang said.

Young agrees, adding that that people may buy a more expensive set for the living room but will likely look for cheaper flat-panel TVs to replace sets in other parts of the house.

“The strategy has legs,” Young said.

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InterDigital inks license deal with Apple; shares rise (Reuters)

Separately, InterDigital raised its third-quarter revenue outlook range to $55.5 million to $56.5 million from its prior view of $53.5 million to $54.5 million.

The King of Prussia, Pennsylvania-based company did not say how much it expects from the deal but an analyst said he estimated it to be worth about $56 million over the duration of the deal.

"They are going to be getting $2 million a quarter for the next seven years," Boenning & Scattergood analyst Michael Ciarmoli said by phone.

According to a regulatory filing, InterDigital's license agreement with Apple covers the current iPhone and certain future mobile phones, if any.

"The deal covers various 2G and 3G cellular technologies encompassing bandwidth allocation, roaming and power efficiency controls, and most likely also includes some type of packet data coding and delivery," Ciarmoli said.

In its statement, InterDigital said it expects to receive a $20 million payment in the near future in connection with a recently signed license agreement. Revenue associated with the agreement was reflected in its new guidance, the company said.

However, when reached for comment, a company spokesman would not confirm if the money was coming from the Apple deal.

Shares of InterDigital were trading up $2.76 at $23.97 in afternoon trade on the Nasdaq. They rose as high as $24.69 in midday trade.

InterDigital is also involved in a patent dispute with Nokia over third-generation technology. The U.S. International Trade Commission is expected to start an investigation of certain Nokia (NOK1V.HE) 3G mobile phones based on a complaint filed by InterDigital last month.

Adobe Unveils Social Features for Flash Media Server (NewsFactor)

Adobe's new server, scheduled for release in the first quarter of next year, will have a "flexible environment for creating and delivering interactive social-media applications," as well as enhancements of traditional media-streaming capabilities.

The announcement of the new features was made during the IBC trade show in Amsterdam, where Adobe said the server will be previewed over the next few days.

Live Events, Chats, Messaging

The social-media applications, so popular in these days of Web 2.0, include audio/video messaging and blogging, live audio/video chat, text chat, and multiplayer gaming. There is also live event support for presenters of concerts, news, and other programming, which the company said is made possible in conjunction with the upcoming Adobe Flash Media Encoder 2. And, for content companies wary of stream-ripping, the server offers an unspecified degree of content protection.

The social-media features, as well as traditional streaming, will be enabled by a performance level that the San Jose, California-based company said is twice the previous version's.

With the Internet becoming increasingly accessible on mobile devices, Adobe's Flash Media Server 3 will provide live or recorded streaming to Adobe Flash Lite 3, which is the Flash player for phones and other mobile devices. The company said that Flash Lite 3-enabled phones should be on the market by the end of 2007.

Audiences are expecting "high-quality experiences that live up to and surpass television," said Adobe vice president Jim Guerard, who noted that the new Media Server can help publishers integrate video into their sites and applications "with more control over playback, interactivity, and branding."

Media Player, Cisco Connection

In an apparent reference to the now-emerging Silverlight, Adobe said in a statement that "the Flash ecosystem" is the only "ubiquitous online and offline video solution for creating and delivering" interactive media across browsers and operating systems.

Silverlight is also cross-platform, but Adobe's Flash player is the dominant video and animation viewer on the Web. According to Adobe, the Flash player is installed on 98 percent of the Internet-connected desktops worldwide.

In addition to the battle being fought on desktops and mobile devices, the Silverlight-Flash fight likely will take place on TVs as well. On Thursday, Cisco said that it will work to intregrate Flash Media Server 3 into its Content Delivery System.

Some observers suggest this could mean the delivery of Flash content to home TVs through Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes, as well as to desktops — or "any stream to any screen," in Cisco's phrase. Scientific-Atlanta is owned by Cisco.

Microsoft Releases Virtual Machine Manager 2007 (NewsFactor)

Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager software, available to demo at allows system managers to view and manage physical and virtual server assets simultaneously. Not coincidently, the release of the software occurred just ahead of VMware's VMworld technology show in San Francisco.

The immediate impact of the release is limited because it's "focused squarely" on managing Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005 R2 product, Chris Voce, an analyst with Forrester Research, said in a telephone interview.

What seems to be more important than the current release is what comes next. The next version of the software, to be released with Viridian, will be able to manage not only Windows physical and virtual servers but also virtual servers from Microsoft's competitors, VMware and Xen.

A Single Management Solution

Writing on a Microsoft blog, server virtualization team leader Chris Stirrat wrote that Redmond has "heard loud and clear from customers and partners" about the need to manage other virtualization environments. "They want a single management solution that manages all the different hypervisor technologies," he wrote. That's what System Center Virtual Machine Manager will do when Viridian ships.

Even though Thursday's release is limited in application, many enterprises are interested to see what Microsoft is up to. "A lot of large organizations we talk to, even though VMware is far and away the market leader, want to see what Microsoft has up its sleeve." But he added that the "delays and reduced features give them pause." Microsoft wants to tip its hand a little bit, Voce said.

Enterprises have good reason to see what Microsoft can do, Voce said. "They're smart about where virtual machines get deployed and provisioned, and they bring a good understanding of lifecycle considerations," he said.

Big Step for Virtualization

In this release, System Center Virtual Machine Manager is tightly integrated with Microsoft's other virtualization tools, Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, and Data Protection Manager, Stirrat said. "Ultimately the combination of SCVMM and Operations Manager provides a powerful solution to continually optimize your virtualization environment."

By integrating with Config Manager, SCVMM "allows you to patch VMs including the ones not currently running," he wrote. And the data protection tool enables backup and restore of all virtual machines running on a physical host.

Thursday's release addresses "the next big step" for virtualization, "marrying the tools that manage physical and virtual servers," Forrester's Voce said. "A lot of the practices and methods of managing physical servers have been applied to virtual servers," he said. "But using the same methods doesn't hold up with regard to things like patching."

Voce concluded by saying that that Microsoft now has all the pieces for a "cohesive solution" for both physical and virtual server environments.

AOL to drop Digg-like news from Netscape (AP)

AOL, the Internet services unit of Time Warner Inc., said it isn’t giving up on social news completely and will instead send interested visitors to a separate, yet-to-be-determined Web address.

However, AOL said visitor feedback indicated that “people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled.” In a blog posting, the company said some readers liked the social-news experience “but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.”

The feature received tepid response when it was introduced last summer. Over the past year, U.S. visitors to the Netscape home page dropped by about half to 2.4 million in July, according to comScore Media Metrix. By contrast, visitors to social-news rival nearly quadrupled to 4.6 million.

Netscape’s social-news feature has allowed visitors to submit links to articles they find elsewhere and vote on the ones they like most. The items receiving the most votes appear on the home page and in separate sections such as technology and food.

The feature resembles the news-recommendation system found at Digg.com, although Netscape.com also has been displaying at the top some items hand-picked by its staff.

Within the next week or so, Netscape.com will revert to a more traditional format and resemble the portal that AOL also runs at . Both portals are free, supported by advertising.

The switch back marks the latest in a string of changes since AOL acquired the Netscape brand in 1999, primarily for its once-dominant Web browser.

In early 2005, for instance, Netscape introduced features that heavily used Flash animation technology in response to growing adoption of high-speed Internet lines, only to quietly drop many of those features before the social-news revamp.

AOL spokeswoman Jay Esmele said the latest change was unrelated to last November’s departure of Jason Calacanis, who as Netscape head spearheaded the social-news effort.

The current Netscape director, Tom Drapeau, wrote in the blog posting that the company remained committed to social news.

“This move is an effort to make both the former portal experience and the social-news experience accessible so that you can decide which you prefer — or, even better, that you want to participate in both,” Drapeau said. “The ability to post, comment, rate and share the news that’s most relevant to you is as important to us as it is to you.”

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"High School Musical" star appears nude in Web photo (Reuters)

A representative for Hudgens confirmed on Friday that the image is of the 18-year-old actress. The picture shows her standing fully naked in what appears to be a bathroom, smiling at the camera.

"This was a photo which was taken privately. It is a personal matter, and it is unfortunate that this has become public," Hudgen's representative said in a statement.

Hudgens plays the sweet and innocent science geek Gabriella, whose romance with jock Troy, played by Zac Efron, is chronicled in the two hugely popular made-for-television movies on the Disney Channel.

The two movies form the cornerstone of one of Disney's most lucrative franchises for pre-teen girls, and a third is planned for release to theaters next year. The film debuts on Disney Channels around the world starting this weekend.

A Disney representative had no comment about whether the appearance of the photo would affect their decision to cast Hudgens in the second sequel.

"High School Musical 2" debuted on Disney Channel on August 17 to a record-shattering audience of 17.2 million viewers to become the most-watched individual program in cable TV history.

The show's soundtrack debuted at No. 1 on national album sales charts, where it has remained for the past three weeks, selling nearly 1.2 million copies.