Tech frenzy over mobile - Seattle Times

BARCELONA, Spain — The crowd outside the auditorium at Mobile World Congress on Monday was a restive mass of executives waiting to hear Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. It was worse than the dressing-room line at Nordstrom Rack.

The pushing and shoving among men in suits to get a seat were a microcosm of the fierce competition and frenetic pace of a wireless industry here for its largest annual gathering. It was a stampede of the electronics industry to mobility.

The Mobile World Congress trade show, which started Monday, could draw as many as 53,000 attendees and 1,400 companies setting up booths and battling for sales and partnerships with hardware makers, software developers and wireless carriers. That compares with 49,000 attendees and 1,300 booths in 2010.

In addition to Ballmer, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo also spoke Monday.

With the industry drawing much of tech world's attention, the world's largest software company still had a lot of explaining to do about Windows Phone 7, the mobile operating system that started selling in October. The platform is growing slowly and has shipped 2 million copies to phone makers — the largest metric it has disclosed so far.

"We're off to a strong start; we know we've got a lot of work to do," Ballmer said in his speech.

But, no matter how Windows Phone 7 sales are characterized and despite Microsoft's eyebrow-raising partnership announced Friday with Nokia, the platform faces huge challenges.

Software update

Ballmer's speech was, at the end of the day, mostly a software update for an industry hungry for big technology leaps. This crowd has been spoiled by Apple's steady stream of new products and Google's stratospheric growth in mobile.

In fact, Google's mobile platform, Android, seems ubiquitous at the show, the launchpad for new products from all corners.

Samsung, for instance, announced both a new Galaxy smartphone and tablet, only a few months after releasing its first one. Sony Ericsson announced a smartphones running PlayStation games is coming in March. The platform common to all of them: Android.

Chip maker Qualcomm promoted software-development kits for new technologies such as augmented reality, also running on Android. An example of augmented reality is the yellow first-down line TV viewers of football games see on their screens.

Apple, too, looms large over the show, even though it is not at the conference in an official or public way, with many companies showing software built on the iPhone and iPad.

By contrast, Microsoft had no new devices running Windows Phone 7 to show here, and Nokia has not said when its first Windows Phone will be ready.

Even more telling is both Apple and Google are the platforms for tablets most developers here are targeting — and tablets are the hot topic at the conference.

Microsoft had no specific news about an operating system for tablets. The last update came at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, when the company showed a very rough chip prototype for the next version of Windows on tablets.

With this as a backdrop, Ballmer drummed on the phrase "fast paced" in his speech to describe Microsoft's mobile progress over the past 12 months.

The company announced plans for Windows Phone 7 about 12 months ago, began selling devices in the fall and on Friday announced the exclusive deal to put Windows Phone 7 on smartphones for the world's largest phone maker, Nokia.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, formerly president of Microsoft's Business division, joined Ballmer in the Monday appearance.

"The world is shifting from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems," he said. "... Microsoft and Nokia together represent a natural partnership."

Ballmer shared a laundry list of updates coming to Windows Phone 7 this year in his speech. One, planned for March, will add a copy-and-paste feature for Windows Phone 7 users.

Later this year, Windows Phone 7 will get Twitter integration into its People Hub, its address book. When people pull up their address books on the phone, they will also see their most recent tweets. (Facebook is already integrated.)

Multitasking between programs is also coming to Windows Phone 7. Corporate Vice President Joe Belfiore showed the ability to pause and switch between two games on the phone.

Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft's Web browser in progress, will have a version ready for Windows Phone 7 this year. The browser is a major update for Microsoft because it supports HTML5, a Web programming standard that lets developers build richer, more applike websites.

Microsoft will also expand the integration of SkyDrive on Windows Phone so people can access Office documents created in Office Web Apps on their phones.

Kinect connection

Microsoft also showed Windows Phone 7 working with Xbox Kinect. In a video, a Windows Phone user controlled balls in an Xbox "Kinect Adventures" handball game while another player tried to hit them in a game.

"My sense is they're doing better than people expected," Will Stofega, an analyst with Framingham, Mass.-based IDC, said of Windows Phone 7. "People said they would sell 10,000 copies."

He said the key is for Microsoft not to let Nokia get in the way of other phone makers such as Samsung and LG, which are already selling Windows Phones.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com

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Mom, tot found dead in dumpster - Boston Herald

BROCKTON — The bodies of a young Ecuadorean and her toddler son were found stuffed in a Dumpster behind their downtown apartment house, and authorities said yesterday the mother and child may have been there for days.

“It’s a terrible crime scene, especially when you think about what happened to a small child and his mom. I mean, who would do that to a 2-year-old child?” said Plymouth District Attorney Timothy J. Cruz.

Until autopsies determine the cause and manner of their deaths, Cruz refused to speculate on what evil may have befallen Maria Avelina Palaguachi-Cela, 25, and Brian Palaguachi, 2, except to say the mother was last seen at her home at 427 Warren Ave. on Thursday.

“We do not believe this is a random act,” Cruz said.

No arrests have been made.

A New York cousin of the child’s father — day laborer Manuel Caguana — told the Herald last night Caguana was questioned by police, but had been working “far, far away” for about two weeks when his son and Palaguachi-Cela were found by cops Sunday night.

The baby’s father had called his family repeatedly last week “and there was no answer, no answer. So he was worried,” said the cousin, who is also named Manuel Caguana. “He was like, my wife, my son, where are they?”

When the father returned home, “everything was quiet, clean, just as he had left it, so he was shocked when the police came and told him she was dead,” Caguana said.

The family “were good people,” the cousin added. “They were always going to church.”

Denise Agnello, who lives across the street from Palaguachi-Cela’s spearmint-colored triple-decker, said the young woman lived with a man, whom she saw police talking to after the gruesome find.

Agnello said detectives questioned her, too. When she asked what was going on, “All they said to me was, ‘We found a young woman in the Dumpster in a duffel bag, dead,’ ” she said.

Cruz refused to comment on whether a duffel bag was involved or how the remains were positioned —in part, he explained, because police don’t know if the presumed crime scene was disturbed. “My understanding,” he said, “is the bodies involved in this were fully intact.”

Agnello said she usually saw Palaguachi-Cela — a quiet, petite woman — on a daily basis, but not in the past week.

“Right across the street — it’s just awful,” she said.

According to Manuel’s cousin, Manuel Caguana and Palaguachi-Cela originally met as neighbors in Ecuador and reconnected in the United States. Manuel had been living in New York, but moved to Massachusetts “for love” of Palaguachi-Cela, his cousin said.

The couple had been married for about four years but, the cousin said, Palaguachi-Cela had a prior relationship with a man who he believes may also live in Massachusetts.

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Obama's Budget Plan Complicates Talks on Corporate Tax Overhaul - BusinessWeek

February 15, 2011, 12:05 AM EST By Ryan J. Donmoyer and Richard Rubin

(See {EXT2 } for more on the budget.)

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama renewed his call to raise taxes paid by U.S.-based multinational corporations and oil and gas companies, complicating efforts to overhaul the corporate tax code this year.

The president, in a $3.7 trillion budget plan released yesterday in Washington, revived dozens of proposals that Congress has rejected, including $129 billion in higher taxes on the overseas profits of U.S. companies. He also proposed changing the tax treatment of oil, gas and coal companies, which would raise about $46 billion.

The proposals revived opposition from businesses. They had been looking for a signal of a friendlier tax stance.

“There was the hope they would consider some of the arguments and concerns that were raised by the multinationals” after Obama included similar proposals in his first two budgets, said Lindy Paull, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in Washington.

Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in the past few months have held a series of meetings with corporate executives, who have pushed for reducing taxes on global profits rather than increasing them.

‘Fundamental Changes’

“There is disappointment that those proposals were not revised and that they’re continued to be labeled loophole closers when they are pretty fundamental changes to the tax code,” Paull said. “People have spent a lot of time and effort trying to discuss that with the administration.”

Michigan Representative Dave Camp, a Republican who would play a pivotal role in any rewrite of the tax code as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, blasted Obama’s proposals.

“Rather than setting the stage for broad-based, pro-growth tax reform, this budget goes in the opposite direction with more tax hikes,” Camp said.

The proposal also would bring back pre-2001 tax rates on income and capital gains for individuals earning more than $200,000 annually and married couples making more than $250,000. The estate tax would return to 2009 levels with a $3.5 million per-person exemption and a 45 percent top rate. Under a law Obama signed in December, lower rates expire at the end of 2012.

“The president was unable to reverse the Bush tax cuts this past year with a majority in each house of Congress, so it’s very difficult to see how he will be successful over the next two years with the Republicans firmly in control of the House,” said Neal Weber, managing director in charge of RSM McGladrey’s Washington national tax office.

Limits on Deductions

The budget plan would limit itemized deductions for top earners to 28 percent, curbing the value of tax breaks for charitable contributions, home mortgage interest and state and local taxes. That proposal has been included in every budget of Obama’s presidency and was rejected as a revenue-raising provision to fund his overhaul of the health system last year.

Under the budget’s assumptions, federal revenue as a percent of the economy would increase from 14.9 percent in 2010 to 20 percent in 2021. Part of that increase stems from projected economic growth, not from policy changes.

A key Senate Republican also criticized the tax increases in the budget.

“This budget fails to preserve the pro-growth policies needed to expand our economy, create jobs and reduce the deficit,” said Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Finance Committee.

Administration officials said the budget is balanced with proposals favorable to business, such as making permanent a tax credit for conducting research.

Tax Incentives

Obama proposed an array of other tax incentives. They include the elimination of capital gains on some small business stock and one to revive the Build America Bonds program, which expired at the end of 2010.

The budget also proposes converting a deduction for energy- efficient buildings into a credit. Obama wants to extend a provision expiring at the end of 2011 that allows certain energy tax credits to be converted into grants.

Instead, many in the business community are focusing on renewed proposals to place limits on multinational companies’ ability to defer income taxes on profits they earn outside the U.S. These plans have drawn criticism from corporations such as Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.

The budget also revives a proposal that Congress require executives of investment partnerships including private-equity firms to pay ordinary tax rates on the profits they receive as compensation. This pay, known as carried interest, currently can qualify for lower capital gains tax rates. The proposal would raise $14.8 billion over 10 years.

--Editors: Jodi Schneider, Jim Rubin.

To contact the reporters on this story: Richard Rubin in Washington at rrubin12@bloomberg.net; Ryan J. Donmoyer in Washington at rdonmoyer@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net

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Drumming Up More Addresses on the Internet - New York Times

Certainly not Vint Cerf.

In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network?

They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment would ever require, far more, in fact, than he could ever imagine needing. And so he was comfortable rejecting the even larger number of addresses that some on his team had argued for.

“It was 1977,” Mr. Cerf said, in an interview last week. “We thought we were doing an experiment.”

“The problem was, the experiment never ended,” added Mr. Cerf, who is a former chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit corporation that coordinates the Internet naming system. “We had no idea it would turn into the world’s global communications network.”

Today, the Internet that Mr. Cerf helped create more than 30 years ago is about to max out. Within the next 12 to 18 months, or perhaps sooner, every one of the 4.3 billion Internet Protocol addresses will have been allocated, and the Internet, at least as it exists today, will have reached full capacity.

I.P. addresses are the unique sequence of numbers assigned to each Web site, computer, game console or smartphone connected to the Internet. They are distinct from domain names, which identify Web sites, like nytimes.com.

“There are 4.3 billion addresses, and a lot of people have more than one,” said Leo Vegoda, manager of number resources at Icann. “And there are seven billion people on the planet. That’s a big mismatch.”

The rapid expansion of Internet adoption in Asia has sped things up even more.

Experts saw this problem coming years ago, and the transition to a new system, referred to as Internet Protocol version 6, is well under way. This new standard will support a virtually inexhaustible number of devices, experts say. But there is some cause for concern because the two systems are largely incompatible, and as the transition takes place, the potential for breakdowns is enormous.

“This is a major turning point in the ongoing development of the Internet,” Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive, said. “No one was caught off guard by this.”

Still, the question looms, is the Internet industry prepared?

The answer depends on whom you ask. While it is true that no one has been caught off guard, some parts of the industry responded faster than others, leaving some technology companies scrambling to catch up. Software companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, along with PC makers, say they have been taking the problem seriously for years in hopes of thwarting any major calamities. The major operating systems — like Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X — have already incorporated the new system. And providers, including Comcast, say they are ready to make the switch.

But Mr. Cerf is critical of Internet service providers, along with the manufacturers of Internet devices, for not addressing the problem sooner, saying that many chose to wait until customers started asking for the new system.

“How can customers be expected to know what they need?” Mr. Cerf said. He compared Internet protocols to the internal workings of a car engine. “It’s like changing a gear in a car’s transmission,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to worry about that.”

I.P. addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is operated by Icann, to five registries representing regions of the globe. Those registries distribute the addresses to Internet service providers like cable and phone companies, universities, governments and large corporations. Millions of new devices will be attached.

At a ceremony early this month in Florida, the last block of addresses based on the original standard, known as IPv4, were allocated to the five registries.

Comcast began working on the problem nearly six years ago, and last year began customer trials nationwide. Jorge Alberni, a Comcast spokesman, said the trials so far had gone smoothly.

Comcast is now beginning to distribute dual-mode cable modems, for example, that support both the original and the new Internet Protocol versions. By the time the transition is fully under way, Mr. Alberni said, most Comcast customers will already be using cable boxes and modems that support IPv6, as the new version is commonly called. In some case, customers with older equipment will have to make a swap.

“We don’t foresee any problems for our customers,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 14, 2011

Because of an editing error, a previous version of this story misstated Vint Cerf's relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. He is a former chairman, not the current chairman.

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