Business Tech

As a German company defends the "Smartbook" trademark, its actions underscore what happens when companies gratuitously heap new category monikers on top of existing--and perfectly adequate--naming schemes.

Smartbook's Heaven Puro is, in fact, a Netbook.

(Credit: Smartbook)

Question: what do Netbooks and smartbooks have in common? Besides looking pretty much the same to consumers (small, lightweight clamshell laptops), both terms have been the object of legal wrangling by companies claiming trademark infringement.

First, the term Netbook came under attack from Psion Teklogix. That dispute with Intel was settled in June. Now Germany-based Smartbook is claiming that Qualcomm's use of the term smartbook infringes on the eponymous company's trademark. "Smartbook AG sets a high value on its protected trademarks, which are being used as company symbols and product marks for years," the company said in a statement sent to CNET.

The San Diego, Calif.-based cell phone chip giant had this to say in response: "Qualcomm is surprised by the claims being made by Smartbook AG...given that Qualcomm does not claim, and has never claimed, to own the term 'smartbook,' which it believes is a descriptive and generic term. The term is used by a number of companies, consumers, and industry commentators to describe a class of devices that combine attributes of smartphones and Netbooks that will be enabled by various technology companies, including Qualcomm."

Qualcomm has been promoting smartbooks for months on its Web site, and Freescale Semiconductor has been doing the same, though on a smaller scale. Both companies make, in effect, the silicon engines that power these devices.

And Qualcomm is now starting to crank up its promotion of the smartbook, as Lenovo prepares to roll out one of the first smartbooks at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

So the question arises: why call them smartbooks at all? Qualcomm believes that the devices it is promoting are different enough--as described above--from Netbooks that the moniker is warranted. But the reality is that by the time smartbooks hit the market in force (if they indeed do), there will be little really to set them apart from Netbooks.

For proof, look no further than the local Verizon or AT&T store. Verizon now carries Windows-Intel-based Netbooks from Hewlett-Packard with 3G modems built in. The sales pitch: connect to the Internet anywhere at 3G speeds--similar to what Qualcomm is preaching for smartbooks. Yes, smartbooks will have a different operating system (Android/Linux), but to consumers, this won't mean that they are different. At a Verizon store, it's just another Netbook.

And the Smartbook case is a microcosm of this whole problem. The German company offers a line of laptops that, in the United States, are called Netbooks. The systems promoted on its Web site offer the usual fare of Intel Atom processors and Windows software--except that the company calls them Smartbooks.

Confused? Well, the confusion may go away on its own when everyone just keeps it simple, calling a spade a spade: a Netbook is a Netbook is a Netbook.

IBM said Monday that it has acquired database security firm Guardium.

Guardium is a leading vendor in monitoring and protecting databases for large enterprises. In addition to securing the data and watching database activity, Guardium's technology can automate certain tasks to assist businesses with regulatory compliance, said IBM. Big Blue expects the acquisition to help its customers better shield their critical databases against both external and internal threats.

Guardium can check for specific patterns and anomalies when information is accessed, said IBM, allowing enterprises to maintain the integrity of their data. Guardium's technology can also detect fraud and unauthorized access to a database by way of an enterprise application, such as a company's ERP or CRM software.

"Organizations are grappling with government mandates, industry standards and business demands to ensure that their critical data is protected against internal and external threats," said Arvind Krishna, general manager of IBM Information Management, in a statement. "This acquisition is another significant step in our abilities to help clients govern and monitor their data, and ultimately make their information more secure throughout its lifecycle."

Guardium, a privately held company based in Waltham, Mass., will be integrated into IBM's Information Management Software portfolio.

Big Blue hasn't been shy about buying companies this year to increase the scope of its business services. In July, the company picked up analytics and information forecaster SPSS for $1.2 billion. With security a vital need for its customers, IBM also acquired security provider Ounce Labs around the same time.

Financial terms of the Guardium deal were not disclosed.

Industry insiders are accusing Apple of manipulating the price of NAND flash memory chips used in its popular iPhone and iPod products, according to a report in The Korea Times on Monday.

Citing unnamed sources, the article says Apple asks manufacturers to produce more chips than it eventually buys from Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor. The sources said Apple waits for the price of the chips to fall before making its purchase.

(Credit: Apple)

The practice of not buying all of the product originally ordered, semiconductor analyst Jim Handy told CNET, is "not uncommon in the industry."

Handy, of market research firm Objective Analysis, explained that these contracts are normally negotiated with a cancellation clause, with provisions to protect the supplier and buyer. He said companies usually work closely with the buyers, so changes to orders are normally small and don't cause many problems.

Supply and demand in the NAND market are currently about even, Handy said, adding that with the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, he's heard estimates that 20 percent to 30 percent of the worldwide NAND flash memory goes to Apple. In its fiscal fourth-quarter results, the company reported selling 10.2 million iPods and 7.4 million iPhones for the three months ended September 26.

Chipmakers Samsung Electronics and Hynix Semiconductor declined to comment for The Korea Times, as did Apple's Korean office. Contacted by CNET, representatives of Apple in the United States also declined to comment for the story.

The iPhone sales numbers continue to increase, as does the number of applications available for the device. Apps are one reason the iPhone has become as popular as it is among so many different categories of users in such a short time on the market.

Apple currently has more than 100,000 apps available for download, with users having downloaded more than 2 billion apps as of November 4.

Nokia has sued Samsung, LG Displays, and other makers of liquid crystal displays, accusing them of conspiring to inflate prices for displays, a suit that comes a month after AT&T made the same allegations against LCD manufacturers, according to a Bloomberg report.

The lawsuit, filed Nov. 25 in San Francisco, is based on federal and state antitrust claims. Nokia is seeking unspecified damages, as well as an injunction that would bring a halt to the alleged collusion.

Both the AT&T and Nokia suits cite an investigation of display panel price-fixing by the U.S. Justice Department.

Read more of "Nokia sues Samsung, LG over LCD price fixing at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Mike Milinkovich

(Credit: Eclipse Foundation)

Open-source communities are founded on trust. It's therefore disappointing but not surprising, to see the Eclipse Foundation's executive director, Mike Milinkovich, rip into former Eclipse Foundation director of community Bjorn Freeman-Benson and tell him to take his "steady acid drip of negativity" and "go away."

Milinkovich, a steelie, hockey-playing executive, didn't mince words in a blog post:

Your former colleagues at the Eclipse Foundation have tolerated your public abuse quietly because we are professionals, and we honestly thought that you would tire of it. Apparently we were wrong. But the time has come to say it: You are a jerk. Please go away. You quit the Foundation, you have zero commits since April, and we tire of your sniping from afar.

Not the most diplomatic but better than a body check against the glass any day.

Given Freeman-Benson's constant carping on the foundation and his former colleagues, it's understandable that Milinkovich went on the offensive. In a variety of posts, including the one that prompted Milinkovich's post, Freeman-Benson has sought to undermine the Eclipse Foundation, which has successfully managed one of the industry's top open-source projects.

His criticism may have been fragmenting the trust that held together the Eclipse community.

Indeed, as Eclipse Foundation director of marketing Ian Skerrett told me, "There is a long history of troll-like blog post[ing] that built up to this point; yes, it is harsh, but it was hurting the community."

Call it tough love for the open-source set. Given the existence of poisonous individuals in many open-source communities, it may be "love" we see more often.

It's getting harder to focus on the vision of cloud computing these days. While there are still plenty of critical and complex problems to solve, and many, many implications of this disruptive operations model that have yet to be understood, the truth is that we've entered a new phase in the evolution of cloud adoption. Real work now exceeds theory when it comes to both new online content and work produced.

This kind of snuck up on me, but it shouldn't have. I myself witnessed many of the early events that greased the skids for real cloud success: the introduction of revolutionary products from Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services; great blogs that discussed practical applications of early cloud environments, followed by books that explained step-by-step what should be considered in application architectures destined for the cloud.

The rapid adoption of "software as a service"-style offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google, Zoho, and a wide variety of others in both the consumer and business markets belied new computing options delivered at Internet scale.

However, what really made me aware of the changing cloud buzz is what's happening in the software development space. I was shaken awake by Microsoft's brilliant launch of its Azure cloud service. I loved almost everything about how Ray Ozzie and crew positioned and discussed Azure's services to its target market: developers of the next generation of business applications.

The recent (re)unveiling at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles included an impressive array of services, customer testimonials, and partner announcements. If it had stopped at that, I would have assumed it was just "Mister Softy's" massive marketing machine in action.

However, I began following the "#azure" tag on Twitter from that day forward, and I've been blown away by the amount of content being generated by developers for developers. For example, this step-by-step guide to installing SQL Server on Azure. Or, how about this list of sessions from PDC from a variety of vendor and customer presenters, covering topics ranging from development basics to "making sense out of ambient data".

But it's not just Microsoft. Other cloud platform and infrastructure service vendors are building significant volume. Ruby on Rails platform service vendor Heroku reportedly hosts more than 40,000 applications now. At their Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com mentioned they had approximately 135,000 applications running on their Force.com platform. (Of course, the number of these respective applications that are generating revenue or even used on a regular basis was not disclosed. Still, these numbers are impressive.)

Amazon Web Services has seen tens of billions of objects stored in its S3 environment (64 billion as of August 2009), and reportedly has several hundred thousand instances running at any given time. Google App Engine doesn't seem to do much marketing, but anecdotal evidence suggests there is a large body of Web application developers running on both the Java and Python instances.

Development and test services, such as SkyTap and Soasta, are thriving. The cloud model really works well for the dynamic resource usage model of software engineering. In fact, it works so well that IBM is putting some real muscle into the game.

There is other evidence that cloud is seeping into mainstream IT thought. This year's Gartner Data Center conference has a "virtual track" dedicated to cloud computing and its impact on the data center. Several vendor conferences leaned heavily on cloud computing in the last year. Professional associations are getting into the act by considering the impact of the cloud on their respective best practices and standards.

There is growing evidence that new and existing independent software vendors and consultancies are finding the cloud to be fertile ground. Of course, that could be a double-edged sword, as some firms will try to use the cloud as leverage to pry their way into otherwise closed doors. However, real projects do exist, and there are signs that that opportunity is growing.

If you are wondering if cloud computing is a fad, the evidence to the contrary is all around you. I heartily recommend that you really listen to what is being said, understand how the cloud is being used, and seriously evaluate how this disruptive model will change your projects, your organization, and even your career. Clearly, there are many technologists who already have.

Microsoft has begun a campaign to actively urge users of its 8-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser to upgrade.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases--those who don't have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren't tech-savvy enough to realize there's a reason to move on.

This eBay 'Web slice'--basically a live bookmark in Internet Explorer 8--is part of Microsoft's effort to get people to upgrade from IE 6.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It's this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign's first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

"What we're doing with the outreach is help users understand how to protect themselves against social engineering threats that exist and to help people understand how Internet Explorer 8 puts people in control of their own privacy online," said Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Security was one of the big problems with IE 6, and Microsoft now boasts that security features in IE 8 block 2 million malware sites a day.

According to Net Applications' statistics, Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used browser, with 23.3 percent share of usage in October, followed by IE 7 at 18.2 percent and IE 8 at 18.1 percent. The newer browsers are gaining on IE 6, but so are rivals including Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome.

Web developers often gripe about having to support IE 6, which doesn't support many modern features for more sophisticated Web sites and even applications. Microsoft acknowledges that it's holding back development of the Internet, too.

"The best thing a user can do to advance the Web is to help move people off IE 6," Servatius said.

Of course, many will upgrade to IE 8 by buying Windows 7. IE 6 was the browser that shipped with Windows XP, which remains entrenched, but there are signs Windows 7 is a more compelling successor than Windows Vista. That could help the corporate customers move away from IE 6, Servatius said.

"As enterprises migrate from whatever operating system they're using today to Windows 7, that's going to help deprecate IE 6," he said. "What we're doing is working both with consumers worldwide and IT professionals to help them understand what the benefits of a modern browser are."

eBay is criticizing a French court's ruling that orders the company to pay a $2.55 million fine to European conglomerate LVMH.

The auction giant and its European unit were fined 1.7 million euros on Monday by the Commercial Court of Paris, which ruled that the company violated a 2008 court order by not preventing the sale of legitimate LVMH perfumes and cosmetics. LVMH's brands include Christian Dior, Guerlain, and Givenchy perfumes.

In June 2008, the Commercial Court fined eBay $61 million in a lawsuit filed by the conglomerate, which is officially known as LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton. LVMH had asserted that eBay had not done enough to stamp out the sale of fake LVMH goods on its site. The court went a step further, ruling that eBay-traded LVMH products--even authentic ones--were not being sold by an authorized reseller. As a result, eBay was ordered to remove all listings of these products.

eBay criticized the ruling then, saying it was an attempt by LVMH to "protect uncompetitive commercial practices." eBay likewise condemned the new ruling.

"Today's outcome hurts consumers by preventing them from buying and selling authentic items online," Alex von Schirmeister, general manager of eBay in France, said in a statement. "The injunction is an abuse of 'selective distribution.' It effectively enforces restrictive distribution contracts, which is anti-competitive."

Despite its objections, eBay argued that it has complied with the 2008 court order. The company said it has used state-of-the-art filtering software to check millions of listings each day, making thousands of authentic LVMH products invisible or inaccessible to French eBay users.

eBay also discounted the proof brought against it, claiming that LVMH offered details on only 1,341 listings out of 200 million posted on the auction site each day. eBay believes those listings were deliberately posted by people to sneak past the filters. In 1,091 of the listings targeted by LVMH, the seller did not accurately describe the item, using misspelled brand names, no brand names at all, or only pictures to describe the product.

As a result, eBay asserts that both the fine and ruling are unjustified. The fine itself is disproportionate given that eBay complied with the injunction," said von Schirmeister. "It is out of step with our legal victories in France, U.K., Germany, Belgium and the U.S."

eBay plans to appeal the new ruling and two other cases tied to LVMH. "We believe that the higher courts will overturn this ruling and ensure that e-commerce companies such as eBay will continue to provide a platform for buyers and sellers to trade authentic goods," said von Schirmeister.

eBay has been in and out of U.S. and European courtrooms for years, sued by companies trying to clamp down on the sale of fake versions of their legitimate products. It's faced courtroom battles with several European powerhouses, winning cases against L'Oreal and Tiffany, but losing suits filed by LVMH.

Mozilla, determined to release Firefox 3.6 before year's end, is also determined to squeeze as many features as possible into the new browser.

The latest example: support for the File interface that adds more sophistication to uploading and some other chores.

Support for the feature is one of the 133 changes that arrived in Firefox 3.6 beta 4, which the Mozilla project released Thursday for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The File API (application programming interface), a draft standard at the World Wide Web consortium, lets browsers handle files better. Among its abilities are uploading multiple files at once, showing thumbnail previews of images that have been selected for upload, breaking a long video upload up into chunks to protect against network interruption problems, and integrating with drag-and-drop Web applications.

While many software projects use beta testing periods to shake down their code, Mozilla isn't afraid to add new features as it goes. That can mean new ideas arrive sooner, of course, but it also can delay the completion date of the new version. What was to have been a quick Firefox 3.1 release was pushed back months as new features were added and the version ultimately was renamed Firefox 3.5.

For those who want to dig into the File interface, Mozilla offers a Web developer guide to using it.

The beta-testing periods aren't just important for debugging Firefox itself. New versions often don't work with older add-ons that people install to customize the browser, so beta testing gives some time for programmers to update those add-ons. Mike Belzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, said 70 percent of add-ons are now compatible with Firefox 3.6.