News Blog

Correction 6:18 p.m. PT: I misinterpreted the announcement; Inquisitor founder David Watanabe isn't joining Yahoo.

Inquisitor augments Safari by autocompleting search queries and showing results.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has acquired Inquisitor in a move to improve how search results appear on Apple computers.

The Safari browser plug-in offers autocompletion of search queries and shows a pane with search results as users type queries. The plug-in, now in version 3, is a free download.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but Inquisitor founder and developer David Watanabe will continue to work with Yahoo on the software.

"I look forward to assisting Yahoo in refining and extending the Inquisitor user experience beyond where it is today.," Watanabe said on his blog.

"David and our team of Macphiles will continue to innovate on both form and function for Inquisitor," Ariel Seidman, director of search product management for Yahoo, wrote in Yahoo's blog posting.

With every Google enterprise announcement Microsoft must hear the war drums beating.

Sure, Google owns the search market. And, as a result, the company is the online advertising leader. But Microsoft has all those Windows desktops out there, and owns the corporate market, right?

Well, maybe not for long.

Sure, software as a service and cloud computing don't sound as sexy as free e-mail and pay-per-click, but they are the wave of the future, experts say.

On Thursday, Google unveiled a re-branded Web Security for Enterprise based on the Postini technology it acquired last year. The Web-hosted service protects corporate Web and e-mail users from viruses, spyware, and malicious Web sites, and extends protection directly to remote workers if needed.

This is all part of Google's hosted apps business, but targeted at corporate customers instead of consumers who expect--and get--hosted services for free, at least for now.

By putting traditional desktop applications, e-mail, word processing, and calendars into the cloud, Google relieves corporations of the administrative burden of having to buy hardware, install software, and hire people to maintain it.

This greatly reduces the costs for corporations and allows them to focus on their core businesses. And by beefing up the security of its hosted offerings, Google has removed a large impediment to widespread corporate adoption of its hosted services.

"Securing the current enterprise environment is futile," Philippe Courtot, chief executive of Qualys, which offers security as a service to corporations, said in an interview on Friday. "This ... Read more

It looks like EA has made a turn-around in response to fan outrage at its plans for a complicated DRM scheme in two high-profile PC games due out later this year.

Word came out yesterday that Spore (from Sims-meister Will Wright) and the PC version of Xbox 360 hit Mass Effect would implement a new version of the Securom DRM middleware, which not only requires you to keep a game's DVD in the drive to play it, but would need to perform an authenticity check every 10 days, which would have required your computer to be online during that time.

Electronic Arts has high expectations for its forthcoming, PC-only Spore from Sims creator Will Wright. Irritating DRM won't help.

(Credit: CNET)

Amid much fan outrage and negative publicity, it appears EA and each game's respective developer has relented and will instead implement a more benign DRM strategy. Gamer's Hell reported that Mass Effect will now require a one-time online authentication, and it will reauthenticate each time you connect to the game's download servers, but that it will no longer require constant reauthentication. Kotaku reported the same decision has been made for Spore.

On the Mass Effect user forum, the community manager from developer BioWare cited its its "many friends in the armed services and internationally who expressed concerns that they would not be able reauthenticate as often as required," as one of the reasons for the change. Considering that the forum topic in which ... Read more

If Circuit City gets sold anytime soon, it probably won't be to its chief suitor, Blockbuster, according to one of the electronics chain's most vocal investors.

In an interview with TWICE magazine Friday, Jim Wattles, owner of Wattles Capital Management, which owns 6.5 percent of Circuit City shares, said a sale could happen in the next two months. Wattles also said that Blockbuster, which bid roughly $1 billion for Circuit, isn't the only interested party, and in fact, the likely future buyer will be a private equity firm.

So, essentially, the company has options. It was revealed Friday morning that it has retained Goldman Sachs to look at other opportunities for acquisition besides Blockbuster. And another famously vocal shareholder, Carl Icahn, let it be known that if Blockbuster can't make good on its bid, he's interested.

Wattles comments to the magazine come a few weeks after Blockbuster's bid became public and he sent a letter to the retailer's chairman encouraging him to allow Blockbuster to at least kick the tires. Circuit City was, at the time, resisting allowing Blockbuster a look at its books, necessary to make a complete acquisition offer.

Not that he's soured on Blockbuster. On the contrary, he praised Blockbuster's hiring practices and employee training.

He's probably the only one. Sure, investors are unhappy, but the combination of two different retail companies with different cultures, products, and business models, is a disaster waiting to happen. In ... Read more

March of the Penguins: the only movie in Netflix's top 100 that you can stream

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The "Watch Now" feature on Netflix is a great idea: instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows, available for instant streaming to your browser at the touch of a button. There's just one big problem: despite an advertised library of over 8,000 titles, very few of them seem to be movies or TV shows that I want to watch.

Out of 41 titles currently in my queue, only 4--The King of Marvin Gardens, Das Boot, The Good German, and Pickup of South Street--are available to be streamed. OK, fine--my taste for older movies is probably throwing things off. Surely plenty of newer, more popular movies are available to be streamed, right?

Wrong. ... Read more

The entertainment industry's controversial efforts to get universities to be more proactive about policing peer-to-peer piracy have begun to spread from Capitol Hill to the states.

Earlier this year, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a Hollywood-backed proposal buried in a higher education reauthorization bill that would require universities receiving federal financial aid funding to devise plans for "alternative" offerings to unlawful downloading--such as subscription-based services--or "technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity."

That otherwise wide-ranging bill won't become law until House and Senate politicians agree upon a compromise version. Meanwhile, the debate over the proper role of higher education institutions in fighting piracy has shifted to some state legislatures.

On Thursday, what appears to be the first such proposal in the country became law in Tennessee--home to Nashville, the country music capital of the world. A similar measure is currently being considered in Illinois. And California held an "informational hearing" last month featuring a Recording Industry Association of America representative, although no legislation has been introduced there yet.

RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth declined to divulge where else the industry may be planning to push such policies, but she insisted the group views new laws as a last resort.

"If we're asked to participate in conversations by lawmakers, of course we will," she said in an e-mail interview. "But we prefer to be working directly with schools on a collaborative approach to reduce theft."

Still, university administrators gathered at a policy conference in Arlington, Va., this ... Read more

The fate of Philadephia's citywide Wi-Fi deployment is still in limbo as EarthLink threatens to pull the plug.

EarthLink, which fronted $20 million to build the network and has completed 80 percent of the build-out, stopped accepting new customers last week, according to a report by Metro Philadelphia. The company has also supposedly given the city a deadline of this week to come up with a plan to take over the network or sell it to a third party.

EarthLink, which won the contract in 2006 to build what was at the time to be the largest citywide Wi-Fi deployment in the nation, said earlier this year that it's getting out of the Wi-Fi business.

The company had aggressively pushed its municipal Wi-Fi strategy. And Philadelphia was one of several large contracts the company had won to build citywide Wi-Fi networks.

But after the death of EarthLink's CEO Garry Betty in early 2007, it quickly became clear that the Internet service provider had a change of heart when it came to Wi-Fi. Within months, the company had wiggled out of several contracts with cities such as San Francisco and Houston. Early this year it announced it was abandoning the business altogether, and it started negotiating with five cities in which networks had already been built or partially built.

Last month, it announced it had reached agreements with Corpus Christi, Texas; Milpitas, California; and New Orleans. The city governments of Corpus Christi and Milpitas decided to take ownership ... Read more

Wind energy company Noble Environmental Power has filed to raise as much as $375 million in an initial public offering, according to a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission that was filed Thursday.

The Connecticut-based company, which plans to list its shares with the Nasdaq under the symbol "NEPI," operates in the booming wind power market. But the company will still have to brave a weak IPO market.

The 4-year-old Noble runs wind parks in New York state that generate about 282 megawatts of electricity; and later this year, it plans to open added parks in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Maine, and Texas. Noble is seeing demand for wind power in the Northeast partly because of renewable energy mandates in the area. But the wind-power industry is hampered by a shortage of wind turbines.

Noble plans to use the money from the IPO to develop its business, invest in new technologies, and ink future turbine supply agreements. Lehman Brothers, JPMorgan Securities, and Credit Suisse Securities, are underwriting the IPO.

Virtual cell phone operators Virgin Mobile USA and Helio are rumored to be in merger talks, a move that could bring a lot of benefits to both companies.

The tie-up between the two MVNOs, or mobile virtual network operators, was first reported Thursday by the wireless blog MocoNews. According to the blog, SK Telecom, one of Helio's parent companies, would buy out Virgin Mobile USA and then Virgin Mobile would buy Helio in an all-stock transaction.

(Credit: Helio)

As the economy tightens and other larger wireless carriers look to consolidate, it makes sense for these smaller players, who essentially resell service from Sprint Nextel, to look for alternatives. The companies are also rumored to be in talks with private equity firms.

Over the past 18 months, Helio and Virgin Mobile USA have seen many of their MVNO brethren die. ESPN Mobile, Disney Mobile and youth-targeted Amp'd Mobile have all closed shop.

And even though Virgin Mobile USA and Helio are still in business, the companies have not been immune to the increasingly competitive market place. For the first quarter of 2008, Virgin Mobile USA reported that its earnings fell 75 percent compared to a year ago. Meanwhile Helio, which is jointly owned by South Korean carrier SK Telecom and Internet service provider EarthLink, lost $327 million in 2007 on $171 million of revenue. All told, the company has lost more than $560 million since it was started in 2005.

While combining the two companies won't magically solve ... Read more

Microsoft announced Friday it's appealing the $1.39 billion fine the European Commission imposed for failure to comply with its historic 2004 antitrust order against the Redmond giant.

Microsoft filed an application with the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg, seeking to annul the Commission's decision from late February, in which it imposed a fine of 899 million Euros, or $1.39 billion, against Microsoft.

"We are filing this appeal in a constructive effort to seek clarity from the court. We will not be saying anything further," Microsoft said in a statement.

When the Commission imposed the fine, it was specifically designed to address sanctions over the pricing structure Microsoft had set for licensing of its interoperability protocols and patents.

The pricing issue was the last of three parts of the Commission's March 2004 order, which called for the software giant to provide accurate and complete interoperability information to rivals. The purpose was to allow rivals' software to work with the Windows operating system and to provide that license information under "reasonable and nondiscriminatory" terms."

Two years ago, the Commission hit Microsoft with a fine of 280.5 million euros, or $434 million, for failing to comply with the other two parts of its sanctions related to providing complete and accurate interoperability protocol information to rivals. Microsoft initially appealed that 2006 fine, but withdrew it last fall.

Microsoft sought to overturn the Commission's March 2004 order, but last fall the Court of First Instance upheld the Commission's order, ... Read more