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While some had expected Google to come out with an iPhone-killing G-Phone, the company’s announcement in November of the Android mobile platform is something far more sweeping, and it has ramifications for IT.

To show that Android is no pipe dream, Google trotted out scores of partners in the initiative, including handset vendors, carriers and software providers. What’s most interesting is that the Linux-based platform will be open source (under the Apache license) and free of charge.

So, why is Google doing this? It aspires to get its applications into the mobile sphere, but right now there’s just too much platform fragmentation. Even Java on one handset is not like Java on another. Lacking a single, strong platform to build on, Google wants to create one. That’s why it isn’t coming out with its own hardware or tying Android to one carrier.

The cost of Android (there is none!) is going to make it attractive to both handset vendors and carriers. And there are no strings attached other than a very important agreement not to fragment the platform. Google will offer a suite of mobile applications for Android, but it won’t require that the apps be used. In theory, you could see Android handsets with Yahoo Mail and Live Search, but no Google services at all.

If Google delivers on its vision, the impact to consumers could be huge. The mass market is finally embracing more functionality in mobile devices, but at the same time, carriers and handset vendors are looking to cut costs. Android might bridge that gap. And Google has the corporate heft to prevent the market from fragmenting, so it could succeed where other Linux implementations have failed.

Is Google making a smart move? To answer that, consider a bit of alternative history. Suppose that Linux had been available at the time that Microsoft came out with Windows NT. Now suppose that IBM decided to offer Linux for free to PC vendors along with a core suite of applications. How different would the PC business be today? Oh, and there are a lot more phones out there than there are PCs.

But, of course, business users are not consumers, and corporate IT will have a different take on Android. Google will need to articulate why business users should embrace this platform. At the moment, a lot is missing for business deployment. There was no announcement that Android would support Exchange synchronization, be compatible with Office applications or allow central device management. Google’s mobile competitors already have solutions for these things that work well. Enterprise developers will want to keep an eye on Android, but it’s not something they’ll embrace in the short term.

Still, IT cannot ignore last year’s big developments in the mobile market. A year ago, neither Google nor Apple was a player, and today they are two of the most relevant and talked-about companies in the mobile world. Things are moving fast, and IT has to pay attention as the combatants fire one salvo after another.

Source: Computerworld

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As recently as three years ago, if you told a top game industry executive that your favorite genre was online PC games, you would almost invariably provoke a reaction akin to telling a television mogul that your favorite shows explain the migration patterns of obscure African fauna. In other words, you would get the verbal equivalent of a condescending pat on the head — “Oh, that’s nice” — while the executive looked around for someone with something more relevant to say.

And if you had dared suggest that an online fantasy game made by some guys in Orange County, Calif., would become a worldwide phenomenon by attracting more players in China than in the United States, you would have been laughed out of the room.

After all, it was not that long ago that cooperative online games were an afterthought in much of the business, an often-derided pimple on the behemoth that was the industry’s main focus: consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2 and the original Microsoft Xbox. The conventional wisdom was that only hard-core nerds would play online and that the big money was in pumping out sequel after sequel of barely distinguishable console sports games and flashy shoot-’em-up fare.

How times change, and for the better. Sunday’s multibillion-dollar mega-merger between Activision and the games unit of Vivendi was perhaps the most compelling reflection yet of how swiftly video games have evolved in the last few years, not just as a business but also as a force on the global cultural and artistic landscape.

That is because the tail wagging the dog in this deal is the Vivendi subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, one of the best-known game studios and the creator of World of Warcraft, the paradigm-busting online game that now has more than nine million paying subscribers worldwide. In terms of the studio’s importance to the deal, all you really need to know is that Blizzard, based in Irvine, Calif., is getting its name on the door of the new company — Activision Blizzard — while the erstwhile parent, Vivendi, is not. (Vivendi will, however, own a majority of the new company.)

But there is something of much broader significance happening here than just another Wall Street-pleasing consolidation.

Until recently, it seemed that the only way the game industry knew how to grow was to keep drilling deeper into its core demographic of tech-savvy young men who had few interests beyond cleavage, explosions and touchdowns. And that vein was just about tapped out: over the last few years, the growth of industry bellwethers like Electronic Arts has slowed to a crawl.

But then, over three successive autumns, true visionaries demonstrated a new way to conceive of video games — not merely as a niche pastime for geeks but as the next mainstream entertainment medium, one that could appeal to women, families, older people and all the other demographic groups the industry had forgotten about.

First, in 2004, came World of Warcraft, which far surpassed even its creators’ expectations as it brought in millions of casual players in North America and became a cultural sensation in China and South Korea.

Then, in 2005, a small developer called Harmonix and an obscure publisher known as RedOctane released the first Guitar Hero game. The concept of playing a plastic guitar in time with classic rock tunes made no sense to the sequelitis-afflicted major publishers. That is, until Guitar Hero starting selling millions of units by appealing to folks who had no interest in gunning down virtual aliens (Halo) or beating up virtual prostitutes (Grand Theft Auto). Guitar Hero’s success prompted Activision, which had previously depended on more conventional games like the Tony Hawk skateboarding series, to acquire RedOctane in 2006.

And then last year, Nintendo, one of the pillars of the industry, demonstrated that it, too, had moved past the tired model of marketing only to the caffeine-laced and reflex-endowed. The company’s Wii console has outsold more powerful new machines from Microsoft and Sony because its offerings rely not on technical wizardry but on creative play and an intuitive, easy-to-use control system: just pick up and wave.

The success of World of Warcraft, the Wii and the Guitar Hero series are all crucial elements of the same story: how video games have begun to climb out of the cultural basement and move into the mainstream living room. Ultimately, that is what the Activision-Vivendi-Blizzard deal is about.

“What’s happening, if you look at World of Warcraft or the evolution of the physical interface with something like the Wii and Guitar Hero, is that they are all allowing gaming to become more social and more mainstream than it was,” Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision, said in a telephone interview Monday. (Mr. Kotick is to remain chief executive of the new Activision Blizzard.) “They are all catalysts of appealing to a much broader population, not just the 16 to 35-year-old guy who can’t get a date on a Saturday night.”

“I take a step back and I look at World of Warcraft not so much as a game but as game meets social networking,” Mr. Kotick added. “It has as much in common with Yahoo message boards or MySpace or Facebook as anything else, and it’s very powerful once you start thinking of games in that way.”

Michael Morhaime, a founder of Blizzard and the studio’s chief executive, is expected to stay in that job after the deal is competed, so the studio’s fans have little reason to fear that the vaunted “Blizzard magic” will dissipate any time soon.

“There is definitely a trend of broadening the idea of who a gamer is,” Mr. Morhaime said in a telephone interview yesterday. “Activision and Blizzard both believe that we’re in an expanding market where we can reach more people across multiple platforms, geographies and age groups. Both of our companies are positioned very well to take advantage of those trends to keep lowering the barriers to get more people into gaming.”

Source: New York Times

SANTA CLARA, Calif. NYT — Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap — for spam, not mice — if he has enough time to finish his project.

An M.I.T.-trained engineer, Mr. Kirsch was frustrated by the quality of the first computer mice in 1982, so he set out to improve them by incorporating an optical sensor.

Since then he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services. He has made forays into word processing document design, accelerating the Web, and in 1997 Infoseek, his search engine company, was the third ranking company in Web search. In many ways Mr. Kirsch, who is 50 years old, has come to exemplify what distinguishes Silicon Valley — a blend of engineering skills with persistent entrepreneurship.

Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million, a success that has permitted him and his wife to become significant philanthropists in Silicon Valley by contributing more than $75 million to the United Way campaign and other causes through his foundation.

Recently he has taken on the challenge of e-mail spam. This year he founded Abaca, a company with a new approach in the crowded market for stopping junk electronic mail.

Abaca claims that it can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee. According to the result of an independent survey last February by Opus One, a computer industry consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., that would be significantly better than the results of six leading spam blockers.

Abaca has taken on a new urgency for Mr. Kirsch — during the summer, he was discovered to have a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, that is found in about 1,500 Americans every year and is considered incurable, although it can be managed beyond the five- to seven-year longevity that new patients are usually told to expect.

So far he has shown no effects from the disease, and he said he is intent on applying his engineer’s approach to the problem.

“This is harder on my wife than it is on me,” he said during a recent interview. “I just look at it as a problem. Here’s a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don’t get to solve any more problems.”

Mr. Kirsch is not the first prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to battle cancer. Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel, has survived prostate cancer. In May 1996 Mr. Grove wrote about his battle with the disease in intimate detail in a Fortune magazine cover story. More recently Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, also underwent an operation and has survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

As he has in confronting his earlier challenges, Mr. Kirsch outlined his situation and what he is doing to try to solve it in great detail on his Web home page. His approach to surviving is outlined in painstaking detail. However, it is listed as the third of his current projects, after “Eliminating spam,” and “Who would make the best president?”

In his description, he writes: “I have enough time to change the outcome and I’m going to try to do that. This is my story.”

His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is “Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years.” He writes, “My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.”

Once a registered Republican, Mr. Kirsch has moved closer to Democratic candidates and was a significant backer of Al Gore, in particular because of his environmental stance.

“He’s done a lot of fund-raising and he’s really been willing to put himself out there,” said John Shoch, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “He says what he believes in and supports political causes, and he’s not bashful about getting into the fray.”

The most visible change that he has made as a result of his cancer is the recent decision to change the financing direction of the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation, which until late last month had focused on a wide range of community philanthropic goals.

At the end of October, however, the foundation announced that in the future it would focus its financing on research associated with his cancer, which because of its rare nature receives almost no federal money.

For the moment, between weekly visits to the Stanford Medical Center, Mr. Kirsch is continuing to put much of his time into persuading the world that he has stumbled on a better way to block spam.

He has been thinking about the spam problem for a number of years and has several patents covering other approaches, but Mr. Kirsch said he had hit on the idea underlying Abaca — profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender — quite by accident.

“We were sitting around thinking of ways to obfuscate the description about how our system worked so the spammers would be misdirected,” he said. “So I came up with receiver reputation as something that might sound plausible. Then as I thought about it more and more, the more sense it made to me.”

The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.

Unlike most of its competitors, he said, Abaca’s technology does not require a training period, is language independent and is faster than many competitors because it does not scan the entire contents of a message to determine whether it is spam.

Mr. Kirsch has invested about $5 million in developing his idea, and he said he expects Abaca to reach profitability by the middle of next year.

“I have to admit it sounds innovative and novel,” said Sunil Paul, the founder of Brightmail, one of the leading providers of antispam technology, which was sold to Symantec in 1997 for $370 million.

At the same time Mr. Paul is dubious about the ability of a stand-alone antispam company in today’s computer security market. “Remember Bill Gate’s promise to rid the Internet of spam in a few years?” he said. “That was over seven years ago. Once any of these solutions scale up, though, thousands of other clever, smart people start to work on how to defeat the system.”

Mr. Kirsch insists that Abaca is unlikely to be caught soon. “Most people like me get 99.8 percent or so with the current volume of users,” he said, referring to the percentage of good e-mail he now sees using his system. “Our performance gets better as we add more users; our competitors already have scale, and we are way ahead even with just 20,000 users. When we get to scale, our performance should be nearly 100 times better than our closest competitor.”

In February, Opus One tested six antispam products on a stream of 10,000 messages during a 10-day period. Spam catch rates ranged from a high of 97.36 percent to a low of 74.10 percent. “At 99.8 percent you miss two out of 1000,” said Mr. Kirsch. “At 95 percent you miss 50 out of 1,000. So other systems give you 25 times as much spam. Who wants that? Nobody we know.”

Opus One has not yet tested the Abaca system. However, the testing group has been briefed by a representative of Abaca. “Generally, I am very skeptical of antispam techniques that get put forth with the pseudo-math that you hear from Abaca,” said Joel M. Snyder, a senior partner with Opus One. “In their case, however, the math has a face validity that’s unusual in this business. The only obvious issue with their system is that it really requires a lot of participants in order to work.”

Source: New York Times

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), the update scheduled to release next year, runs Microsoft Corp.’s Office suite 10% faster than XP SP2, a performance testing software developer reported Friday.

Devil Mountain Software, which earlier in the week claimed Windows Vista SP1 was no faster than the original, repeated some of the same tests on the release candidate of Windows XP SP3, the service pack recently issued to about 15,000 testers.

“We were pleasantly surprised to discover that Windows XP SP3 delivers a measurable performance boost to this aging desktop OS,” said Craig Barth, Devil Mountain’s chief technology officer, in a post to a company blog Friday.

Devil Mountain ran its OfficeBench suite of performance benchmarks on a laptop equipped with Office 2007, Microsoft’s latest application suite. The notebook — the same unit used in the Vista/Vista SP1 tests earlier — featured a 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 1GB of memory. The results reported a 10% speed increase under XP SP3 when compared to SP2, the service pack released in 2004.

“Since SP3 was supposed to be mostly a bug-fix/patch consolidation release, the unexpected speed boost comes as a nice bonus,” Barth said. “In fact, XP SP3 is shaping up to be a ‘must-have’ update for the majority of users who are still running Redmond’s not-so-latest and greatest desktop OS.”

According to the Office performance benchmarks, Windows XP SP3 is also considerably faster than Vista SP1. “None of this bodes well for Vista, which is now more than two times slower than the most current builds of its older sibling,” said Barth.

While Microsoft was not available for comment over the weekend about XP’s performance, it defended Vista SP1 after Devil Mountain’s first round of tests. “We appreciate the excitement to evaluate Windows Vista SP1 as soon as possible. However, the service pack is still in the development phase and will undergo several changes before being released,” a spokeswoman said in an e-mail.

Microsoft has at times struggled to wean users from the six-year-old Windows XP and get them to migrate to Vista. During 2007, for example, it made several XP concessions, including adding five years to the support lifespan of the Home edition and extending OEM and retail sales of XP through June 2008, as it recognized that customers wanted to hold on to the older OS.

Recently, Forrester Research said that XP remained Vista’s biggest rival, and cited survey data that showed American and European businesses would delay Vista deployment, in part because of application incompatibility issues with the new OS. “That’s causing a lot of XP shops to take a wait-and-see approach to Vista,” said Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray two weeks ago.