JJ News Maker: Oct 9, 2010

Saturday, October 9, 2010

Yahoo Agrees To Buy Online-Ad Technology Firm Dapper - Wall Street Journal

(Updates throughout with background, company comment, analyst comment, latest share price)

SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)--Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) said Tuesday it agreed to buy Dapper Inc., a startup that has developed technology to dynamically create and target personalized ads at Internet users.

The acquisition will help narrow the gap between Yahoo and Google Inc. (GOOG), which acquired similar technology when it bought startup Teracent last year.

"Yahoo needs to be competitive in terms of the pairing of content and advertisements," said BGC Partners analyst Colin ...

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Lawyers: Student charged in Rutgers case innocent - The Associated Press

Lawyers: Student charged in Rutgers case innocentBy SAMANTHA HENRY (AP) – 51 minutes ago

NEWARK, N.J. — Lawyers for one of the two Rutgers University students accused of secretly webcasting the sex life of a fellow freshman who later committed suicide said Tuesday that their client is innocent.

Prosecutors have charged Molly Wei, of Princeton, and fellow Rutgers freshman Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro, both 18, with invasion of privacy for allegedly using a webcam to broadcast the encounter between Ravi's roommate, 18-year-old freshman Tyler Clementi, and a man who hasn't been identified.

Clementi jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River three days later. His death has led to nationwide soul-searching over the plight of gay teenagers and to mourning on the Rutgers campus. Prosecutors are weighing whether to charge Wei and Ravi with a hate crime.

Attorneys for Wei released a statement Tuesday extending sympathy to the Clementi family and saying Wei was innocent.

"This is a tragic situation. But this tragedy has also unfairly led to rampant speculation and misinformation, which threaten to overwhelm the actual facts of the matter," the statement said. "Those true facts will reveal that Molly Wei is innocent. Molly committed no crime. Her remarkable reputation is being unjustly tarnished by uninformed and incorrect assumptions."

Describing Wei as "a wonderful, caring and talented young woman with a bright future," the statement said the firestorm surrounding the charges were "a classic rush to judgment," adding Wei had been "maligned by unfounded attacks on her character."

"Neither Molly nor anyone else should be used to further the agenda of others," the statement said.

Lawyers for Ravi haven't returned calls seeking comment, including a message left Tuesday evening.

Ravi and Wei could face up to five years in prison if convicted of the invasion-privacy charges. A spokesman for the Middlesex County prosecutor's office told The Associated Press on Tuesday that no decision had been made on possible additional charges.

Middlesex County prosecutor Bruce Kaplan said at a news conference Monday that he wouldn't rush the investigation.

"We need to determine the facts and then determine what the applicable law is," he said.

Clementi's family has said little about his death.

"We understand that our family's personal tragedy presents important legal issues for the country as well as for us," the family said in a statement last week. "Our hope is that our family's personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity."

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Microsoft IE Falls Below 50% Market Share - InformationWeek

Slideshow: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 Beta Revealed(click image for larger view and for full photo gallery)The global market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer fell below 50% in September, a milestone in the web browser wars that started in the mid-1990s, a research firm says.

At the end of September, IE's share dropped to 49.87%, StatCounter reported Tuesday. Just two years ago, IE dominated the market with a 67% share.

"This is certainly a milestone in the Internet browser wars," Aodhan Cullen, chief executive of StatCounter, said in a statement.

The research firm found that the rising star in the browser market was Google's Chrome, which has tripled its share to 11.54% in September from 3.69% the same month a year ago. In June, Chrome overtook Apple Safari for the first time in the U.S. Mozilla Firefox holds the second largest market share with 31.5%.

Microsoft has been the powerhouse in the browser market since the company started bundling IE with Windows in order to compete with Navigator, a browser launched in 1994 by Netscape Communications Corp. By leveraging its Windows monopoly, Microsoft contributed to the eventual demise of Netscape.

Today, government regulators require Microsoft to create a level playing field for competing browsers in Windows. In Europe, European Commission competition authorities require Microsoft to provide a menu of browsers to give Windows users a choice.

The stiff requirements in Europe have contributed to IE's share falling to 40.26% in September from 46.44% a year ago, StatCounter said. In North America, IE still accounts for more than half of the market at 52.3%, followed by Firefox at 27.21% and Chrome at 9.87%.

StatCounter bases its report on data collected from more than 15 billion page views per month at the more than 3 million websites in the StatCounter network. The firm provides a Web site tracking and reporting service.

Net Applications, another Web metrics firm, has drawn other conclusions on the global browser market. The company this month reported that IE's share had fallen in September but still accounted for more than half the market at 59.65%.

Findings from research firms often differ due to differences in methodology.

SEE ALSO:

Internet Explorer Drops Below 60% Market Share

Review: IE9 May Be Best Version Yet

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Apple Challenges $625.5M Jury Award In Patent Case - InformationWeek

Apple has asked a federal judge to toss out a $625.5 million award by a jury that found the Mac maker had violated three patents related to how documents are displayed on a Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch.

The U.S. District Court jury in Tyler, Texas, found on Friday that Apple had infringed on the Mirror Worlds patents in developing Time Machine, Spotlight and Cover Flow. The jury awarded the plaintiff $208.5 million on each patent.

Time Machine, Spotlight and Cover Flow allow people to scroll through files in a way that's like flipping through a deck of cards. Cover Flow is for scrolling through album cover art when looking for music in the iTunes library in Apple devices, Time Machine makes backup copies of files and Spotlight is used to search for files. The latter two are in the Mac.

On Sunday, Apple filed an emergency motion asking U.S. District Judge Leonard Davis for a stay of the jury decision, saying that the damages awarded on each patent amounted to Mirror Worlds "triple dipping." In addition, Davis had said that he would reconsider the evidence regarding infringement of two of the patents and could reverse the jury's ruling, Apple argued. The judge's decision on the request is pending.

The patents reflect the work of Yale computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter, who in the mid-1990s recognized that the desktop metaphor has its limits and proposed to organize computer documents in a time-ordered stream.

Mirror Worlds, which sued Apple in March 2008, began operating in 1997 and shipped its first enterprise software product, Scopeware, in March 2001. In 2002, it released a desktop product called Scopeware Vision. The company closed its doors on May 15, 2004.

SEE ALSO:

Apple Faces Time Machine Patent Lawsuit

Apple Sued Over iPhone Liquid Sensors

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Solar cells for electricity, hot water to top White House - MiamiHerald.com

WASHINGTON — The most famous house in America is going solar.

The White House soon will have solar panels to supply the first family's hot water and some of its electricity, the Department of Energy announced Tuesday.

It's not yet clear whether the panels will be visible to tourists from below, but environmentalists and clean energy advocates hope that the buzz will give solar a boost, just as first lady Michelle Obama's vegetable garden got more people buying seeds.

The White House solar panels will be a demonstration project to show that "American solar technologies are available, reliable and ready for installation in homes throughout the country," the Energy Department said in a statement.

"This project reflects President Obama's strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create here at home. Deploying solar energy technologies across the country will help America lead the global economy for years to come," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.

Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org — a campaign to find climate change solutions in communities around the world — said in a statement that the White House "did the right thing."

"If it has anything like the effect of the White House garden, it could be a trigger for a wave of solar installations across the country and around the world," he said.

President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House above the Oval Office in 1979 to heat water in the staff kitchen, according to the National Museum of American History in Washington, which acquired one of them. President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986.

McKibben obtained one of the old White House panels and drove it from Maine to Washington last month, trying to push the administration toward taking action on climate change.

After Tuesday's announcement, White House officials said solar had been in the plans since the early days of the administration.

Chu said in a blog post Tuesday that the new solar panels would be on the roof by the end of next spring.

The Energy Department will take bids from companies that want to install the panels and water heater. Among its criteria will be how well a company "showcases American technology, products and knowhow," said Christine Glunz, a spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

The department expects the solar-powered system to produce about 19,700 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. Based on Washington commercial rates, that would mean an electricity bill savings for a typical household of $2,300 per year. The additional savings on hot water would be about $1,000.

The department is investing in the next generation of solar power, and it says that innovation and new technologies will make solar energy cost-competitive with conventional electricity across the country.

Solar today generates less than 1 percent of the nation's electricity. The costs of photovoltaic panels have been declining, however. The solar industry says that scaling up the use of solar would lower the cost further and make it competitive with coal and natural gas.