[WEB2] Advertising's just the beginning: Facebook chatter heats up even more
[WEB2] Sun plans to countersue NetApp
Updated at 2:31 p.m. PDT: Sun Microsystems plans to countersue Network Appliance later this week, Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz said Wednesday, a suit that will include a request to remove the company's products from the market. Schwartz said on his blog that he has "no interest whatever in suing them" and therefore "reached out" to Chief Executive Dan Warmenhoven. But, he said, NetApp's demands--that Sun "retract" its ZFS file system from open-source community and restrict its use to...
[WEB2] Microsoft acquires equity stake in Facebook, expands advertising partnership
Updated 3:50 p.m. PDT: It's official: Microsoft will take a $240 million equity stake in Facebook during its next round of financing, valuing the company at a whopping $15 billion. News.com's Ina Fried in her Beyond Binary blog reported earlier Wednesday that Microsoft had beaten out Google in the high-stakes bidding war for the slice of tasty Facebook cake. The final deal resulted in a 1.6 percent stake in the social-networking company, notably smaller than the 5 to 10 percent that had been ...
[WEB2] Microsoft and Facebook: The $240 million poke
It's official. Facebook decided to ignore the friend request from Google and instead clicked "OK" to one from Microsoft. The deal, reported first in this spot earlier Wednesday, gives Microsoft a much-needed win against its Silicon Valley search rival. As noted over at Caroline McCarthy's blog, The Social, Microsoft is paying $240 million for a stake in Facebook, in a deal that values the social networking company at $15 billion. That's at the high end of what had been rumored. Under the...
[WEB2] Live report from Microsoft/Facebook press conference
Microsoft and Facebook held a joint telephone press conference about the Microsoft investment and partnership with Facebook that was announced earlier today. Click through to the story page for the Twittercast. Microsoft/Facebook press conference more > Originally posted at Webware....
[WEB2] Internet poker players to Congress: We have rights, too
WASHINGTON--America's online poker enthusiasts descended on Capitol Hill this week with two messages for Congress: Poker's good for the brain, and stop jeopardizing our games already. The multiday lobbying visit by members of the the Poker Players Alliance, which counts more than 800,000 professional and amateur players on its rolls, arrived about a year after politicians enacted a restrictive anti-Internet gambling law. The players' goal for the fly-in: to boost support for a co...
[WEB2] Samsung combo player news; BD-P2400 officially canceled
(Credit: Samsung) Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of speculation regarding the status of Samsung's upcoming Blu-ray/HD DVD combo player--the BD-UP5000--and the high-end Blu-ray player, the BD-P2400. Finally, Samsung has made an official announcement. First, the bad news: The BD-P2400 is officially canceled. The BD-P2400 was supposed to be the step-up to the BD-1400, adding HQV video processing, but now those who want HQV will have to go for the combo player. Now for the good ...
[WEB2] Appeals court overturns law targeting 'sexually explicit' photos
A federal appeals court has struck down, on First Amendment grounds, a long-standing requirement forcing people who produce "sexually explicit" images to keep detailed records about their operations. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday (click for PDF) that the "2257" record-keeping requirements--which bedeviled the adult industry because they apply even to Web sites that "reproduce" sexually explicit material--are overly broad and violate Americans' free-speech rights. Tues...
[WEB2] Buy a house, get the electric car thrown in
In Mexico, you'll soon be able to buy a house and put a new electric car on the mortgage as part of the package. Porteon Electric Vehicles, a low-speed electric car company, has signed a deal with a developer in Mexico to effectively bundle its cars with the sale of a home, according to CEO Kenneth Montler, speaking at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif. Porteon's electric vehicles, however, are a far cry from the Tesla Roadsters. Th...
[WEB2] 'Spore' fans, don't fret: It's still coming next spring
Thanks to my good friends over at GameSpot, I can now finally let out my breath: Spore is going to come out next spring. For nearly two years, Spore, the next title from The Sims mastermind Will Wright, was all people in the video games industry could talk about. Well, OK, maybe not the only thing, but one of the major ones. Then, suddenly, people stopped talking about it as its launch date slipped and slipped and no one knew when, or even if, it would come out. But according to GameSpo...
[WEB2] Google's Cerf: Deep space Web decades out
Internet visionary Vint Cerf predicted on Wednesday that in the coming decades, scientists will have developed an interplanetary Web, or a common set of communications protocols that will allow sensors on spacecraft, satellites and planets to transmit information to each other and back to Earth. Google, of course, would be the search engine to organize all that data. "I think were going to end up with an interplanetary backbone over the next 20, 30, 40 years..." Cerf said during a talk at Goo...
[WEB2] My first book, 'The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life,' is published
One of the things that separates the new News.com personal blogs, like this one, or Declan McCullagh's The Iconoclast, or Caroline McCarthy's The Social, from the larger, impersonal News.com blog, is that they are a place for us to write not just about what's going around us, but also what we're doing ourselves that's relevant. In my case, that's pretty easy because I live a lot of the things I write about. So there's a never-ending supply of blog fodder. And you get the benefits of that. Ins...
[WEB2] Microsoft steals show at Google Analyst Day
Google Analyst Day could have been big news for Google. Executives at the event on Wednesday trumpeted their enterprise Apps business, explained why they would bid on wireless spectrum, and said they were optimistic about getting approval to acquire DoubleClick, while trying as hard as they could to ignore the elephant in the room--Microsoft snagging a big Facebook deal. All the positive spin on Google's future with advertising and social networks couldn't change the fact that Micros...
[WEB2] So, are you and the Internet a thing?
If only the Internet had been around to comfort Rear Window's Miss Lonelyhearts back in 1954. A new poll shows that nearly 1 in 4 Americans say the Internet could be a stand-in for a significant other for a period of time. Among singles, the percentage was even higher: 31 percent. (One wonders how popular such responses as "reading a good book" or "playing with my cats" were to the question of substitutes.) The poll examined people's attitudes about the Internet. Results...
[WEB2] Playhut opens kids' virtual world
Correction: This blog initially misstated the day of the announcement. It is Tuesday. More toy makers are joining the virtual worlds' fray. Playhut, a toy company known for making physical play structures like inflatable fire engines or playhouses for kids, is trying its hand at online virtual worlds for the 6 years and older set. On Tuesday, the company said it launched two online worlds--one for boys and one for girls--under the brand GoLive2.com Kraze. The free sites enable members play...
[WEB2] GE to plow $1 billion into clean tech research
NISKAYUNA, New York--General Electric will spend $1 billion in research and development this year on clean energy technologies, part of its ecomagination environmental initiative. The industrial giant announced the investment on Tuesday at its Global Research center here, where it also said that it will put $6.8 million of that into plug-in hybrid vehicles as part of a U.S. Department of Energy project. The company hosted a day-long presentation at its labs to showcase technology develo...
[WEB2] Wider variety of ethanol blends on the way, DOE official says
There's a lot of room between E10 and E85, says Alexander Karsner. Karsner, the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at the Department of Energy, says that there needs to be a greater variety of gas-ethanol blends. E10 has only 10 percent ethanol, and in some states E10 contains only 2 percent to 3 percent ethanol, he said during a meeting with reporters at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place in Redwood City, Calif. In his State o...
[WEB2] Broadband-over-power-lines battle goes to court
WASHINGTON--A dispute that could affect the roll-out of broadband over power lines, which some hope will one day compete with cable and DSL services, went before a federal appeals court on Tuesday, but no immediate resolution occurred. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard arguments from attorneys for the Federal Communications Commission and the American Radio Relay League, which represents amateur radio operators, about FCC rules aimed at allowing BPL services t...
[WEB2] What holds back electric cars? Car dealers, says VC
The cozy relationship between car dealerships and automakers will have to be changed for electric cars to take off, theorized venture capitalist Jennifer Fonstad. A managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Fonstad said that Detroit automakers have created an environment--through discounts and volume buying--that make it tough for new, electric car companies to squeeze into the market. "The tipping point will be breaking the Detroit model," she said at the Alternative Energy Innovation...
[WEB2] Depth of field: The small-sensor difference
Having struggled on many occasions to explain the difference between cameras sensors the size of a full frame of 35mm film and the vastly more common smaller sensors, I thought I'd point readers toward this lucid explanation of one aspect by Canon tech guru Chuck Westfall in his October column with the Digital Journalist. One reason you might want to pay attention: the vast majority of digital SLRs use smaller sensors than film SLRs, though Canon and Nikon have some high-end exceptions. W...