Archive for October 7th, 2009
AT&T and Samsung Mobile launch the new Samsung Mythic (A897) and Samsung Flight (A797) touchscreen mobile phones for qucik messaging. The Samsung Mythic, successor to the Eternity, is a full touch phone with a 3.3-inch touhcscreen display. It supports AT&T’s Mobile TV service. The phone features the TouchWiz UI and includes AT&T Navigator, AT&T Social Net apps and more.
The Samsung Flight also gets a touchscreen and also a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It has a unique UI that provides one-touch access to functions like shortcuts, favorites and messaging. It will be available in Red and Silver.
Both phones will get a new Opera-based Full HTML browser. AT&T will release the Samsung Mythic and Samsung Flight next month for $199.99 and $99.99 respectively, after $50 rebate with a new 2-year contract.
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Verizon makes Apple look open.
But they are one-half the U.S. mobile phone duopoly (T-Mobile and Sprint are minor players) so the kids at the Googleplex are doubtless celebrating news that Verizon will be working on bringing Android phones to market.
Verizon has a ton of incentive to make this work. Apple’s iPhone is the 800-pound gorilla in the wireless room, and since it’s exclusive to AT&T Verizon has been hemorrhaging market share (especially on the high end) for many months now.
Both sides were saying the right things today, but Verizon Wireless has based its corporate identity on maintaining control of its wireless environment.
Old habits will be hard to break.
Top management at Verizon seems to have decided that in its pursuit of market share it will throw everything it can at the wall and hope something sticks.
But what if Verizon succeeds? What if it starts selling a lot of Android kit, and those users start making heavy use of apps for which Verizon isn’t getting its usual cut?
What happens when those in Verizon middle management, raised on the iron belief that Verizon must get a cut of every bit on its wireless network, see Google spreading its open source gospel on its network?
I think I know. And I don’t like it.
It will take more than a few words at a press conference to remove my suspicions. How about you?
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Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.
The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.
This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.
The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.
I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.
Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.
Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:
- Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
- Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
- Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
- A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
- Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
- Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.
All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.
Now get to work and make yourself some money.
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Red Hat has filed a “friend of the court” brief to the Supreme Court in hopes of having software patents invalidated once and for all.
The brief follows the logic of the U.S. Court of Appeals in re: Bilski but asks the Supremes to go further in deciding the case, now called Bilski vs. Kappos. David Kappos is the new Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual property and director of the patent and trademark office.
The brief argues that lower courts erred in the 1990s, disregarding guideposts previously set by the Supreme Court and opening the floodgates for patents based merely on abstract ideas.
This is the heart of the argument:
Because the boundaries of software patents are exceedingly vague and the numbers of issued software patents is now enormous, it is virtually impossible to rule out the possibility that a new software product may arguably infringe some patent.
The brief goes on to argue that given such legal risks only the largest companies can afford to do any kind of software development, especially if it might involve real innovation.
Much of the argument is based on the 1972 case of Gottschalk vs. Benson, a decision written by the legendary William O. Douglas that invalidated a patent for turning binary-coded decimal numbers into pure binary numbers for use in a computer program.
The Benson ruling was that software was “merely a series of mathematical calculations” and thus did not constitute a “process” within the meaning of the Patent Act.
The brief even quotes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, speaking in 1991 against the idea of software patents, arguing that if people understood how courts were moving when software was first being developed “the industry would be at a standstill today.”
It is, in sum, an audacious brief, as audacious in its way as new Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s recent argument that courts erred when they first called corporations persons in the 19th century.
Given history both arguments make sense. Given politics neither is likely to be accepted any time soon.
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Employees at big companies often have mountains of information available to do their jobs — information that lives (and hides!) in various areas within the organization. The information can lie buried deep within an enterprise content management system or a company intranet. Unlike the Internet, however, this info isn’t necessarily well organized — there isn’t always a searchable index to sift through and get good results. Lots of companies want to make searching their intranet more like searching the Internet — bringing Google.com-type search to their internal information stores.
Mercer, the global professional services company, has been dealing with this issue for a while. Their intranet, Mercer Link, has more than 350,000 webpages, and over 1.5 million docs in a content management system— lots of information for employees to search through as they work on projects for clients. They’re now using the Google Search Appliance to give employees a more searchable intranet experience, so the docs and pages that were hidden or hard to find are now easier to track down fast. Mercer’s enterprise search architect Haroon Suleman, along with AMR Research’s Jim Murphy, will be sharing the company’s search story in a special webinar aimed at enterprises, “Search: A Vital Element to a Content Strategy,” this Thursday, October 8 at 11 a.m. PDT. You can register and learn more about the conversation here — hope you can join.
Posted by Vijay Koduri, Google Enterprise Search team
