By Tim Conneally, Betanews

The battle over RealNetworks' DVD copying software, called RealDVD, has finally come to a close, and Real has lost.

Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the United States District Court, Northern District of California ruled today in favor of the DVD Copy Control Association, who argued that RealDVD actually made illegal copies that violated the Content Scramble System (CSS) license agreement.

The case began in late 2008 when RealDVD was only a couple of weeks old. RealNetworks preemptively sued the DVD Copy Control Association for the right to copy DVDs, using a previous case (DVD CCA v. Kaleidescape Inc.) as a hopeful legal precedent.

A temporary injunction was imposed as the case played out, and lower courts banned the software. One year into the case, Judge Patel determined that RealDVD's methods for avoiding CSS were at the very least a breach of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and upheld the lower court's ruling.

RealNetworks countersued, arguing that the motion picture industry was an illegal cartel that sought to corner the market for unprotected content (a.k.a., "digital copy"), but the judge again ruled in favor of the DVD Copy Control Association.

Today, Real said it has settled and will drop all of its appeals. The permanent injunction will stand, and Real will pay the studios a $4.5 million settlement.

"Almost from the moment this product was introduced, it was clear RealDVD violated the CSS license," Jacob Pak, President of DVD CCA said in a prepared statement today. "Now, after months of arguments from both sides, the legal message is clear: Making a DVD copier is a breach of the CSS license. This case demonstrates how important it is to uphold legal agreements that are essential to fostering and maintaining a vibrant competitive industry."

Bob Kimball, acting CEO of Real, said, "Until this dispute, Real had always enjoyed a productive working relationship with Hollywood. With this litigation resolved, I hope that in the future we can find mutually beneficial ways to use Real technology to bring Hollywood's great work to consumers."

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Though it's still technically a work in progress, TiVo's new higher resolution interface lets the Premiere DVR take better advantage of your HDTV. We sat down with TiVo's Director of Product Marketing, Bob Poniatowski to take a look at all the new features.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Yesterday's surprise $1 billion buyout offer for Novell from the New York-based private investment group Elliott Management came with a letter, made public yesterday, spelling out the investors' goal for the company. "Novell is a long-established company that we have followed closely for a considerable period of time," the firm wrote. "Over the past several years, the Company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the Company's stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers."

If by "the past several years," Elliott meant "the dawn of time," it may very well have been accurate. Novell is a company that, in many people's minds, is defined by its propensity towards strategy shifts. Elliott Management's members collectively own 8.5% of Novell common stock. If their proposal ends up being approved, Novell's strategy could shift again -- this time, very dramatically. And if you can interpret their message as a signal of disappointment in Novell's inability to focus on its fundamentals, then you may see the possible result of all this: a divestiture of Novell's stake in SUSE Linux, the world's #2 Linux distribution.

Getting rid of what Novell execs may perceive as excess ballast, but what the world may perceive as valuable property, has become a periodic ritual for this company. Every few years since the mid-1980s, about as regular as the next Olympics, those who have had the interesting fortune of being Novell chief executives -- Ray Noorda, Robert Frankenberg, Eric Schmidt, Chris Stone, Jack Messman, Ron Hovsepian -- have come forth with their vision for the company. Everything is fine, fantastic, copacetic. Nothing to worry about, each one typically began. But the future will be altogether different. And to understand what that bright future will become -- 1996, 2002, 2006, and beyond -- close your eyes, if you will, and imagine an entirely different world...

Last December, Novell outlined what it called a holistic solution (are you keeping your eyes closed?) to the problem of automating the modern information workforce. From this point forward, company executives said, Novell would be devoting itself to a new model of enterprise marketing called intelligent workload management. It defined the concept as nothing short of a top-to-bottom re-envisioning of enterprise network resourced, using a model based, it would appear, on Newtonian physics.

"Intelligent Workload Management is a new and more effective model of computing that enables IT organizations to manage and optimize computing resources in a policy-driven, secure and compliant manner across physical, virtual and cloud environments to deliver business services for end customers," reads last December's announcement. "A workload is a portable, self-contained unit of work built through the integration of the operating system, middleware, and application. With Intelligent Workload Management, organizations can build, secure, manage and measure workloads."

The technology behind this concept may not be as psychedelic as it sounds on the surface. As distributed applications become less bound to an instance of an operating system, SUSE Linux or Windows Server becomes not so much their "environment" as their "provider." Virtualization has made it possible for OS instances to traverse processor boundaries without affecting workflow. Now, it's foreseeable that applications, or the components of them, can traverse those same boundaries independently of the operating system, removing one more layer from the process. However, those freed applications will need to be administered the way operating systems are today, and Novell foresees a need for tools to that end.

That makes sense. But it seems that somewhere along the way in the marketing process, Novell felt it necessary to justify all the identities it had tried to assume in the past -- the office applications producer, the infrastructure architect, "the identity guys" -- in order to make it appear this new 2010 strategy is the single thread that pulls everything together like lacing ones boots.

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But the need to characterize a practical strategy as some kind of holistic vision, an inspiration heard in the whisper of the trees when spending a week alone fly-fishing in the wilderness, has become a kind of disease that afflicted Novell, starting in the mid-1990s. The company was already making headway with its Novell Directory Services, the innovative registry of network resources that was its first truly successful product line after NetWare (NOS). But CEO Robert Frankenberg wanted to take that concept further, not so much with a technology as a vision, which he introduced at COMDEX in 1994.

Frankenberg asked his audience essentially to close their eyes, and imagine a three-dimensional world where users would experience their data and workflow environments using pictorial representations of everyday and household items. He called this vision the "NetTop" (emphasis on the capital "N"), and introduced a type of embedded system called NEST that he said could be implanted into real office resources, such as telephones, televisions, and staplers, so that they could be "NetWare-ready," with avatars of sorts in the virtual world.

And yes, the vision had a catchy title: "Pervasive computing," the then-CEO projected, "is more than connecting information systems and computing devices. It's connecting people with other people and the information they need, giving them the power to act on that information anytime, anyplace."

At that time, Frankenberg's Novell was busy supercharging NetWare and its recently acquired intellectual property in UNIX (or so it had believed) to become ready for this all-encompassing, pervasive environment. The concept was called SuperNOS, but it was actually never to be. In the fall of 1995, after this fusion dream fell apart, Novell entered into its UNIX agreement with Hewlett-Packard and SCO, in the beginning of what was to become the ugliest single chapter in the history of computing.

In that agreement, Novell thought it had divested itself of what it was calling UnixWare (close your eyes and imagine a bigger, brighter UNIX), but all the while enabling UNIX to still become cultivated so that it could support the services for it that Novell was building. But letting go of UNIX made Novell focus its resources on NOS, in a move which would-be partner Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison famously predicted in 1995 would be the decline and fall of the company: "Novell will be less and less important every year," Ellison said. "If they have to treat [NetWare] as a 'star' and spread R&D on it, it's a mistake. UNIX and NT will take share from Novell."

In 1996, in another attempt to remake itself, Novell shed itself of its investment in WordPerfect, selling it to Corel for about a tenth of its value. In 2004, blaming Microsoft for the devaluation, Novell sued Microsoft as part of its effort to re-establish some semblance of its former swagger. But that lawsuit would be terminated in 2007, when another attempt at remaking Novell led the company to shift its attention away from the courtroom, and in so doing, it said, reduce some of the conflict in the world. (Imagine there's no litigation. I wonder if you can.)

In-between those three major strategy makeovers, there were actually two more. In 1999, Novell imagined a re-emergence of NetWare (not NOS, not SuperNOS, but NetWare), after embracing the fact that the Internet would be built on TCP/IP rather than IPX/SPX. This was Eric Schmidt's doing. Imagine a company that didn't always produce big software all the time, but rather constructed a big base of Web services built on eDirectory, and improved incrementally through small releases of standards-compliant code. Again, another good idea, in theory. But the company was so poor at articulating its vision for a global virtual phone book that analysts were comparing the eDirectory vision to that of Yahoo. Isn't there already a big directory on the Internet, they asked?

Schmidt's co-successors, CEO Jack Messman and Vice Chairman Chris Stone, tried to address that problem with a new vision for the company. Close your eyes for a moment, and imagine there are four pillars. We'll call them Nsure, exteNd, Nterprise, and Ngage. These would represent four categories of services, with Nsure representing what would be the company's push into that under-addressed part of the Internet, secure identity management. Novell's goal was nothing less than to become perceived as "the identity company." As Stone described it at the time, "This campaign is intended to address the positioning so that when you ask people next year they'll say, 'Oh, yeah. They're the identity guys.'"

The four pillars would be holding up not so much the Internet as we have come to know it, but rather something Messman in the fall of 2002 as "One Net." Imagine, if you will...well, imagine nothing. No boundaries, because information tends to flow, and you don't want things like boundaries getting in the way.

"With Novell Nsure, Novell exteNd, Novell Nterprise and Novell Ngage, we have the solutions our customers have been telling us they need to achieve One Net -- a world without information boundaries," Messman announced. "Identity is security in a One Net world. Only by knowing who is accessing the network, and what they are entitled to see, can companies effectively manage their disparate relationships in a Web environment."

Novell has never been devoid of good ideas, or even good technology. But it has chronically suffered from an excess of "the vision thing," the need to encapsulate a practical methodology using ill-fitting metaphors. And it may be last December's move by Hovsepian to fold "One Net" into yet another vision of the "intelligent workload" -- once again, exercising the irresistible urge to make a practical concept holistic -- that drove Elliott Management's investors yesterday to finally say, "Enough."

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

For anyone that missed Microsoft CEO's Q&A during the Search Marketing Expo West yesterday, a transcript is now available online. I went through and picked out key quotes, so that you don't have to read the whole thing.

Several things stand out from Ballmer's comments:

1) Mobile operators that want a search engine other than Bing can't have Windows Phone 7 Series.

2) Microsoft almost certainly is stirring up trouble for Google in Europe through third parties.

3) Microsoft isn't interested -- at least for now -- in releasing a Bing application for Android phones.

4) A Bing for iPhone search deal is still possible, simply because Ballmer deflected the question rather than denying it.

5) Twitter is a great Microsoft partner, but the value of an acquisition is "not clear."

My favorite quote from the Q&A: "I haven't found that when you're trying to sell something to somebody yelling is very effective." How funny is that. coming from boisterous Ballmer?

Bing

When asked if Microsoft could be No.1 in search, Ballmer answered: "There's no good answer to this question...If you say yes, you sound arrogant. If you say no, you sound like you have no faith. So the answer is, yes, someday."

The truth of the matter is the number one thing that Google benefits from in search is they did it right first. And put culture aside and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I love our culture, I think we've got great people, they're innovative, they're doing great things, but we started later.

Ballmer's Binging family: "We have Bing evangelists, age 18, age 11, and age 15. We are definitely a religiously pro-Bing family...My dad worked at Ford for 30 years, I still drive a Lincoln. I hope my kids 30, 40, 50 years from now, they'll still be using Bing."

I love to make the assertion about apartments in Paris. I have a buddy from Stanford who rents apartments in Paris and if she wasn't my buddy you wouldn't find her on page one of Bing, you would find her on page one of the other guy, and that is a quality. From the standpoint of the searcher if you're looking for an apartment in Paris it's not going to show US in the algorithmic results. So, it's really important for us to get scale in terms of value to the searcher themselves.

Is Bing Cashback a success: "The Cashback has been interesting. I would say it has worked. It hasn't worked fantastically. I mean, in the sense that it has completely changed the economic structure of the business."

Google Competition

Regarding Microsoft encouraging third-party antitrust complaints against Google in Europe:

As in our case, a lot of times initial complaints will come from a competitor. We're clearly a competitor, there are other competitors, as well. But, we have a blog post on our public policy blog that kind of makes clear we're not being silent in this game, we're expressing some of the issues and frustrations that we see, and certainly sometimes unsolicited, but oftentimes because we've been asked.

Google in China: "I think we all understand, the real force in China isn't Google and it's not Bing, it's Baidu."

Google's book search deal: "The book deal essentially takes somebody who has a very strong position, and gives them a stronger position relative to everybody else in the space. It doesn't seem right to me, let alone what it might mean for publishers' rights. So, we'll express our points of view, but ultimately it's up to the regulators."

Smartphones

Regarding Bing replacing Google on iPhone: "I read that rumor...It was very funny, I was in Europe someplace, and I read it, after a journalist had asked me about it. Weird how rumors start."

Do I search when I'm out on the move? The answer is too much relative to what my wife thinks I should be doing when I'm driving. So, I'm trying to -- I'm trying to tame my search behavior while I'm -- I mean, literally I only have a phone when I'm in the car, because if I'm not in the car I'm in a meeting, and it's impolite, for me at least, to bring phones to most meetings.

About Bing for Android phones: "It's not like our open religious principles can be questioned here, but it is a little bit tricky to understand exactly where the market opportunity might lie for us in the mix of Android kind of cacophonous implementations."

Stop and take it outside of the specific Android-Windows phone debates. How does Apple make money on phones, basically with a licensing fee on their own phones. It's a positive gross margin on the phone. If you offer a phone of high value, there is money to be made. We happen to, in our model, split that with a phone manufacturer who makes some of the money that Apple might have made and we make some of the money that Apple might have made.

Search-engine choice on Windows Phones: "My guess is we're not going to get a huge amount of operator support for Windows Phones who don't want Bing. I mean, in some senses it's an essential part of the definition of the Windows Phone, and if you have an operator who would want to do something with another search player, they'll probably do it with a non-Windows Phone."

Xbox

"How many hours of practice do you need on Xbox to catch your kids?...Ten thousand hours. Ten thousand hours of Xbox and you can be as good as your eight-year-old."

Twitter

Should Microsoft buy Twitter:

Not clear. I mean, we have a great relationship and partnership with Twitter. Not clear to me. I mean, I would hate to not have that partnership. Whether we need to own the company or not I think is far less clear. In some senses, as an independent, they have a lot of value and a lot of credibility, I think, with their user community. Would they have that same credibility with the user community if they were captive? Not clear.

Does Ballmer have a stealth Twitter account: "Of course."

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

At the end of February, Senators John Kerry (D - Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R - Indiana) introduced the Startup Visa Act of 2010, which will let immigrant entrepreneurs earn a two-year visa if they get at least $250,000 in venture capital investment, and then earn them legal US residence if that startup creates five or more new jobs, gets a second round of funding of over $1 million, or nets $1 million or more in revenue.

"Global competition for talent and investment grows more intense daily and the United States must step up or be left behind," Sen. Kerry said in introducing the bill. "Everywhere Dick Lugar and I travel for the Foreign Relations Committee, we see firsthand the entrepreneurial spirit driving the economies of our competitors. Creating a new magnet for innovations and innovators to come to the United States and create jobs here will offer our economy a double shot in the arm -- robust job creation at home and reaffirmation that we're the world's best place to do business."

This week, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists led by former PayPal executive turned startup investor and advisor Dave McClure will be heading to Washington DC to promote the bill to legislators in hopes of showing the power that this bill holds.

"There are no lobbyists, no campaign contributions, no PR agencies," McClure writes on the site dedicated to the bill. "This is a 100% grass-roots movement of citizens who want to encourage job creation and innovation in the United States."

More than 160 notable VCs and investors have voiced their support for the bill, and there are plenty of ways for citizens to join in on the startupvisa.com campaign page.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Hulu has been increasing in popularity, and its ads are getting more valuable, but two of the video site's most popular shows, The Daily Show with John Stewart and The Colbert Report, are being pulled.

Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal, the Fox division of News Corp., and now the ABC division of Disney, now racks up over a billion video views per month. (Viacom was at one time merged with CBS, the proprietor of TV.com, but is now separate.) Viacom is removing the two shows from Hulu at the end of the day on March 9, after having been available on the popular site for a little less than two years.

"In the past 21 months, we've had very strong results for both Hulu and Comedy Central, in terms of the views and revenue we've generated, thanks to a couple of key trends," said Andy Forssell, Hulu's Senior Vice President of Content and Distribution. "First, more and more of our viewers have voted with their time by making these shows a regular part of their day. And second, we've driven steadily increasing revenue per view as advertisers voted with their budgets to take advantage of innovative ad formats and very strong advertising effectiveness. After a series of discussions with the team at Comedy Central, though, we ultimately were unable to secure the rights to extend these shows for a much longer period of time."

Full episodes and short clips of the shows will remain available on Comedy Central's site, and individually on thedailyshow.com and colbertnation.com. Additionally, the "videos" section of The Daily Show's site has an archive of clips dating all the way back to March 1999.

Hulu is the number one online TV destination site, and its viewership has been steadily increasing since its launch. In December, ComScore's Video Metrix showed the number of program views has grown by about 100 million per month to over 1 billion views monthly. Even so, the popular video site still has difficulty getting content providers behind it.

In the beginning of 2009, for example, Hulu and CBS Interactive got into an altercation over content distribution. CBS revamped TV.com and launched it as a video content site to compete with Hulu in 2009. NBC Universal and News Corp. then pulled all of the Hulu content from TV.com, citing contractual discrepancies. Today, CBS content remains available on Hulu, but TV.com does not link to Hulu for content. Instead, it links to sites such as ABC.com and NBC.com for full episodes, and Fox programs are presented only as clips and highlights, not full episodes.

This sort of distribution is actually already in place for many (if not most) of Viacom's programs. Viacom's brands -- which include MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and Paramount -- are indexed by Hulu, but most of the content for those powerful brands is hosted on Viacom's own sites.

Although The New York Times reported today this content removal represents "first major fracture between television show owners and the wildly popular video Web site," it simply is not. Everyone wants to monetize their own content in their own way.

By Joe Wilcox, Betanews

That's the question I pose to Betanews readers on this fine Spring afternoon. If "Yes" then please further answer: How has your smartphone changed your life?

I'm raising the questions today because of AFP news story "Australia is social networking capital of the world." (Mike Cherng tweeted the story -- my thanks to him.) Reporter Amy Coopes quotes Danielle Warby: "My smartphone changed my life. Serious. It has my calendar, all my contacts and is an easy and intuitive communication tool."

I'm with Warby. My smartphones changed my life, starting with the original iPhone, which I described as "life changing" two weeks after buying it in June 2007. I've used many smartphones since -- and a few before -- including all three iPhone versions; several HTC models, including the AT&T 8525, Google Nexus One and T-Mobile MyTouch; Nokia E71, N97 and N900, among others.

In assessing the original iPhone's value I identified five areas as important: Synchronization, mobile Web, mobile mail, battery life and joy (from the user interface). I would add as important for more modern smartphones: Social media, mobile applications and quality photos and video (with easy sharing capabilities). Some enterprising marketer should use something like "Your life in your pocket," or "My life in my pocket" as a slogan to sell smartphones.

The smartphone can be life changing because it's so personal, in terms of how and how often the device is carried and how it is used to connect and to extend relationships. There's a real intimacy about cell phones -- smartphones, particularly -- that no other technology device matches. Probably many geeks reading this post are long-time smartphone users. But how many of you often use a smartphone as a makeshift PC on the go?

The South by Southwest conference convenes late next week in Austin. Following last year's event, Gizmodo's Jack Loftus blogged:

The tech and media savvy hipsters currently at SXSW could very well be a snapshot of things to come. The conference is chock full of smartphones, but there's nary a notebook (or netbook) in sight. It's anecdotal evidence, sure, but these folks are undoubtedly ahead of the curve on technology. And what they're saying is they're more comfortable using mobile devices as a primary computing and communications tool than they are with notebooks, or even netbooks.

There's a reason why AT&T loudly promises that there will be adequate service for SXSW 2010: Many attendees will pack smartphones -- and many will be iPhones.

Buzz? So What?

Sure there is big buzz about smartphones, but how important are they really? According to Gartner, cell phone sales -- not shipments -- were 1.21 billion in 2009, with 380 million sold in fourth quarter. Smartphones: 172.4 million for the year and 53.8 million for fourth quarter. Smartphone sales grew by over 41 percent year over year in 2009. Android's smartphone market share increased by 680 percent, while unit sales rose by 961.4 percent. Among American adult cell phone owners, 33 percent get news from cell phones; 88 percent of adults who have mobile Internet, according to PEW Internet.

In a report issued today, ComScore revealed that in January 30.8 percent of smartphone owners used their mobile Web browser to access social networking sites, up from 22.5 percent a year earlier. By comparison, only 6.8 percent accessed social networking sites from standard phones, up from 4.5 percent in January 2009.

Clearly manufacturers see potential in smartphones, which I repeatedly have asserted will replace the PC as primary connected-computing device in this decade (within five years in some markets, I predict). Yesterday, Apple sued HTC for infringing iPhone patents. It's competition by litigation -- like Apple-Nokia patent infringement lawsuits (one is suing the other).

Today, Nokia released Skype for Symbian^1-based devices, making free voice calls over 3G a possibility for some 200 million handsets. These include E and N Series devices.

Yesterday's Nokia C Series announcement is huge, not that many American bloggers or journalists seem to get it. Nokia is brilliantly taking smartphone OS features downmarket to standard handsets. Nokia, the global handset market share leader according to Gartner and IDC, sells more low- and mid-tier phones than any other category. The first device, the C5, will sell for €135 (US $185) unsubsidized. The phone is tiny, cheap but robust, particularly connected features like social sharing and networking.

Nokia is taking the right approach for persevering and extending sales particularly in emerging markets. Apple's iPhone might have sex appeal, but the C5 has worldwide mass market appeal. Come second quarter, dumb phones will be much smarter coming from the world's handset leader. Will the C5 pack enough punch to be life changing for many current dumb phone users in markets like Brazil, China, India and Russia (commonly referred to as BRIC)? That's a future question to answer.

The point: 2010 promises dramatic changes for the handset market. That brings me back to my questions for Betanews readers: Has your smartphone changed your life? If so, how? And how long ago (That's the bragging rights question for longtime smartphone users)? Please respond in comments or by email: joewilcox at live dot com. I'll collect the best responses for a follow-up post.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

It's only been a few days since Microsoft's rollout of the browser choice screen for European Internet Explorer users. But already, the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS, not to be confused with the European Commission, a legislative body), which is credited with pressing the EC forward on the browser bundling issue, is claiming victory not just with regard to exposing users to the choice they have, but with helping to advance the developmental progress of the Web.

Now, ECIS legal counsel Thomas Vinje is calling upon other trade regulatory and legislative bodies worldwide to follow Europe's example, arguing in a statement yesterday (PDF available here) that everyone should be entitled to the same ballot.

"The ability of...applications to run quickly and with improved features depends upon progress in Web browsers. As we know from experience, that is driven by competition that offers rewards to companies that build the quickest, most versatile browsers," Vinje stated. "The European initiative will help spur competition, but leaves most of the world's computers with operating systems that are tied to Internet Explorer. We call on competition authorities around the world to look closely at what has happened in Europe, and to act on behalf of their consumers. Only then will we get a fully competitive market that will drive intense competition to build better browsers."

Vinje's statement comes as global analytics firm StatCounter released one of the stranger statistics to emerge from this whole affair. Although it's way too early to call this a verified trend, StatCounter statistics show usage share of Internet Explorer 6 among European users spiked sharply higher, by better than three points, just since the official rollout date of the browser choice screen March 1. Amazingly, Internet Explorer 8 usage share spiked down to pre-February lows, while the uptick in Mozilla Firefox 3.6 adoption tapered off as well.

So much for the "Internet Explorer 6 death watch."

Assuming for the moment that this isn't a trend, what other regulatory agencies would be interested in compelling Microsoft to impose a choice screen in their regions, or in imposing restrictions forcing it to do so?

In much of the rest of the world, the heat of antitrust scrutiny against Microsoft has actually cooled, even below the typical "low boil" point. Although the new antitrust chief at the US Justice Dept., Christine Varney, was an outspoken critic of Microsoft's abuse of Netscape during her time as a corporate attorney, she has essentially sided with the 2008 viewpoint expressed by DOJ that Microsoft has turned a corner and is cooperating. Last December's Joint Status Report indicated that DOJ was happy with how Microsoft addressed the issue of giving Vista and XP users upgrading to IE8 the option of testing the browser before making it the default, or not making it the default at all.

The Status Report went on to dismiss many of the usual complaints against the company with the following language: "Since the prior full Status Report, filed on April 16, 2009, fifteen third-party complaints have been received by the United States. All of these complaints were non-substantive and did not raise any issues regarding Microsoft's compliance with, or the United States' enforcement of, the Final Judgment."

Last June, a district court in Seoul, South Korea, did find Microsoft guilty of charges dating back to 2001, brought forth by that country's Fair Trade Commission, that the company abused its market dominance by bundling Windows Media Player with Windows. But in an extremely unusual twist, the Seoul court overturned the lower court's 2005 judgment in favor of the original plaintiffs, two third-party producers of media players, stating in so doing that the bad fortune those companies encountered was not on account of Media Player. It chose to fine Microsoft instead, probably as a way of putting the whole matter of bundling behind it.

In September 2009, Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) dropped its antitrust investigation of Microsoft, which centered around charges that by discontinuing sales of Windows XP, it forced Russian consumers to purchase Vista. The statement FAS issued at the time said it found no evidence that Microsoft violated any laws.

With antitrust action in Japan cooling way below "simmer" and closer to "off," attention could turn to China, where the Maxthon browser is based. Maxthon has historically borrowed IE's browsing engine, but adopted the open source WebKit engine as an alternative with Version 3 last September. But last August, in an interview for China Times, Maxthon CEO Jeff Chen pointed to what he perceived as IE's already declining usage share in China, as an indication that the existing conditions there may already be making the browser market fairer.

"In China, the competition is more confined comparatively. We hope that browser developers in China can give user experience and technology improvements the highest priority, collaboratively advance relevant technologies, and facilitate Web site standardization," Chen told the reporter. "These will be instrumental to unifying the Internet industry in China with the rest of the world. The market share of IE is dropping rapidly in China. At this rate, a full-scale browser war could soon break out in China. We hope that developers would compete constructively and improve together for the benefit of users."

So while ECIS may be looking for an avenue for spreading the news, the demand for its product in foreign markets may actually have subsided.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

It's been just over a year since Nokia first announced it would be bringing Skype to its top-of-the-line N-Series smartphones. Today Nokia announced the popular voice and text chat client is available on all Symbian^1-based devices, making free voice calls over 3G a possibility for some 200 million handsets.

The free Skype client can be downloaded from the Ovi Store. It lets users make free Skype-to-Skype calls; send and receive instant messages to and from individuals or groups; share pictures, videos and other files; receive calls through an online number; see when other Skype users are live and available; and import contacts from the native phone address book.

The initial list of compatible handsets includes: N97, N97 mini, X6, 5800 XpressMusic and 5530 in the all-touch form factor, and E72, E71, E90, E63, E66, E51, N96, N95, N95 8Gb, N85, N82, N81, N81 8 Gb, N79, N78, 6220 classic, 6210 Navigator, and 5320.

Since Skype effectively gives away for free what the telephone companies have long charged for, the technology for Skype on mobile devices is actually quite old. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom said they intended to have the service on Nokia phones as far back as 2005, but mobile networks viewed Skype as a threat to their business model.

But now that mobile networks are making their slow upgrades to all-data networks, they're changing their tune. Last February 16, Verizon Wireless made the huge announcement that it will begin supporting free Skype calls over its 3G network, and it appears that things are changing dramatically for the popular soft phone and indeed for mobile VoIP as a whole.

By Nate Mook, Betanews

Now that TiVo has unveiled its Series 4 platform of TiVo boxes, known as the Premiere and Premiere XL, the big question for existing users is: How do I upgrade? We cornered a few executives at the launch event in New York to get the answer. And no, your existing TiVo box will not receive the new user interface.

In short, there are two separate upgrade paths. One for lifetime subscription customers and another for customers wanting to pay monthly. Why two different approaches? TiVo says its because each customer has different priorities.

For existing TiVo customers wanting a lifetime subscription with the new box, they must pay full price for a TiVo Premiere or TiVo Premiere XL -- $299 and $499, respectively. However, they will receive $200 off the lifetime subscription price of the box, making it $299.

For those existing subscribers who want to upgrade but pay monthly, TiVo is offering a 20% discount on the Premiere or Premiere XL hardware. That lowers the price of the base model to $260. And if monthly customers keep their existing hardware active, they can benefit from the multi-service discount.

Notably missing this time around is an option for transferring an existing lifetime subscription to a new Premiere box, as you could when the Series 3 platform was launched. TiVo says it wants to start fresh, and the advantage is that existing customers can keep their current TiVos active.

TiVo says it will update its website soon with detailed information on the upgrade offers.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Though the focus of tonight's TiVo unveiling was a new TiVo Premiere DVR, the company was especially proud of the upgrade to the remote control due out later this year. TiVo's new Bluetooth remote features a QWERTY keyboard to aid searching and finding content.

Shaped identically to the standard TiVo "peanut" remote, the new model slides horizontally to reveal a chiclet keyboard with a D-pad and a numeric keypad. This feature adds some girth to the usual remote's size and also contributes to a somewhat flimsy feel. This, however, could be due to the fact that all the remotes we handled were pre-production versions that looked to have been handled quite a bit.

Since TiVo doesn't have Bluetooth radios built in, the remote comes with a USB dongle that is plugged into an available USB port on TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, or TiVo Premiere boxes.

Though D-Link's Boxee Box also has a full QWERTY keyboard on its remote, that particular device is otherwise very simple, with an iPod-like D-pad and a menu, enter, and play buttons. TiVo's new remote has just about 80 buttons in total.

The device is far from elegant, but its utility is hard to dispute. It clings very closely to TiVo's traditional design and users will no doubt feel quite at home using it.

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

For the first time in the company's history, TiVo has completely redesigned the user interface of its popular DVRs with the introduction of the new TiVo Premiere and Premiere XL. TiVo says it has "reinvented" the DVR with what it calls the "One Box," which incorporates content from the Web, movies, music, and TV into a unified library.

The problem with any media, be it print, audio, or video, is that there's simply too much content for a user to be able to casually browse it and still be satisfied by what he's seeing. That's why news aggregators are so handy, and why there's a whole industry dedicated to social media content sharing. When there's so much stuff, you need something to filter it for you.

TiVo has been doing that for pay TV for a decade now, and the job keeps getting tougher.

As if 500+ channels of linear content wasn't enough, there are now thousands of on-demand movie and TV episodes distributed through various popular sources, and countless thousands of short-form Web shows and user-generated clips whose relevance needs to be parsed.

This is why the TiVo Premiere line is such a big advancement for TiVo. It's not just a DVR and set top box, it's a source agnostic interface that decides what content is good for you. While much of what the device does is stuff that TiVo has always done, it has never done it in such a simple way.

Completely new UI

The first thing you notice is that the UI is no longer a bunch of nested screens, it's now a much simpler two-column interface where the menu is on the left and the options are on the right. TiVo has taken full advantage of the added resolution in high definition and added a live video preview window to the TiVo Central menu. This has been one of the most demanded features for quite some time, TiVo's Director of Product Marketing Bob Poniatowski told us.

"In the standard definition user interface, we would have had to rewrite every screen to include that preview window. Since we were rewriting everything for high-def, we've put it in," Poniatowski said.

When you want to watch a show, you'll find TiVo has organized all of the available content under the show's heading. You can actually comparison-shop to see if it's available on demand from multiple sources. There's a list of upcoming episodes, an episode guide, and you can cross-search by cast members in an IMDB-like catalog of content available to you. Content on YouTube is presented as "bonus material" for shows, and you can link away to Amazon if you want to buy a DVD or other material related to the show you're looking at.

"The important thing is, all of that technology has been around in TiVo for a long time," Poniatowski told us. "We had Amazon, we had searching by actor, we had wish lists...but they were all separate destinations in the UI. We've completely rethought how we present things. Now it's, 'Here's the show you like and here's everything about that show.'

"If you're watching Fringe, we've constrained the view of YouTube to just showing the YouTube that's about Fringe, or just showing the view of Amazon that's about Fringe...It's about your relationship to the program, not your relationship with the box or these services. It's how we help you find the best content and get the most out of what you're paying for."

It's an approach not seen in other set-top boxes, which typically arrange content by the source it's coming from. TiVo has arranged it by show.

"This is really source agnostic," Poniatowski told Betanews. "This is all the sources coming into your home, aggregated into one UI, so we'll tell you about Netflix, and we'll tell you about Amazon, we'll tell you where you get it from, but until you go and buy it from Amazon or buy it from Netflix, it's a TiVo experience...Broadband, broadcast, it doesn't matter where it comes from, you can get it in this UI."

It's a good thing that TiVo tackled the content management problem when it did, because the Premiere XL can now record 150 hours of HD content, or 1400 hours of standard definition. Back when TiVo started in the DVR business in 1999, the series1 could only hold 14 hours.

Further simplifying the experience for users, TiVo has redesigned title searching (you are now given a list of most popular titles by the first letter typed in), browsing by genre (you rank your favorite types of content by a one-to-three thumbs up rating), and hard drive navigation ("Now Playing" has become "My Shows" and now includes dedicated "A, B, C" function keys for changing the hard drive view.)

About the new A, B, and C soft keys in the "My Shows" menu, Poniatowski said, "We've had these features as keyboard shortcuts for years, but nobody knew! The only people that would know would have either read the manual, personally talked to me on the Internet, or sat on the remote and accidentally changed it, then they'd call us and say 'I lost all my folders, what happened?' We don't want to take those calls," he joked.

TiVo Premiere:

• $299.99
• 320 GB HDD, records up to 45 hours of HD programming or up to 400 hours of standard-definition
• TiVo Series4 architecture
• Supports digital cable, high-definition digital cable, antenna (ATSC), and Verizon FiOS. Does not support satellite or AT&T U-verse.
• Outputs: HDMI, component video, composite video, optical audio, analog audio
Video output modes include: 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
• Inputs: CableCARD support, cable coax, antenna coax, Ethernet, USB 2.0 ports (2), E-SATA support for external storage
• TiVo Wireless-N and Wireless-G network adapter support
• Energy Star certified

TiVo Premiere XL:

• $499.99
• 1 TB storage -- Records up to 150 hours of HD programming, or up to 1350 hours of standard-definition
• Features all of the same ins/outs as the Premiere box, plus a backlit, programmable, and learning remote
• TiVo Premiere XL is the first HD product to feature THX Optimizer, a video calibration tool that lets users fine-tune color, black levels, and other settings to improve picture quality.

TiVo Premiere and TiVo Premiere XL boxes will be available in retail nationwide in early April. They are also available for pre-order today at tivo.com.

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews

Sybase's new mobile sales application for iPhone, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry lets users connect to SAP CRM remotely from their phones, much as they would from a desktop or laptop PC. And a new mobile workflow app from Sybase and SAP lets users play roles in multi-part business processes from their phones, an SAP representative tells Betanews.

With new business apps for iPhone, WM6, and BlackBerry smartphones rolled out on Tuesday, Sybase and SAP have now completed the first phase of a long-term pact around mobile customer relationship management and (enterprise resource planning software. In the week ahead, iPhone and Windows Mobile client software will be available for both Sybase Mobile Sales for CRM and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite, said Prashant Chatterjee, director of mobility and industry analytics for SAP.

Chatterjee noted that RIM released a preliminary proof-of-concept client for BlackBerry about a year ago. But, he added, the existing smartphone software for BlackBerry, currently available on the Web as freeware, will be replaced during the second half of this year with a "full-fledged client."

In an initial deal announced in March 2009, the two vendors agreed to make business processes from SAP Business Suite Mobile 7 available on Sybase's Unwired Platform to all mobile devices, including Symbian and Palm devices as well.

Chatterjee told Betanews that the two companies will soon finish up a roadmap that will outline additional phases of their pact.