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Steven Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone’s appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it.

John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers.

At an event Thursday at Apple headquarters, Jobs announced a low-cost software development kit that outside programmers can use to create programs for the iPhone, much as they now write the vast majority of the programs created for the Macintosh. Until now, iPhones have officially been able to run only the limited assortment of applications that Apple includes. (Some buyers have modified the phones to add unauthorized software.)

“We’re very excited about this,” said Jobs, who also announced that the company was adding features to make the iPhone more appealing to business users. “We think a lot of people, after understanding where we are going, are going to want to become an iPhone developer.”

Sharing the stage with Jobs, Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had established a $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone entrepreneurs. Called the iFund, it is the largest fund the company has created for a specific technology.

“The potential for iPhone is huge,” Doerr said.

Matt Murphy, the Kleiner partner overseeing the fund, said he expected the fund to last two to three years, after which the company might decide to add more capital.

Jobs said Apple would offer a developer kit for $99 that would allow programmers to create everything from games to business programs. On Thursday, Sega and AOL demonstrated applications they created for the iPhone using the kit.

The programs that are created will then be available to iPhone users exclusively through a new service on all iPhones called the Apps Store, an aspect of the plan that may discourage some developers. Apple will keep 30 percent of the sale price.

Jobs said that Apple would offer only those programs that it approves, rejecting pornography, for example, and programs that might not provide adequate security for users.

He argued that developers would benefit from Apple’s being the sole distributor because only Apple could give third-party programs such wide exposure to customers. All iPhone users will be able to browse the available programs directly from their devices. Customers will also benefit, he said, from Apple’s weeding out of malicious programs.

“We can track the developers and we can tell their parents,” Jobs said, joking about the demographic profile of many Apple entrepreneurs.

In an attempt to lure corporate customers, Apple executives also announced that the iPhone would be able to work directly with Microsoft’s Exchange software, allowing it to interact closely with corporate networks and e-mail systems in much the way that BlackBerry devices do. Apple said Genentech and Nike were among the companies that were already taking advantage of this feature.

The new business abilities will be added to the iPhone in June and will come to existing owners in a free upgrade. The software will include extensive security features, like the ability to lock and erase the system remotely in the event of loss or theft.

“The majority of the objections IT managers have had about the iPhone have been addressed today,” said Van Baker, an analyst with Gartner Inc., referring to corporate information technology managers. “It’s a very valid and robust device, and for that reason it’s a viable platform for the enterprise in competition with the BlackBerry and others.”

But attracting a huge following among corporations is something Apple has not been able to achieve with the Macintosh, and it remains to be seen whether the iPhone will take sales from the BlackBerry, the popular business communicator sold by Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario.

“It’s a better device and platform that does more things than the BlackBerry,” Murphy said. If people have been questioning whether the iPhone is a business tool, the integration with Exchange “takes the issue off the table,” he said.

The iPhone is already the second most popular smartphone after the BlackBerry, with a 28 percent share of the market, but its inability to communicate with corporate computer systems running Microsoft Exchange has hindered its growth in that market.

source: International Herald Tribune

Intel has decided to accelerate the launch of its Basic Platform for low-cost PCs from the originally planned third quarter this year to May, according to sources at PC makers.

Shelton’08 for desktops will offer two 45nm Diamondville processor options; the 230, a single-core CPU running at 1.6GHz, 533MHz FSB and 512KB cache, and a dual-core CPU whose specification is not yet available, said the sources.

Shelton’08 for notebooks will include a single-core Diamondville-based CPU, the N270, that is able to execute two threads per cycle, the sources revealed. Other key components of Shelton’08 are the 945GSE northbridge and ICH7-M southbridge.

Sources at notebook makers pointed out that no matter which vendor’s low-cost PC products gain the largest market share, Intel will still be the biggest winner. Intel is planning to invest US$1 billion over the next three years in Asia to support PC makers to push low-cost PCs in order to help promote and standardize such products in the emerging markets.

Intel declined the opportunity to respond saying it cannot comment on unannounced products.

source: DigiTimes

Factories here churn out iPhones that are exported to the United States and Europe. Then thousands of them are smuggled back into China.The strange journey of Apple’s popular iPhone, to nearly every corner of the world, shows what happens when the world’s hottest consumer product defies a company’s attempt to introduce it slowly in new markets.

The iPhone has been swept up in a frenzy of global smuggling and word-of-mouth marketing that leads friends to ask friends, “While you’re in the U.S., would you mind picking up an iPhone for me?”

These unofficial distribution networks help explain a mystery that analysts who follow Apple have been pondering: Why is there a large gap between the number of iPhones that Apple says it sold last year, about 3.7 million, and the 2.3 million that are actually registered on the networks of its wireless partners in the United States and Europe?

The answer now seems clear. For months, tourists, small entrepreneurs and smugglers of electronic goods have been purchasing iPhones in the United States and then shipping them overseas.

There the phones’ digital locks are broken so they can work on local telephone networks, and they are outfitted with localized software, essentially undermining Apple’s effort to roll out the phone with exclusive partnership deals, similar to its primary partnership agreement with AT&T in the United States.

“There’s no question many of them are ending up abroad,” said Charles Wolf, an analyst who follows Apple for Needham.

For Apple, the booming overseas market for iPhones is both a sign of its marketing prowess and a blow to a business model that could be coming undone, costing the company as much as $1 billion over the next three years, according to some analysts.

But those economic realities do not play into the mind of Daniel Pan, a 22-year-old Web site designer who says a friend recently bought an iPhone for him in the United States.

He and other people in Shanghai often pay $450 to $600 to get a phone that sells for $400 in the United States. But they are happy.

“This is even better than I thought it would be,” he said, toying with his iPhone at an upscale coffee shop. “This is definitely one of the great inventions of this century.”

Pan is among the new breed of young professionals in China who can afford to buy the latest gadgets and the coolest Western brands.

IPhones are widely available at electronic stores in big cities, and many stores offer unlocking services for imported phones.

Chinese sellers of iPhones say they typically get the phones from suppliers who purchase them in the United States, then have them shipped or carried to China by airline passengers.

Often, they say, the phones are given to members of Chinese tourist groups or Chinese airline flight attendants, who are typically paid a commission of about $30 for every phone they deliver.

Although unlocking the phone violates Apple’s purchase agreement, it does not appear to violate any laws in China, though many stores may be avoiding import duties.

Considering the penchant in China for smuggling and counterfeiting high-quality goods, the huge number of iPhones being sold in China is not surprising, particularly given the popularity of the Apple brand in China.

Indeed, within months of the release of the iPhone in the United States last June, iPhone knockoffs, or iClones as some have dubbed them, were selling in Shanghai for as little as $125. But most people want the real thing.

“A lot of people here want to get an iPhone,” said Conlyn Chan, 31, a lawyer who was born in Taiwan and now lives in Shanghai. “I know a guy who went back to the States and bought 20 iPhones. He even gave one to his driver.”

Negotiations between Apple and China Mobile, the world’s biggest mobile-phone service operator, with more than 350 million subscribers, broke down last month, stalling the official release of the iPhone in China. Long before that, however, there was a thriving gray market.

“I love all of Apple’s products,” said a 27-year-old Beijing engineer named Chen Chen who found his iPhone through a bulletin board Web site. “I bought mine for $625 last October, and the seller helped me unlock it. Reading and sending Chinese messages is no problem.”

An iPhone purchased in Shanghai or Beijing typically costs about $555, compared with the $400 retail price for the same model in the United States. To unlock the phone and add Chinese language software costs an additional $25.

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Yahoo on Monday rejected a $44.6 billion takeover offer from Microsoft as too low, setting up a potential showdown with the software maker.After a 10-day review, the board decided the $31-per-share offer “substantially undervalues” Yahoo, the Sunnyvale, California-based company said in a statement.

The Yahoo chief executive, Jerry Yang, will seek to persuade shareholders that he can win a higher bid or craft a plan to reignite growth in online advertising sales. The market may double by 2011, but Yahoo has lost out to Google and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

“Yahoo thinks they’re worth more because of the plans they’ve implemented that have yet to come to fruition,” said Daniel Taylor, an analyst at the Boston-based research firm Yankee Group. “The board is saying, ‘We think we can keep the company together and do far better with it than Microsoft ever will.’ ”

The rejection leaves Microsoft weighing whether to raise the price, give up, or take the offer straight to shareholders.

Yahoo shares have climbed above the value of the cash-and-stock bid, showing shareholders expect a higher price. Microsoft plans to let investors choose cash or stock, at a ratio that will end up being about 50-50.

Microsoft’s offer was originally worth $31 a share. Microsoft shares have declined since the bid, lowering the value of the stock portion and pushing the total value of the deal to about $29.08 a share as of last week.

A UBS analyst, Heather Bellini, the top-ranked software analyst by Institutional Investor, said last week that Microsoft may have to bid $34 to $37 a share.

Yang has resisted letting go of the company he co-founded in 1995 as a graduate student at Stanford University. He replaced Terry Semel as chief executive in June and planned to craft a strategy to revitalize Yahoo. An upgraded search engine, new mobile phone software and plans to win sales in social networking have yet to gain investor confidence.

Yahoo posted eight straight quarters of profit declines and spent years trying to catch up with Google in Web queries and the lucrative market for ads linked to search results.

Microsoft may not be ready to give up. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo would control more than a quarter of the market for animated ads and colorful display banners at the top of Web pages. Google has not made much progress there, giving the combined company a way to challenge Google and start going after emerging markets such as mobile-phone ads.

To fend off Microsoft, Yahoo might seek help from rivals, soliciting other bids or seeking partnerships with News Corp., owner of MySpace, or Google, according to analysts including Clayton Moran of Stanford Group.

source: Herald Tribune

SAN FRANCISCO - Microsoft Corp. has pounced on slumping Internet icon Yahoo Inc. with an unsolicited takeover offer of $44.6 billion in its boldest bid yet to challenge Google Inc.’s dominance of the lucrative online search and advertising markets. The Justice Department says it is interested in reviewing antitrust issues associated with it.

The surprise offer of $31 per share, made late Thursday and announced Friday, seizes on Yahoo’s weakness while Microsoft tries to muscle up in a high-stakes battle with Google likely to define the technology landscape for years to come.

In a statement Friday, Yahoo said it will “carefully and promptly” study Microsoft’s bid.

With its profits steadily sliding, Yahoo’s stock slipped to a four-year low earlier this week and a new management team has been trying to steer a turnaround but sees more turbulence through 2008.

The announcement lifted Yahoo’s share price by almost 50 percent in morning trading, while Google fell almost 8 percent, dragged down by a fourth-quarter earnings report that missed Wall Street expectations.

In conference call Friday morning, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer indicated he won’t take no for an answer after Yahoo rebuffed takeover overtures a year ago.

“This is a decision we have — and I have — thought long and hard about,” Ballmer said. “We are confident it’s the right path for Microsoft and Yahoo.”

To underscore its resolve, Microsoft is offering a 62 percent premium to Yahoo’s closing stock price Thursday. If the deal is consummated, it would be by far the largest acquisition in Microsoft’s history, eclipsing last year’s $6 billion purchase of online ad service aQuantive.

Since reaching a 52-week high of $34.08 in October, Yahoo shares have fallen 46 percent. Yahoo climbed $9.41 a share, or 49 percent, to $28.59 in morning trading. Microsoft shares fell $1.43, or 4.4 percent, to $31.17.

Microsoft publicly disclosed its cash-and-stock offer in hopes of rallying support from Yahoo’s shareholders, making it more difficult for Yahoo’s board to turn down the bid.

In a letter released Friday, Ballmer pointedly noted Yahoo’s financial performance has deteriorated since Microsoft was spurned a year ago. At that time, Ballmer said he was told Yahoo believed it was better off on its own.

“A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved,” Ballmer wrote in his letter.

Microsoft’s previous offer was rebuffed by Terry Semel, who stepped aside last year as chief executive under shareholder pressure.

Microsoft sent its latest takeover offer to Yahoo late Thursday, shortly after Semel resigned as the company’s chairman. The letter is addressed to Semel’s successors, new Chairman Roy Bostock and the current CEO, co-founder Jerry Yang, who is one of Yahoo’s largest shareholders.

In a prepared statement, Yahoo said its board “will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.”

Microsoft views Yahoo as its best chance to thwart Google, which has leveraged its leadership in Internet search and advertising to emerge as an increasingly serious threat to the world’s largest software maker’s persuasive influence on how people interact with computers.

Google already controls nearly 60 percent of the U.S. search market, and has been widening its lead, despite concerted efforts by both second-place Yahoo and third-place Microsoft. By combining, Microsoft and Yahoo would have a 33 percent share of the U.S. search market, according to the latest data from comScore Media Metrix.

By joining forces, Microsoft and Yahoo also would widen their narrowing advantage over Google in providing free e-mail accounts — a service that helps foster more loyalty with users and create more advertising opportunities.

Advertisers around the world are expected to double their spending on the Internet during the next three years as more people get their news and entertainment on the Web instead of television, radio, newspapers and magazine. The trend is expected to create an $80 billion online ad market in 2010, up from an estimated $40 billion last year.

Despite an aggressive push in recent years, Microsoft’s online advertising expansion hasn’t paid off. Last week, the Redmond, Wash.-based company reported a 79 percent jump in its overall profit, but its online division’s loss widened to $245 million.

And Yahoo has been struggling to attract more advertising even though its Web site attracts one of the biggest audiences. The Sunnyvale-based company’s profit has declined for five consecutive quarters, prompting plans to cut 1,000 jobs later this month, a 7 percent reduction of its 14,300-employee work force.

Besides helping to boost its online ad revenue, Microsoft believes it could mine more profit from Yahoo by jettisoning workers and eliminating overlapping operations.

Microsoft said it sees at least $1 billion in cost savings if it buys Yahoo. Microsoft executives deflected questions about how many jobs might be lost, but the company emphasized retention packages will be offered to Yahoo engineers and other key employees, including some executives.

The fate of Yahoo’s brand also is unclear if Microsoft takes over. Both Ballmer and Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, hailed Yahoo’s strong brand value but didn’t commit to keeping the name alive.

___

AP Business Writer Jennifer Malloy in New York and AP Business Writer Jessica Mintz in Seattle contributed to this story.

source: Yahoo! News

Samsung Electronics aims to ship 50 million handsets with a unit price tag of above US$200 in 2008, accounting for 25% of the company’s shipment goal of 200 million handsets for the year, the Chinese-language Commercial Times quoted South Korean media as indicating.

Meanwhile, LG Electronics also targets to ship 40 million handsets with an ASP (average unit price) of US$200 this year, accounting for 40% of the company’s total shipments projected for 2008, the paper noted.

In other news, Samsung expects unit sales of 3G handsets in Taiwan will grow 60% on year to reach three million units in 2008, raising the ratio of 3G models in Taiwan’s handset market to 40% in 2008 compared to 25% in 2007, according to Scott Huang, vice president of the mobile communication unit at Samsung Taiwan.

Huang made the remarks during Samsung’s launch of its 5-megapixel camera phone, the Samsung G808, in Taiwan on January 21. Market sources indicated that the G808 carries a suggested retail price of NT$19,600 (US$607).

source: DigiTimes

Google said Thursday that it had come up with a plan that began to fulfill the pledge it made to investors when it went public nearly four years ago to reserve 1 percent of its profit and equity to “make the world a better place.”The philanthropy the company has set up - Google.org, or DotOrg as Googlers call it - will spend as much as $175 million in its first round of grants and investments during the next three years, Google officials said. While it is like other companies’ foundations in making grants, it will also be untraditional in making for-profit investments, encouraging Google employees to participate directly and lobbying public officials for changes in policies, company officials said.

DotOrg officials said they had decided to spend the money on five initiatives: disease and disaster prevention; improving the flow of information to hold governments accountable in community services; helping small and midsize enterprises; developing renewable energy sources that are cheaper than coal; and investing in the commercialization of plug-in vehicles.

Google may be one of the 10 richest U.S. corporations as measured by market value, but its budget for philanthropy is minuscule, compared with the $70 billion of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Still, Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, expressed hope in 2004 that “someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact.”

Mark Dowie, author of the book “American Foundations,” said DotOrg was part of “a new mode of philanthropy that is very similar to venture capitalism, holding those they fund responsible in ways never seen before.” The danger, he said, “is that a lot of philanthropic work is not quantifiable. How do you qualify arts grant making, for example.”

Still, he added, “what would be worse is for Google not to give away its money, but to hoard it.”

The director of Google.org is Larry Brilliant. Brilliant, a medical doctor who moved to an ashram in northern India in the 1970s and went on to play a major role in eradicating smallpox in the country, likened his moral quandary in figuring out how to spend Google.org’s money to that faced by a saint wandering the streets of Benares, on the banks of the Ganges.

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Nokia, the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, said Tuesday that it would close a factory in Germany and cut about 2,300 jobs as it shifts production to locations with lower costs.The factory in Bochum in western Germany is scheduled to close in mid-2008, Nokia said in a statement. Production will be moved to more competitive plants in Europe, Nokia said without elaborating. Costs for the shutdown were not disclosed.

Nokia wants to stay ahead of competitors Samsung Electronics and Motorola without sacrificing profit margins at a time when cellphone prices are falling. Nokia has European plants in Finland, Hungary and Britain, and is building a new site in Romania. Last month, the company decided to move some production lines from Finland to South Korea because of labor shortages.

“Germany isn’t very cost efficient,” said Jari Honko, an analyst at eQ Bank in Helsinki. “They were forced to do this.”

Nonproduction related activities in Bochum will also be closed, the company said. Nokia said it planned to sell its line fit automotive business and is in talks to sell the adaptation software research unit in Bochum to Sasken Technologies.

“The planned closure of the Bochum production site is necessary to secure Nokia’s long-term competitiveness,” Veli Sundbaeck, head of corporate relations and responsibility, said in the statement. “It cannot be operated in a way that meets the requirements for global cost efficiency and for flexible capacity growth.”

The Finnish company employed about 113,000 people as of Sept. 30. Nokia also has factories in Mexico, Brazil, China and India. It is currently spending $75 million in Chennai to increase capacity at the Indian plant.

“If you build a plant, it would be better to do it Asia than in Europe,” said Wing-Yen Choi, an analyst at Theodoor Gilissen Amsterdam. He said Nokia could still benefit from redirecting production to Eastern Europe, where costs are lower. “The plant was already written off and has zero economic value.”

Germany’s IG Metall union called Nokia’s plan “inhuman” and “socially unacceptable.”

“That location is running well and the workers there give it all seven days a week,” said Ulrike Kleinebrahn, an IG Metall official based in Düsseldorf, Germany. “As a top company in the industry, Nokia made a very brutal decision.”

Nokia increased its handset market share in the third quarter, the fifth straight quarter, while Samsung Electronics overtook Motorola, a survey showed.

The Finnish company’s global third-quarter market share by unit sales rose to 38.1 percent from 35.1 percent a year earlier, according to a report by Gartner, the researcher based in Stamford, Connecticut. Samsung increased its share to 14.5 percent from 12.2 percent and Motorola fell to 13.1 percent from 20.7 percent.

Nokia has stayed ahead of competitors with products ranging from phones costing less than $50 to advanced devices featuring satellite navigation and e-mail.

Nokia, which reports fourth-quarter earnings next Thursday, posted an 85 percent increase in third-quarter profit to €1.56 billion, or $2.32 billion.

Gartner forecast in November that global unit sales would be 1.13 billion units or “slightly” higher for 2007, an increase of about 14 percent from the previous year.

source: Herald Tribune

Sony BMG, the music company, announced Thursday that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalogue in the MP3 format by the end of the month.The move by Sony BMG, which represents artists like Bruce Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Santana and Justin Timberlake, further positions Amazon’s digital music store as a significant rival to the market leader, the iTunes store from Apple.

“This is such an exciting day for us and our customers,” said Bill Carr, vice president for digital music at Amazon. “All four major labels will be part of our service. It means our customers will really have access to all the biggest artists in the world.”

Sony’s embrace of the MP3 format is also the latest blow to the technology known as digital rights management software, or DRM, which is intended to prevent consumers from making unauthorized copies of digital material.

In an open letter to the music industry last February, Steven Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said his company would welcome the end of software antipiracy measures and a world where music from any online music store could be played on Apple devices.

Since then, one by one, major music industry figures like Edgar M. Bronfman Jr., Warner Music’s chairman, have supported the notion that DRM was doing more harm than good in the evolving digital music market.

But Sony’s partnership with Amazon.com also underscores the music industry’s gathering effort to nurture an online rival to Apple, which has sold more than three billion songs through its iTunes store. Most music purchased on iTunes can be played only on Apple devices, and Apple insists on selling all single tracks for 99 cents. Amazon, which sells tracks for anywhere from 89 cents to over a dollar, offers the pricing variability the labels want.

“The major music companies feel that Apple’s foot is on their necks, and they would like to get it off,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm. “They are looking to destabilize Apple’s dominant share, and they see Amazon as their best shot.”

The Universal Music Group and EMI Group joined the Amazon MP3 music store when it was introduced in September. In December, the Warner Music Group announced that it would make its entire catalogue available.

Nevertheless, the development is not necessarily a bad one for Apple, said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Capital. “My guess is that Apple doesn’t care,” he said. “The reality is, everyone will now start downloading their songs more cheaply someplace else and using them on their iPods.”

Apple also sells digital music without copy protection, but so far only EMI has made its music available to iTunes in that format.

source: Herald Tribune

Matsushita Electric, the maker of Panasonic electronics, said Thursday that it was changing its name to Panasonic, thus identifying more closely with its best-known exports.The change is the first for the company, based in Osaka, since it was founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita. The change brings it into line with other Japanese companies, including Toshiba, Sony and Omron, that have adopted catchier names along the way to success.

“I see it as a plus for the company,” said Junko Miyakawa, senior analyst at Shinsei Securities in Tokyo, “in that it is easy to understand, and should boost the company’s global presence.”

Shares of Matsushita Electric fell ¥10 to close at ¥2,160, or $19.77, on the Tokyo Stock Exchange after television reports of the name change.

Matsushita is part of the fabric of the postwar Japanese economic miracle, producing affordable household goods for a new middle class.

Its products were produced under several brand names, including National, used in Japan, and Technics, used globally on high-end audio electronics. In many cases the brands are better known than the company. All those brands will now carry the Panasonic name, the company said.

“Consumers don’t see two Coca-Colas or two Nikes, but in this instance they have been forced to deal with both the Matsushita and Panasonic names,” said Orlando Camargo, president of the Japanese arm of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. “That was not a good corporate strategy.”

He added, “Unifying the brand with a global reality as represented by its overseas sales will reinforce the heritage, quality and DNA associated with Japanese products.”

It may take time for the company to achieve its ultimate goal of operating under a single brand name.

“The company could face several challenges in the near future,” Terence Oliver, president of Interbrand Japan, said. “A vast number of businesses and product lines will now fall under the Panasonic brand, and the company may need to redefine what the Panasonic name and brand will mean, over all.”

The name change was to take effect in October, contingent on agreement at the general shareholders’ meeting in June.

Panasonic turns heads with technology at Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas

source: Herald Tribune

Still think copier when you hear the name Xerox? The company knows that you do. And it is sick of it. Good grief, Xerox does not even make stand-alone copiers any more.These days, Xerox gets most of its revenue from machines that both print and copy, and that can be plugged into networks for use in offices and high-speed publishing. It has introduced 100 new products in the last three years. But it does not want the Xerox name to conjure them up, either, given that services - like managing a company’s document flow - are a pretty fast-growing part of the product mix, too.

So Monday morning, Xerox introduced what it said was the most sweeping transformation of its corporate identity since it dropped “Haloid” from the Haloid Xerox name in 1961. In a broadcast to employees, it announced that it would retire the staid red capital X that has dominated its logo for 40 years in favor of what Richard Wergan, vice president of advertising, calls “a brand identity that reflects the Xerox of today.”

The new logo consists of a bright red lowercase “xerox” that sits alongside a red sphere sketched with lines that link to form a stylized X. According to Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s chief, that little piece of art represents the connection to customers, partners, industry and innovation.

Mulcahy insists that the Xerox brand already stands for all those things. But clearly she is betting that the new look will, perhaps subliminally, drive home the point that Xerox is, as she put it, “engaging and approachable” as well as “technologically savvy and eager to lead in the 21st century.” That is a pretty tall task for a ball-and-X to accomplish. But Xerox points to a lot of research that says it is up to it.

As part of efforts to transform Abu Dhabi into the cultural lodestone of the Middle East and expand libraries there, the emirate’s Authority for Culture and Heritage has chosen the first 100 books to be translated into Arabic under a new program.

Among them are Alan Greenspan’s memoir, “The Age of Turbulence,” John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” and Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom.” The goal is to translate 100 titles every year.

The authority, known as Adach, has formed a nonprofit organization called Kalima, which is Arabic for “word,” to undertake the translations and expand Arabic-language publishing in the United Arab Emirates.

The effort is part of the emirate’s lavish spending on culture, which includes $27 billion for building five museums, including a Guggenheim outpost designed by Frank Gehry and a Louvre satellite designed by Jean Nouvel.

The first 100 titles draw from history, science and fiction; Kalima is still securing the rights to most of them. More than half were originally written in English, and they include a Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright, which examines the origins of Al Qaeda, as well as the best-seller, “The Kite Runner,” by Khaled Hosseini. Classics in the first group of books to be translated include Milton’s “Paradise Regained.” A number of works by Jewish writers are on the list, including “Collected Stories” by the Nobel Prize recipient Isaac Bashevis Singer.

About 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past millennium, according to a 2003 study by the United Nations Development Program. The demand has been small, partly owing to the historical tendency to focus most reading on religious texts and classical poetry. About 300 new translations appear each year, so Kalima’s planned 100 titles represents a substantial addition.

Kalima will buy rights, pay translators and enlist established Arabic-language publishers in the Gulf region and North Africa to print and distribute the books.

Karim Nagy, Kalima’s chief executive, acknowledges the hurdles. The Arabic-speaking world comprises about 300 million people in more than 20 countries. Censorship laws vary, and often there is no strong bookselling community or distribution channel.

“First, we will worry about getting the books translated,” he said. “Then we will work to optimize their distribution.”

The typical print run for a book in the Arab world is often no more than 2,000 copies; Kalima plans to fund a minimum of 5,000 copies for each of its titles, with some earmarked for donation to schools and libraries.

Jumaa Abdulla Alqubaisi, director of the Abu Dhabi National Library and an adviser to Kalima, suggested that ultimately the project was as much pragmatic as idealistic.

“Good books are like penicillin,” he said. “They fight against hate, segregation and misunderstanding.”

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts - which itself is financing translations from Arabic into English - said that the Adach project was “political in the best sense of the word. A great novel or poem from another culture allows you to look into the common humanity of people you might have otherwise thought foreign. The important thing is that we broaden these literary and human exchanges.”

Abu Dhabi has been pursuing other literary projects, too. Last year Adach formed a partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair to promote publishing and reading in the emirate and the Arab world in general. The joint venture has been named Kitab, Arabic for “book.”

The partnership’s first project was to transform the annual Abu Dhabi Book Fair, which this year morphed from a book bazaar for shoppers into a trade show for publishing professionals.

source: Herald Tribune 

T-Mobile UK and 3 UK, two British mobile phone operators, recently said they would combine their 3G networks in an effort to save each of them £1 billion over the next decade. Vodafone and Orange, two other British mobile phone companies, have been talking since February about making a similar deal.Think of it as McDonald’s and Burger King getting together to share the cost of the trucks that deliver meat, potatoes and tomatoes to their outlets. While unthinkable in most industries, including fast food, this sort of collaboration is under way between mobile phone companies and is likely to accelerate.

“Everybody in Europe will be watching to see if this works,” said Steven Hartley, a senior analyst in London for Ovum, a consultancy whose clients include Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile. “If they can make this work as fast as they say they will, you’ll see a flurry of these agreements in 2008 or the year after.”

European mobile phone companies spent about £100 billion, or $198 billion, in 2000 buying 3G licenses, and then spent billions more building new networks that were supposed to revolutionize the industry by making the mobile Internet fast, appealing and - most of all - profitable. But seven years later, text messaging still dominates among non-voice services and mobile phone operators continue to struggle to convince their clients to pay for Internet surfing, video downloads and other services.

“What they are doing is trying to improve the bottom line by getting operating costs down while creating a situation where you can improve the top line by having better services,” Hartley said.

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Apple’s sputtering efforts to be a major purveyor of video downloads may get a lift in 2008 from an agreement with 20th Century Fox for digital movie rentals.Apple has been trying to interest a number of Hollywood studios in an iTunes rental service, and several people familiar with the negotiations said that more than one studio would appear onstage at the company’s MacWorld exhibition in San Francisco beginning Jan. 14 to endorse a new Apple movie rental service.

These people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the negotiations, confirmed the Apple-Fox relationship. Apple now trails several companies offering digital movie rental services, including Amazon and Movielink.

The Financial Times first reported the movie rental agreement on Thursday.

Apple and Fox executives declined to comment. The Fox studio is a unit of News Corp.

Steven Jobs, the co-founder and chief executive of Apple, has been publicly skeptical about movie rentals in the past. Hints that Apple would reverse itself and pursue a digital rental strategy emerged last month when a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate found a series of text phrases in the company’s iTunes software suggesting that components of a video-on-demand rental service were already embedded.

Apple, which is based in Cupertino, California, now sells movie downloads from several studios through its iTunes service, including Walt Disney, where Jobs is a board member and its largest individual shareholder.

With more than 30 million iPods sold, many of which can display videos, Apple has in its customers an attractive audience for the Hollywood studios.

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Chris Sacca had a plum job as the Wi-Fi guru at Google. But with his stock options fully vested, he left the Internet search company this month for a new career as a venture capitalist.Sacca, 32, joins a growing number of Google millionaires hoping to parlay their newfound wealth into even greater riches by bankrolling technology start-ups.Three years after Google went public, a fast-growing network of company veterans is fanning out across Silicon Valley. Some are joining the venture capital firms that financed the technology boom of the 1990s. Others are raising investment funds or backing embryonic companies with their own money as so-called angel investors.

“I had one of the best jobs in the world,” said Sacca, who as head of special initiatives at Google led a number of high-profile projects, including the creation of a free Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, California, the company’s hometown. “But there is a world of opportunity.”

So after four years at Google, he struck out on his own to raise a venture fund. Like many Silicon Valley hands, Sacca enjoys working at small companies. And Google, which has more than 16,000 employees, is hardly the start-up it once was.

In their new careers, Google alumni like Sacca are increasingly turning to former colleagues for money and ideas. They help each other line up investors, identify entrepreneurs and hire talented engineers and managers.

Some Google veterans hope to turn their loose affiliation into the next powerful network in Silicon Valley, where webs of money and connections have helped build many companies.

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