[Business Tech] Does Al Gore deserve the Nobel Prize?
[Business Tech] Allow more green cards for foreign techies, Congress told
Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:53 a.m. PDT to clarify a description of IEEE-USA. High-tech companies and groups representing American engineers are famous for clashing over whether it's a good idea to allow U.S. companies to hire more foreign workers on temporary H-1B visas. But what's sometimes forgotten in the debate is a key point of agreement among at least some representatives of the warring sides. A new joint letter (click for PDF) to Congress from the Semicond...
[Business Tech] Google ups storage for Gmail, Google Apps users
Gmail users running short on storage are getting a reprieve starting today. The company has announced they'll be increasing the speed in which they've been adding storage to their popular e-mail service, along with bumps to Google Apps users. You might have seen the storage counter that's been running on the Gmail's start page, which is nearing the 3 GB mark bit by bit--and now, it's doing it just a little bit faster. Meanwhile, Google Apps users are getting a slightly better end of the deal. St...
[Business Tech] More money for e-books, but market still slow
Investors put in $16 million more into E-Ink in the latest effort to get the e-book ball rolling. That brings the total that the small company has raised to $150 million, according to VentureWire. The market, however, has yet to take flight. Everyone loves the idea. E-books don't consume trees and you can carry several books at once. Some believe that college textbooks will go this way. Still, no one seems to be buying them yet. The most prominent product to use the company's technology i...
[Business Tech] No 'electronic hamburgers' for LinkedIn developer initiative
Business social network LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up an application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to contribute to the site. But Dan Nye, the company's CEO, recently spoke with the New York Times' Saul Hansell and explained that it's going to be limited, in the interest of keeping things professional. "We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other," Nye told the Times, in a not-so-subtle reference to th...
[Business Tech] Snocap CEO on layoffs: 'pioneers take arrows'
Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff(Credit: Snocap) On the morning after laying off 54 percent of his staff, Snocap CEO Rusty Rueff, greeted me in his San Francisco office. Guarded at first, Rueff slowly began offering details on Friday about why the music-licensing company, cofounded in 2002 by Shawn Fanning of Napster fame, cut its workforce from 57 to 26 employees and put itself up for sale. Snocap offers to handle copyright and music licensing for musicians and also powers embeddable download st...
[Business Tech] Pursuing virtual world interoperability
I spent the last couple of days at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose, Calif., and one of the more interesting things I came across was the fact that on Tuesday about two dozen tech companies and other institutions gathered to discuss the idea of interoperability between all the various virtual worlds. It's a very interesting idea. Whether it can work is very much up for debate. But you can read my story on the subject, which ran this morning on CNET News.com. The question is: Can t...
[Business Tech] ATA Airlines detains passenger for using iPhone in 'airplane mode'
Apparently putting your iPhone in airplane mode is not the digital equivalent of returning your seatback to the upright position. Don't try to watch movies on an iPhone if you're flying on ATA.(Credit: ATA Airlines) A flight attendant for ATA Airlines recently asked a flier watching a movie midflight on the way to Hawaii to shut off his iPhone, not for the perfectly reasonable reason that the man was watching the inane Jennifer-Love Hewitt vehicle I Know What You Did Last Summer, but because...
[Business Tech] Right brain vs. left brain
It's long been thought that people are governed by one side of their brain. Left-brain thinkers are thought to be logical, practical types who are good at math and science; whereas right-brain people lean toward the fantasy and feelings of life, often turning out to be artists or big thinkers. An article from Australia's Herald Sun has a mind-bending quiz that attempts to show you which type you are. So which direction is she spinning? ...
[Business Tech] Google updates Linux version of Desktop
(Credit: Google)Keeping its Linux fan base in mind, Google has updated its Desktop for Linux, which it launched in June. With version 1.1, still in beta, you can search over more image formats and search the content of Microsoft Office documents. The thumbnails in search results are higher quality and you can customize the hot key that launches the quick search box. There's more information on the Inside Google Desktop blog and you can download the application here. ...
[Business Tech] Microsoft says Automatic Update not misbehaving
Blogs were buzzing this week with reports that Windows users who thought they had automatic updates set to either not install or get permission before installing nonetheless had their machines patched and rebooted. Friday afternoon, the company posted a response to its Web site saying no changes were made to the automatic update mechanism nor did any recent updates change AU settings. The company is looking into whether customers might have actually had their settings changed by Microsoft O...
[Business Tech] Apple honors Al Gore on Nobel Prize
Apple has dedicated the majority of the free space on its home page to honor company director Al Gore on having received the Nobel Peace Prize earlier Friday. Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the coveted prize for their evangelism regarding the causes and effects of climate change. Apple put up a simple message honoring Gore on its site, as well as several news articles about the prize in its "Hot News" section. The prize also spurred Fake Steve Jobs into a f...
[Business Tech] Samsung's SGH-T639: 3G or not 3G?
He's a sneaky one(Credit: Samsung) Earlier this week when we spotted the SGH-T639 under the T-Mobile section of Samsung's Web site, we were a bit confused. The SGH-T639, which looks a lot like the Samsung Hue, is rumored to be T-Mobile's first 3G phone, but we weren't expecting to see it until after T-Mobile had announced a 3G network. And since T-Mobile has yet to do that, we were left a little perplexed. The SGH-T639 has yet to show up on T-Mobile's site, but PhoneSccop is reporting that...
[Business Tech] The game of subconscious spam filtering
I was combing through the piles of uncollected e-mail this afternoon when this nugget grabbed my attention: "OnlineBootyCall message for Daniel Terdiman." Putting aside the entertainment such a message might contain, it got me thinking about the subconscious filtering system I use to sift through the mounds of e-mail I get, looking for the ones I actually need to read. There are all kinds of cues that signal spam: poor spelling; no caps when there should be; caps when there shouldn't be; ...
[Business Tech] Readers' revenge
I'll hand it to all the wisenheimers out there. Guys, you made my day. Within hours of posting today's Facebook Fetish column on News.com, my Facebook in-box was inundated by a flood of strangers asking me to "befriend" them. Sorry guys, but I'm still playing hard to get. And in case you were wondering, so is Melissa. I also received a lot of good feedback from readers who sent in their thoughts via e-mail. For all its success, Facebook still has a big selling job ahead--if it...
[Business Tech] Red Hat, Novell sued for patent infringement
Suddenly all those discussions about the discordant ways of open-source software and patent law have become a lot less abstract. Companies called IP Innovation and Technology Licensing Corporation sued Red Hat and Novell on Tuesday, claiming the top Linux sellers' software products infringe U.S. patent 5,072,412, "User interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects," and two identically named patents. The suit (PDF), in the U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, seek...
[Business Tech] New ATI external tuner on sale at Best Buy
The new ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB.(Credit: AMD) Best Buy.com lists six Visiontex-branded ATI TV Wonder products today, including the never before seen ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB external ATSC/NTSC TV tuner. The others are merely reboxings of various 600 and 650 tuners on the market, ranging from a USB key-sized model, to two full PCI Express cards (excepting, of course, the CableCard-based TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner, which remains a PC vendor bundle exclusive). All of these tuners supp...
[Business Tech] Teenager claims to have easy iPod Touch jailbreak
A 13-year-old hacker claims to have developed code that would let you put third-party applications on an iPod Touch without having to take a computer science class. AriX sent us a press release Sunday promoting iJailbreak, an automated program that allows third-party applications to run on the iPod Touch. It doesn't work for the iPhone, and it's only available for iPod Touch owners who are using Intel-based Macs. I don't have an iPod Touch at my disposal right now, so I'm unable to test whether...
[Business Tech] All hail the lobbyconners
Over the last few years, I have been to a whole lot of conferences. They've been in cities like Austin, Phoenix, San Diego, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco and so on, and have covered any number of topics. And over the years, I've started to come to the conclusion--as so many have before me--that the endless panels and keynotes are hardly worth the time it takes to sit through them. After all, how much value is there really in listening to six people talk over each other for 35 minutes? ...