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Smartphones for smart women
In a big shift for the phone industry,
women have emerged as eager buyers of not just iPhones but of all
so-called smartphones – BlackBerrys, Treos and other models.
Andrea Newman, for instance (pictured with her son David) has her
BlackBerry for work and her iPhone for having some fun. [Online
ladies]
ONLINE CHILDREN
Windows for
poor kids' laptops
After a years-long dispute, Microsoft and the computing and education
project One Laptop Per Child have reached an agreement to offer Windows on
the organization’s computers. Microsoft long resisted joining the ambitious
project because its laptops used the Linux operating system, a freely
distributed alternative to Windows.
The group’s small, sturdy laptops, designed for use by children in
developing nations, have been hailed for their innovative design. But they
are sold mainly to governments and education ministries, and initial sales
have been slow, partly because countries are reluctant to buy machines that
do not run Windows, the dominant operating system.
Education ministries want low-cost computers to help further education, but
many see familiarity with Windows-based computing as a marketable skill that
can improve job prospects.
“The people who buy the machines are not the children who use them, but
government officials in most cases,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder of
the nonprofit group. “And those people are much more comfortable with
Windows.”
The XO laptop weighs 3.2 pounds and comes with a video camera, microphone,
game-pad controller and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.
About 600,000 have been ordered since last fall, with Peru, Uruguay and
Mexico making the largest commitments. The alliance between Microsoft and
the OLPC comes after long stretches of antagonism, punctuated by occasional
talks, between them.
Negroponte, a former computer researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and a new-media pioneer, said he first talked to Bill Gates,
Microsoft’s chairman, three years ago.
But at the time, Microsoft was fiercely opposed to anything that might
promote the use of open-source software like Linux. Since then, Microsoft
has become more comfortable in competing against Linux, at times running its
products on the same machines in data centers, desktops and laptops,
Negroponte noted. Back then, he added, the nonprofit laptop project did not
have a working machine.
Last year, Negroponte said, he contacted Gates again, and this time the
Microsoft chairman was receptive. He instructed Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s
chief research and strategy officer, to work out a deal with Negroponte.
Those talks began in January in private meetings, when both men were
attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
“Customers have come to us and said they really like the XO laptop and they
would like to see Windows on it,” said James Utzschneider, manager of
Microsoft’s developing markets unit.
The first of the project’s child-friendly XO laptops running Windows XP will
be tested this month in limited trials in four or five countries.
Utzschneider declined to identify the countries, but he said XO laptops
running Windows would be generally available by September. The pact with
Microsoft is not an exclusive agreement. The Linux version will still be
available, and the group will encourage outside software developers to
create a version of the project’s educational software, called Sugar, that
will run on Windows.
Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about US$3, the
licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program
called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want models that can run
both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or
so to the cost of the machines, Negroponte said.
The laptops now cost about $200 each, and the project’s goal is to
eventually bring the price down to about $100.
OLPC led the way in designing inexpensive laptops for children in poorer
nations, but others have followed, notably Intel with its Classmate PC,
which runs Windows and is $400 or less.
The project’s agreement with Microsoft involves no payment by the software
giant, and Microsoft will not join One Laptop Per Child’s board. That
contrasts with the approach of Intel, which joined the project last July,
took a board seat and pledged an $18 million contribution — only to quit in
January amid squabbling over Intel’s aggressive sales tactics with the
Classmate PC.
Of the Microsoft arrangement, Negroponte said: “We’ve stayed very pure.”
But the alliance with Microsoft has created some turmoil within the project.
Walter Bender, the president who oversaw software development, resigned last
month. His departure, Negroponte said, was “a huge loss to OLPC.”
Inside the project, there have been people who, Negroponte said, came to
regard the use of open-source software as one of the project’s ends instead
of its means. “I think some people, including Walter, became much too
fundamental about open source,” Negroponte said.
Bender said later he left the project because he decided his efforts to
develop and support the Sugar open-source learning software “would have more
impact from outside of OLPC than from within.” Outside the constraints of
working on a single hardware platform, like the XO laptop, his work should
“lead to a broader base, more options, and a better set of tools for
children,” Bender said.
ONLINE SEARCH
Cashback
from Microsoft
With its share of the internet search market in steady decline
and its pursuit of an alliance with Yahoo in doubt, Microsoft is taking a
new approach to jump-starting its search engine: offering rebates to people
who use it to find and buy some products.
Microsoft executives said the program, called Live Search cashback, is part
of a plan to come up with new approaches to areas of the search business
where they see opportunities to make inroads against Google, the market
leader.
The new program focuses on searches for products to be bought online, which
Microsoft executives said account for roughly a third of search queries and
a majority of search advertising revenue.
“This is a very big part of the US$20 billion search market,” said the
chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates, at an advertising conference run by the
company. “Make no mistake, we are about having the best search, having the
best results.” Some innovations in the business model of search, like Live
Search cashback, “will help drive that,” he said.
Live Search cashback is essentially a marketing effort by Microsoft to
promote its search service, which lags far behind those of Google and Yahoo
in popularity. The research firm comScore reports that Google’s share of all
searches in the United States grew once again in April, to 61.6 percent,
from 59.8 percent in March. Google gained at the expense of Yahoo and
Microsoft, which experienced declines in search share, Yahoo to 20.4
percent, Microsoft to 9.1 percent.
Google has put marketing dollars into some of its services, but it has
managed to dominate in search while spending virtually no money to promote
its search engine.
Microsoft said 700 merchants offering more than 10 million products have
agreed to participate in the program. They include Barnesandnoble.com,
Circuit City, eBay, Foot Locker, Home Depot and Hewlett-Packard.
“It is a great opportunity for buyers who come to eBay,” said Matt Ackley,
vice president for internet marketing and advertising at eBay. “And it is
all about driving demand for our sellers.”
eBay is one of the largest buyers of search advertisements on Google and
other search engines. Ackley said that if Microsoft’s program is effective,
eBay might shift some of its advertising dollars to Microsoft from Google.
In most cases, Microsoft will determine the amount of the rebate that
shoppers will get. On a Samsung digital camera that costs $90 to $107,
rebates range from 2 percent to 5 percent.
“Microsoft’s issue is lack of consumer share,” said Bryan Wiener, the chief
executive of 360i, a digital marketing agency that specializes in internet
search. “This is an interesting effort to try to motivate consumers to use
Microsoft without cheapening the process. “Will the incentives be enough?”
he queried. “Time will tell.”
As part of the program, Microsoft is also unveiling a new business model
that allows search marketers to pay for ads only when people buy a product,
rather than when they simply click on an ad.
Microsoft said this so-called cost-per-action model will give advertisers
more precise returns on their marketing budgets. Google already offers a
program that allows advertisers to tailor their bids on keywords based on
the number of actions, or conversions, they get.
Microsoft also said it has integrated Farecast, a travel website that
Microsoft acquired in April, into Live Search cashback. The Live Search
cashback service was built on technology developed by Jellyfish, a start-up
that Microsoft acquired in 2007.
Microsoft quits book search
Microsoft is ending a project to scan millions of books and scholarly
articles and make them available on the web, a sign that it is retrenching
in some areas of internet search in the face of competition from Google, the
industry leader.
The announcement came shortly after after Microsoft said it will focus its
internet search efforts on certain areas where it sees an opportunity to
compete against Google. The company has also unveiled a program offering
rebates to users who buy items that they find using the company’s search
engine.
Some search experts said Microsoft’s decision to end its book-scanning
effort suggested the company, whose search engine has lagged far behind
those of Google and Yahoo, is giving up on efforts to be comprehensive. “It
makes you wonder what else is likely to go,” said Danny Sullivan, editor in
chief of the blog Search Engine Land. “One of the reasons people turn to
Google is that it tries to be a search player in all aspects of search.”
Sullivan said the number of people using book search services from Microsoft
and Google has been relatively small, but it included librarians,
researchers and other so-called early adopters who often influence others.
These users are now likely to turn to Google with increasing frequency, he
said.
Both Microsoft and Google have been scanning older books that have fallen
into the public domain, as well as copyright-protected books under
agreements with some publishers. Google also scans copyrighted works without
permission so it can show short excerpts to searchers, an approach that has
drawn fire from publishers.
Microsoft’s decision also leaves the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital
archive that was paid by Microsoft to scan books, looking for new sources of
support. Several major libraries said they chose to work with the Internet
Archive rather than with Google, because of restrictions Google placed on
the use of the new digital files.
“We’re disappointed,” said Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive.
Kahle said, however, that his organization recognized that the project,
which has been scanning about 1,000 books each day, would not receive
corporate support indefinitely. He said Microsoft is reducing its support
slowly and the Internet Archive had enough money to keep the project “going
for a while.” “Eventually funding will come from the public sphere,” Kahle
said.
Some libraries that work with the Internet Archive and Microsoft also said
they plan to continue their book-scanning projects. “We certainly expect to
go on with this,” said Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of
Toronto. “Corporate sponsors are interested in whatever works for their
commercial interests and their shareholders. Long-term preservation is not
something you can look to the commercial sector to provide. It is what
research libraries have always done.”
Microsoft acknowledged in its announcement that commercial considerations
played a part in its decision to end the program. “Given the evolution of
the web and our strategy, we believe the next generation of search is about
the development of an underlying, sustainable business model for the search
engine, consumer and content partner,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s
senior vice president for search, portal and advertising.
Microsoft said it has digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal
articles.
Google, which works with libraries like the New York Public Library and
those at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and Oxford, said it
has scanned more than a million books. It plans to scan 15 million in the
next decade. Google makes the books it scans freely available through its
search engine but does not allow other search engines to use its database.
“We are extremely committed to Google Book Search, Google Scholar and other
initiatives to bring more content online,” said Adam Smith, product
management director at Google.
• Questions
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Browser wars
heating up again
By Brad Stone, New York Times
The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the web, is
about to get some fancy new window dressing. This month, after three years
of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent
browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, is releasing Firefox
3.0. It features a few tricks that could change the way people organize and
find the sites they visit most frequently.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public
test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by
about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a
market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8
could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional
features.
Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines
of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto
the computers of people who use Windows PCs.
In other words, the browser war – the skirmish that landed Microsoft in
antitrust trouble in the 1990s – is heating up again.
“The typical browser for today’s consumer doesn’t look all that different
than it did 10 years ago,” said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures,
one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser start-up. “That is an
unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war,
which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation.”
Browsers have always been viewed as crucial on-ramps to the web.
Nevertheless, after vanquishing Netscape, the first commercial browser
developer, Microsoft waited five years before releasing the sixth version of
Internet Explorer in 2006. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer group, says the company was focused on plugging security
holes during that time.
America Online, which acquired Netscape, spun off the nonprofit Mozilla
Foundation in 2003. Its Firefox browser soon inspired an open-source
movement backed by computer enthusiasts. Early versions of Firefox
introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed
browsing, which lets users toggle between web windows.
Firefox now has 170 million users around the world and an 18 percent share
of the browser market, according to Net Applications. That is especially
impressive given that most of its users have made the active choice to
download the software, while Internet Explorer is installed on most PCs at
the factory.
In addition to giving Microsoft a kick in its competitive pants, Firefox has
also reinforced for the high-tech industry the financial and strategic value
of the browser. In 2004, Google struck a deal with Mozilla to include a
Google search box tucked into a corner of the Firefox browser. According to
Mozilla’s most recent tax documents, in 2006 Google paid Mozilla US$65
million for the resulting traffic to its search listings.
With tasks like email and word processing now migrating from the PC to the
internet, analysts and industry players think the browser will soon become
even more valuable and strategically important.
“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only
thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the
software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has
created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize
bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily
strategic.”
That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the
latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as
fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.
The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing
history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the
word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of
all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.
Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace
the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will
also personalize the browser for an individual user.
“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to
become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the
Mozilla Foundation.
Internet Explorer 8, from Microsoft, promises its own set of tricks. One new
tool, web slices, allows a user to bookmark a dynamic piece of a website,
like an online auction or a sports score, and save it in the margin of the
browser, where the user can watch as it changes.
Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a
page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping,
email or blogging service.
Asked whether Firefox’s increasing popularity had motivated these and other
improvements, Hachamovitch of Microsoft said only: “We love to compete.” But
he did say that amid the new competitive pressures, “the quality and
quantity of my team has gone up significantly.”
His group will have one other company besides Mozilla to keep its eye on:
Apple’s Safari web browser has a little over five percent of the market,
according to Net Applications, and subsists mostly on the loyalty of devoted
Mac and iPhone owners.
But in March, deploying the kind of strategic jujitsu more commonly
associated with Microsoft in the past, Apple began using the automatic
update software that is packaged with its iTunes music player to deliver
Safari onto the computers of people who use Windows. Users had to
specifically decline the Safari offer if they didn’t want the browser to be
downloaded to their computers.
The tactic irked even Apple fans in the blogosphere, along with Apple’s
browser rivals. But it was at least partly successful: Net Applications
reported that Apple’s market share on Windows computers had tripled since
March.
In a statement released last month addressing the comments about the
maneuver, Apple said it had made it easier for customers to distinguish
minor updates from new programs delivered through the update software.
Apple’s boldness underscores the new importance of the web browser in a
world that is increasingly shifting online.
Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, which is developing a browser that
helps users share photos, videos and blog entries more easily, said
consumers would ultimately benefit from the new browser battle.
“We are seeing choice in the browser market really emerge as a significant
force for the first time in a while,” Hardin said.
ONLINE LADIES
Smartphones for smart women
By Laura M. Holson, New York Times
If recent history is any guide, roughly a third of the people
snapping up Apple’s new iPhone are likely to tote it in a purse. In a big
shift for the phone industry, women have emerged as eager buyers of not
just iPhones but of all so-called smartphones – BlackBerrys, Treos and
other models.
In the last year the number of American women using smartphones more than
doubled to 10.4 million, growing at a faster pace than among men,
according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks wireless trends.
The trend is mirrored in sales of the iPhone. In October, nearly one out
of four owners of the iPhone was a woman, according to Nielsen. By March
that number rose to one in three. The iPhone model just announced, with
faster internet access and mapping features, may accelerate the shift.
Smartphones are cheaper now – as little as US$99 for the petite BlackBerry
Pearl – and are better designed. Women have been using them for years in
business, of course, but many are finding that the phones can also help
manage their families’ hectic schedules and keep them in touch with
friends.
“You are not seen as a geek anymore if you have a smartphone,” said
Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner Group, a research firm.
“Women, including wives and mothers, need to keep track of their busy
lives, too.”
The phone makers and service providers increasingly see women as the path
to the entire household. According to Verizon Wireless, 71 percent of
women make the decision about their family’s wireless choices, including
phones and service plans (smartphones require data plans that can cost $30
or more a month).
As a result, smartphone makers are beginning to market specifically to
women. Research in Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario, has taken out ads
for its BlackBerry phones in Elle, Martha Stewart Living and Oprah
Winfrey’s magazine O.
Lina Caputo, a part-time teacher from Waterloo, said her husband, who runs
a networking company that is not connected to RIM, gave her a second-hand
BlackBerry a year ago so they could better manage their two sons’
schedules. “It was a nightmare with the four of us,” Caputo said, ticking
off a list of her sons’ after-school activities, including soccer, hockey
and swim practices. “My sons have about 10 hours of sports. It got to be
too much. It was confusing.”
Caputo said she and her husband regularly sync their calendars. She uses
the phone to send email to her husband when she gets home safely from a
snowy trip, and to keep in touch with close friends who regularly gather
at a local coffee shop. When six of them went to Las Vegas for a “girls’
weekend” in February, five of them brought their BlackBerrys so they could
keep track of one another and their children back home.
Caputo is no longer using her husband’s hand-me-downs. Last Mother’s Day
he bought her a new BlackBerry Pearl, one of the company’s best-selling
phones. “I don’t equate it to getting a vacuum or a blender,” she said,
when asked if she would have rather received flowers or chocolate.
“Besides, my girlfriend got a red one for Valentine’s Day.”
David Christopher, the marketing chief of AT&T’s wireless division, said
women are less likely to be wowed by fancy gadgets. Instead, as
smartphones have become sleeker, smaller and cheaper, they have become
more appealing to them.
“Now they are small enough to be in your purse or pocket,” Christopher
said. “Design does matter.”
Competitors have been working hard to catch up to Apple in the design
department. This month Sprint, a unit of Sprint Nextel, begins selling the
Instinct, a touch-screen device created by Samsung that shares many
features with the iPhone. And this summer RIM is adding the BlackBerry
Bold, which, like the iPhone, runs on a faster mobile network.
Nielsen’s research shows that women are more price sensitive than men and
half as likely to care about whether they have used a specific brand
before. Still, more traditional pitches do have their own appeal. RIM and
Verizon Wireless were successful last Valentine’s Day with promotional
events for a pink BlackBerry Pearl. Even then, picking the right hue was
tricky.
“We picked a shade of pink that fit in all kinds of settings – not too
flashy,” said Mark Guibert, vice president for corporate marketing at RIM.
“It was the only color that was purely driven by the female audience.
Years ago the market was much more focused solely on function. Now there
is more focus on lifestyle.”
It’s about time, said Milanesi, the research director. When she used to
attend mobile trade shows with a male colleague, she said, “they showed
him the cool phone and showed me the phone with a mirror.”
“Companies need to be careful to not think that to sell smartphones they
just need to be pink,” she said. “There are other things women want.”
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, understood this when his
engineers created the iPhone. Although it is not marketed specifically to
women, it has a clean design and multimedia features that many women say
they like, but that the BlackBerry lacks.
Kayne Lanahan, who lives in New York and is the owner of an online music
site, bought an iPhone last October after her dog wagged its tail and
tipped her Nokia cellphone into a cup of coffee. She didn’t even
contemplate a BlackBerry, stung by the image of the work-obsessed business
executives she knew when she worked at the News Corporation who furiously
emailed their bosses during meetings and at the table during late dinners.
That, and the fact that the device suited her technological lifestyle.
Lanahan owns an Apple MacBook Pro laptop and five iPods. She uses the
iPhone’s notepad function to track restaurant recommendations from
friends. She takes pictures at concerts, some of which show up on her
website.
Plenty of other women are finding that smartphones are much more than a
tether to the office. According to Nielsen, two-thirds of women with
smartphones say they use them primarily for pleasure rather than business.
The contrast with men is stark: just 42 percent of male smartphone owners
say the same.
But what is a woman to do if she wants all the features of an iPhone but
her corporate email works only with the BlackBerry? In the case of Andrea
Newman, a senior vice president for government affairs for Northwest
Airlines, she decided to get both.
“I have the BlackBerry for work and I bought the iPhone for fun,” she
said. “Using email on the iPhone is more difficult, which is why I use the
BlackBerry.”
Still, she liked her BlackBerry so much that she bought one for her
21-year-old daughter so they could communicate when she went to Europe.
And for her 12-year-old son she bought an iPod Touch (which can access the
internet over Wi-Fi but lacks phone capabilities) so they could email too.
Newman was asked which phone she would keep if she was stuck on a desert
island. “Ewww,” she said. “I never thought about it. Really? If I could
only have one?” Minutes passed as Newman weighed the pros and cons of
each. Finally, she said, “I guess if I wasn’t using the BlackBerry for
work, I’d have an iPhone.”
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