Toteu blog

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Apple’s new iPhone, a “smart” mobile phone offering music storage and Internet access, will be launched on June 29, according to television ads by the high-tech group.

The iPhone, which combines the wildly popular iPod music player with features found in other smart phones, was unveiled in January by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.

The device, to sell at prices of 499 to 599 dollars, will be distributed in the US market through ATT, the new name for the Cingular Wireless brand.

It will weigh 135 grams (3.8 ounces) and have the Apple OS X operating system and four or eight megabytes of storage. It will be able to play videos as well as music and have a screen of 3.5 inches (nine centimeters).

Analysts are divided on whether the iPhone will be an industry-changing device or be too expensive to compete with other smart phones such as the BlackBerry.

On its website, Apple said the iPhone will include “a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.” It will also include a two-megapixel digital camera.

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Smartphone maker Palm Inc. will sell a 25 percent stake to private equity firm Elevation Partners for $325 million and name the former technical guru behind the iPod to be chairman, the company said Monday.

The deal with the long-term investor brings significant new leadership to Palm, which has been battling stiffening competition in a market that is only going to get tougher with Apple Inc.’s June 29 debut of the iPhone.

As part of the deal, Palm will pay a special distribution of $9 per share, or about $940 million in cash, to shareholders. It said the special distribution would be financed by the new investment, cash on hand and $400 million in new debt.

Palm, best known for the Treo line of phones, said two board members — former CEO Eric Benhamou and D. Scott Mercer — will resign. Elevation partners Fred Anderson and Roger McNamee will join Palm’s board, and Apple Inc.’s former top hardware engineer, Jon Rubenstein will join the board as executive chairman.

Rubenstein ran the iPod division at Apple from 2004 to 2006 and was key in the creation of Apple’s iMac computer before that. He was part of the executive team that joined Apple after Steve Jobs returned to that company’s helm.

Anderson, the former chief financial officer of Apple, recently agreed to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges related to a stock options backdating probe at Apple. He also agreed to pay about $3.5 million in fines, without admitting wrongdoing. Anderson also serves as a director of eBay Inc. and Move Inc.

Among Elevation’s five partners, besides Anderson and McNamee, is the rock star Bono, lead singer of U2.

Elevation’s investment in Palm is the firm’s largest ever.

“We don’t think Palm is faltering or that there’s anything wrong with the present,” McNamee said in an interview. “We just think the future is incredibly bright.”

The $1.9 billion private equity firm seeks to strengthen Palm’s position in a highly competitive market that will only become more so with iPhone’s expected entry at the end of the month.

“Today, you can’t get your highest valued content to your phone, other than e-mail,” McNamee said. “And we think that’s going to change in the future.”

Sunnyvale-based Palm was the subject of extensive takeover speculation this year as it hired Morgan Stanley to examine its options, including a complete buyout. A range of telecoms, including Motorola Inc. and Nokia Corp., to private equity firms, were rumored suitors.

“We were approached by larger parties over the last six months,” Palm Chief Executive Ed Colligan said, declining to be more specific. “The reality is that we thought this was the best outcome for our business and our investors.”

For years, Palm’s primary smartphone competitor was Research in Motion Ltd., maker of BlackBerry devices. But as handset giants like Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung Electronics Co. entered the fray last year with lower-priced, slimmer, consumer-oriented models, Palm’s once-groundbreaking Treo design began to appear stale.

Seeking to recapture its innovative streak, Palm last week introduced a new laptop-like device, the Foleo, designed to work with smartphones. However, it was roundly panned.

Colligan said in a conference call with analysts Monday that Palm’s roadmap for the next year is set, but he is looking forward to working with Rubenstein and drawing on his proven record of creating highly efficient engineering teams that produce innovative products.

Rubenstein will work with Palm’s co-founder and top product designer, Jeff Hawkins, who pioneered the Palm Pilot and Treo smartphone, but has been working at Palm only part-time in recent years.

“That’s just a team that can’t be beat,” McNamee told analysts.

Shares of Palm were up nearly 9 percent, or $1.41, to $17.50 in midday trading.

Palm said the deal, which needs shareholder approval, will leave the company with more than $300 million of cash after the transaction.

“The management shakeup at Palm is the key takeaway,” Think Equity analyst Jonathan Hoopes wrote in a note. “Today’s deal should quiet skeptics as these new investors in Palm have ‘been around the block’ and clearly understand the value of a global brand, of a foundation based on software, and of design acumen.”

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google on Thursday provided software developers with technology to keep online applications like e-mail running on computers even if Internet connections are dropped, unavailable or unreliable.

The world’s most popular Internet search engine introduced the Google Gears Web browser extension at the opening of Google Developer Day 2007 in Sydney, Australia.

Google’s offering provides developers with a free tool to make Web-based applications more appealing and comes as a threat to the Microsoft empire, which is built on sales of software installed on people’s computers.

“With Google Gears we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.

“We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

The browser extension downloads enough data to a computer to enable people to continue using Web-based programs such as e-mail, calendars, or word processing even while on flights or otherwise cut off from the Internet.

“This announcement is a significant step forward for web applications,” said Brendan Eich, chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation which makes the FireFox Internet browser.

Google Gears is open-source, meaning developers are free to adapt it as they wish, and the Mountain View, California-based company said it will work with other firms to develop standards for offline functionality.

“We’re very excited to be collaborating with Google to move the industry forward to a standard cross-platform, cross-browser local storage capability,” said Adobe vice president Kevin Lynch.

Google expects the new technology to increase the popularity of its host of Web-based applications but said its intent in releasing the open-source technology is to enhance all programs of that type.

A trend away from downloading software onto personal computers and toward using applications hosted and maintained online is considered a defining characteristic of “Web 2.0,” the latest iteration of Internet life.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. said on Wednesday it had created Web software that runs both online, and offline, marking a sea change for the Internet industry by letting users work on planes, trains, spotty connections and even in the most remote locations.

The technology, called Google Gears, would allow users of computers, phones and other devices to manipulate Web services like e-mail, online calendars or news readers whether online, intermittently connected to the Web or completely offline.

By bridging the gulf between new Web services and the older world of desktop software, where any data changes are stored locally on users’ machines, Google is pushing the Web into whole new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft Corp., leader in the desktop software era.

“The Web is great but it doesn’t work very well when you don’t have a Web connection,” Jeff Huber, Google’s vice president of engineering, said in an interview. “Gears addresses a functional gap on the Web.”

Google plans to make the Gears technology available for free as “open source” software, meaning other developers are free to use and enhance the software in their own products.

Gears promises to expand the usage of scores of Google products and services, as well as thousands of programs from independent software makers, by making them more accessible at previously inconvenient times and places.

The technology also allows developers to build Internet search and indexing of Web pages into their own software applications, Huber said.

Many such products will be able to make limited searches offline, since they will have downloaded data automatically when connected. Google’s full Web search functions would return once the user reconnects to the Internet.

Early partners who will use Gears in their products include design software leader Adobe Systems Inc., maker of Flash animation and Acrobat document-sharing software, as well as new Apollo tools that work online and offline, Adobe said.

Other organizations working with Google are Norway’s Opera Software ASA, maker of a Web browser popular with mobile phone users, and Mozilla, the group behind Firefox, the biggest alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, according to Google.

BEYOND DESKTOP

Analysts said Google’s move capitalizes on a growing trend over the past couple of years for Web applications to behave as responsively as desktop software.

Microsoft already offers technologies like Groove, which allows users to work offline, then synchronize changes when connected later. But the software giant has been reluctant to make existing products work both online and offline.

Technologies such as AJaX, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology have made this increasingly possible.

“Now the Web is becoming so good that there is less and less of a reason to build software that just runs on desktop computers,” said Gartner analyst David Smith of Bedford, New Hampshire. “In the past, developers had to make some pretty clear trade-offs between the Web and software for desktops.”

Google Gears promises to help further close the gap for software developers across the industry. “This is a very big step, but I would say it is an obvious step,” Huber said.

The first Google product to feature Gears will be Google Reader, which allows consumers automatically to track updates to hundreds of Web sites. Users could connect temporarily for updates, then go offline and read up on recent Web news.

“We expect this to be extended to other Google applications over time,” Huber said, without setting any timeframes.

Once retrofitted, for example, Google Apps, the company’s free, advertising-supported group of Web programs including word processing and spreadsheets that can be shared and edited by groups, could work with only periodic Web connections.

Huber said Gears’ biggest impact could be in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where poor or non-existent Internet connections hobble access to digital information.

Google made the announcement ahead of its Google Developer Day conference, which is taking place on Thursday in 10 cities around the world starting in Sydney and culminating at the San Jose Convention Center in Silicon Valley later in the day.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) said on Wednesday that Google Inc.’s (Nasdaq:GOOG - news) YouTube Internet video site will soon be available on its Apple TV set-top box.

Starting in mid-June, Apple TV will stream videos wirelessly from the Internet on YouTube, the company said. Thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available then, it said.

Apple TV works with iTunes to play users’ content — video, movies, television shows and the like — wirelessly on a wide-screen television.

Apple also on Wednesday launched iTunes Plus, a music download service that has no copy-protection software limiting consumers’ use of the songs. It features artists with EMI Group, including Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and Joss stone.

Jobs has called on the music industry to allow online retailers like iTunes to sell digital songs without restrictions to give the digital music sector a boost and give consumers what they want.

EMI said in April that it would allow retailers to sell its music without protection, with its first partner being Apple. Earlier this month, EMI (EMI.L) said it would also work with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN - news)

Along with the YouTube announcement, Apple said that YouTube members can also log in to their YouTube accounts on Apple TV to view and save videos.

MTV Networks owners Viacom Inc. (NYSE:VIAB - news) said it would welcome the chance to license its content to Apple.

“We’re always vigilant about protecting our copyrights. But we would welcome the opportunity to license our content to Apple as we do with all distributors,” a Viacom spokesman said.

Viacom sued YouTube in March for $1 billion charging it with “massive intentional copyright infringement” after finding hundreds of thousands of Viacom-owned videos uploaded to the service without its permission.

Apple also said it was selling a new Apple TV with a 160 gigabyte hard drive. The drive has four times the storage of its previous TVs for up to 200 hours of video, 36,000 songs, 25,000 photos or a combination of each.

With a wireless, high-speed Internet connection, Apple TV can automatically sync content from one Mac or Windows PC or stream content from as many as five additional computers to a television without wires.

An Apple TV costs $299. The larger model will cost $399, and will be available on Thursday.

Shares of Apple rose $4.42, or 3.9 percent, to close at $118.77, after brokerage firm WR Hambrecht & Co. upgraded its price target on Apple to $125.