Skype video chats get sharper (AP)

Logitech International SA released driver software Tuesday for three webcams that allows them to connect Skype chatters at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels, the same resolution as a DVD. Frame rates of up to 30 pictures per second, the standard for TV broadcasts, are possible with the cameras. That’s up from around 15 frames per second in typical Web chats and should cut down on jerkiness and blurring of moving subjects, the companies said. Getting the maximum image quality requires the latest, “beta” version of Skype’s software and computers with the latest dual-core processors on both ends. The processors are needed to compress the video signal to fit it on a standard broadband Internet connection, then decompress it on the other end. The applicable cameras are the $99 Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 and QuickCam Pro for Notebooks, and the $129 QuickCam Orbit AF. The cameras came out this summer. Other webcams are theoretically capable of the same resolutions and frame rates, but Skype and Logitech said the hardware, drivers and Skype software all need to work together to achieve the maximum quality, and “extensive work” by their engineers was necessary to get the three recommended cameras working at their best. Jonathan Christensen, Skype’s general manager for audio and video, said a quarter of all Skype calls have at least one talker on video. The service claims 246 million users. Logitech’s drivers are not available for Macintosh computers, but these have been able to use high-resolution video for some time using Apple Inc.’s iChat software, at least on the fastest broadband connections.

IBM Finds Greener Way To Recycle Silicon

Storied dotcom era magazine returns as blog (Reuters)

At its height, the self-described "newsmagazine of the Internet Economy" was so jammed with advertisements, some readers began complaining about its lack of portability. The Industry Standard then became a part of the story after controlling shareholder International Data Group shut it down in 2001 shortly after the Internet bubble burst. Speaking at the Future of Business Media conference in New York, IDG Communications Chief Executive Bob Carrigan said on Tuesday the relaunch was an "experiment" that would feature bloggers, some editorial content and also rely on its community of readers for contributions. "The Internet economy is more important than ever," Carrigan said at the ContentNext Media-sponsored event, adding that a sponsor had bought the site's advertising inventory for a substantial period of time. "We're going to have fun with it - it's an experiment," he said. Founded in 1998, by former Wired magazine journalist John Battelle, San Francisco-based The Industry Standard was among the top print publications that tracked the explosion in investment and hype in the first generation of Internet businesses. The launch comes after one of the last of the titles born from the late 1990s Internet bubble economy shuttered. Business 2.0, a Time Warner Inc-owned magazine, shut down in September after failing to find an appropriate buyer. (Reporting by Kenneth Li)

Some ‘vampires’ prefer energy over blood (AP)

Insert the little fangs of your cell phone charger in the outlet and leave it there, phone attached: That’s vampire electronics. Allow your computer to hide in the cloak of darkness known as “standby mode” rather than shutting it off: That’s vampire electronics. The latest estimates show 5 percent of electricity used in the United States goes to standby power, a phenomenon energy efficiency experts find all the more terrifying as energy prices rise and the planet warms. That amounts to about $4 billion a year. The percentage could rise to 20 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. In California, lawmakers passed a proposal last year — dubbed the Vampire Slayers Act — to add vampire electronics labels to consumer products, detailing how much energy a charger, computer, DVD player, PlayStation, microwave or coffee maker uses when on, off or in standby mode. “It’s something people don’t know about,” said Dave Walton, home ideas director for Direct Energy, a utility and energy services company that has one of its four main offices in Dublin, Ohio. The issue is particularly pressing in Ohio, the nation’s No. 1 emitter of toxic air emissions — mostly from electricity production at the state’s coal-fired power plants. Walton said skyrocketing energy costs mean everyone should worry about the vampires in the house. The International Energy Agency has estimated standby energy use by vampire electronics at 200 to 400 terawatt-hours a year. The entire country of Italy consumes about 300 terawatt-hours of electricity each year, according to the agency. Picture any appliance that displays a clock while otherwise idle, such as a microwave oven, coffee maker or DVD player. They constantly consume little bits of energy. “About 40 percent of the electricity being used to power your home electronics is consumed while they are in that standby mode,” Walton said. “If you just focus on that piece, you will be making a big step.” Ditto for things that charge, such as cell phones, PDAs, toothbrushes or portable tools, some of which trickle a charge even after the device that’s charging is at capacity. Some chargers halt the flow of current when it’s not needed, which should happen automatically with chargers for lithium-ion batteries. If you’re uncertain, Walton advises unplugging chargers when not in use. He recommends hooking up your home computer system, including accessories like a printer or scanner, to a single power strip that can be easily switched off each night. He advises shutting off the other vampires too, though the inconvenience of resetting the clocks, channels and timers on those devices each morning will discourage most people. The government-backed Energy Star program, coordinated jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, identifies appliances that consume less energy. If one in 10 American homes used only appliances endorsed through the program, the Energy Department estimates, it would reduce U.S. carbon emissions by the same amount as planting 1.7 million acres of trees.

McAfee buying ScanAlert for $51M (AP)

Santa Clara-based McAfee will pay $51 million in cash for Napa-based ScanAlert, which runs daily scans on its more than 75,000 customer Web sites hunting and fixing vulnerabilities to qualify for the company’s Hacker Safe seal of approval. The deal also includes an agreement by McAfee to pay up to $24 million more if certain financial targets are met. Those targets weren’t specified in a news release announcing the acquisition. The deal is expected to close in McAfee’s first quarter. McAfee said it plans to integrate ScanAlert’s technology into its SiteAdvisor service, which alerts Web surfers about the safety of the sites they’re visiting with a series of red, yellow and green lights. The service warns of sites that infect visitors computers’ with malicious code, aggressively display pop-up ads and use submitted e-mail addresses to send spam. McAfee said last week its third-quarter profit more than doubled to $62.9 million as its cash horde grew to $1.5 billion, according to preliminary results for the period ended in September. The results are preliminary because the company is still cleaning up an accounting mess involving mishandled stock option awards over 10 years and needs to restate its finances. McAfee expects to absorb non-cash charges of $100 million to $150 million to properly account for the awards. The options headache led to a management shake-up in October that included the departure of McAfee’s Chief Executive George Samenuk and firing of its president, Kevin Weiss. In February, McAfee Inc.’s former top lawyer, Kent Roberts, was charged in federal court with seven criminal counts of fraud alleging he manipulated the values of his stock options to increase the potential windfall and then falsified records to cover up his misconduct. The alleged offenses occurred in 2000 when McAfee was still known as Network Associates. Roberts has pleaded not guilty.

Microsoft, states ask for change in oversight’s end (Reuters)

Most of the provisions from a 2002 consent decree between Microsoft and the federal government are set to expire on November 12. In a joint motion, Microsoft and the 18 states pushing for the government to extend its oversight asked the court to delay the existing deadline "only for so long as necessary" but no later than January 31, 2008. The extra time is needed for all of the states to file their motions with the court, the documents said. The states want some parts of the 2002 consent decree to be extended to 2012, arguing that Microsoft has failed to live up to the agreement. Some portions have already been extended to 2009. The remedy has been challenged by California and some other states, which argue that Microsoft continues to abuse its dominant position in the market for computer operating systems. Europe's second-highest court recently affirmed a 2004 European Commission ruling that Microsoft abused its overwhelming market position to crush competitors. The court also upheld a 497 million-euro ($708 million) fine.

Uruguay places the first OLPC XO order; Negroponte says Windows is “key”

Foreign tech workers protest over snarled visa issue

Google in talks with Verizon Wireless: sources (Reuters)

"There are good useful talks going on and they could result in a deal," one of the sources said. So far talks between the Web search leader and Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group Plc, revolve around technology and potential business models such as advertising-sponsored services, one of the people said. Verizon Communications Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl said during an investor call on Monday that the operator talks to a lot of companies including Google, but did not elaborate. France Telecom on Tuesday denied its mobile business, Orange, was in talks with Google to introduce handsets running its software after it was named as a potential partner in a Wall Street Journal story earlier on Tuesday. Google shares rose 2.3 percent on Tuesday to $694.77. The Journal reported that Google was expected in two weeks to announce advanced software and services, enabling handset makers to sell Google-powered phones by mid-2008, citing people familiar with the matter. Google declined to comment. Google has moved rapidly in the past year to extend its reach beyond text-based, pay-per-click Web search ads into a variety of new markets, including online video, television, radio and print advertising. Google has also expanded into enterprise software, which has traditionally been Microsoft Corp's domain. According to the Journal, the Google-powered phones are expected to meld several of its applications, including Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail. The ground-breaking part of the plan, according to the newspaper, is Google's aim to make the phone's software "open," right down to the operating system which controls applications and interacts with hardware. This will grant independent software developers access to the tools they need to build phone features, the Journal said. (Reporting by Sinead Carew, Ritsuko Ando, Michele Gershberg and Justin Grant in New York, Astrid Wendlandt in Paris)

Van Wyk aims to transform Red Hat for future growth (InfoWorld)

Coming up with that internal plan lies on the shoulders of 30-year IT veteran Nick Van Wyk. Van Wyk joined Red Hat last year from EMC, taking a newly created role as vice president of operations to optimize Red Hat's subscription model and create better business processes to support the company's channel. Two weeks ago, Red Hat also appointed him to a new role as senior director, transformation, in charge of examining the company's internal processes and operations to "reposition all of our systems to support the next stage of our evolution," he said. That stage includes capitalizing on its April 2006 purchase of JBoss and the open-source middleware package that comes along with it, as well as growing from a company with annual revenue of about $500 million to a billion-dollar company. Red Hat, whose affections toward other vendors can be fickle, also is challenged to build out a stronger ecosystem of partners to support not only Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS but also JBoss and any new technologies it brings to the table. In the current technology business climate, Red Hat is a bit of an anomaly. The company has managed to exist for nearly 10 years with one core competency: a Linux server distribution it supports and provides maintenance for. The company has branched out into other areas of software, such as desktop Linux and virtualization, but for the most part, the server OS has been its bread and butter. Recognizing it can't subsist long on this diet in an environment of consolidation and diversification, Red Hat made a calculated risk and purchased JBoss. It's now trying to position itself to make the most out of that and possible other new product developments or purchases, Van Wyk said. "As we move forward, we will more be described as an open source services and solutions company," he said. "That's an enhanced position for Red Hat." In its present situation, Red Hat has "a base, a critical mass of applications from which to grow," said George Weiss, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. But investors are more interested in what comes next than in how well Red Hat is currently executing, he said. "It's not a look at the present basis, it's what you can do to instill market confidence that you have a sufficiently scalable business model, and the operating system alone is not going to be it," Weiss said. Van Wyk knows full well the pressure on the company, and said that during Red Hat's two-to-three-year transformation, the company will be making changes to ensure it can meet both the internal and the external needs of scaling an IT company. The company is currently examining how it handles a host of functions, among them lead management, partner relationship management, subscriptions, financial systems and technical support. The next step in the transition will be to make changes where necessary to ensure the business is operating efficiently and providing the highest levels of customer service, he said. "This whole idea of ease — the ease of doing business with Red Hat, the ease of support, the automation of those technologies, the time to acquire OS technologies, zero time to subscribe — those are all built into [our goals]," Van Wyk said. "These are things that have been said to us that customers want to have." Van Wyk declined to go into detail about exactly how Red Hat will execute on this strategy, saying the company won't really have a clear idea of the changes it will make until the initial assessment is complete. One thing Red Hat should consider is more acquisitions, said Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group. But Red Hat should move fast to acquire companies that will help them get into new markets — such as database and data management — because larger IT vendors are eyeing similar purchases. "They have companies like Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and SAP competing for the same targets," he said. "Red Hat doesn't have the capital to compete with those suitors. They need to move very quickly before we get into an era where the largest IT vendors are competing for these targets."