Trevor Floyd

Microsoft Corp.marketed i4i Inc.'s XML software to potential customers at the same time it planned to drive the small company out of business by infringing on its patent for the technology, according to court documents filed last week. Federal Judge Leonard Davis issued the injunction in August, barring Microsoft from selling Word 2003 and Word 2007 after Oct. 10. The decision came about three months after a Texas jury found that Microsoft had illegally used patented i4i technology to build XML features into its word processing software. In a brief submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, Toronto-based i4i argued that an injunction blocking Microsoft from selling current versions of Word should stand. The jury had awarded i4i $200 million, but Davis increased the amount to just under $300 million when he issued the injunction.

Earlier this month, the three-judge appeals panel decided to stay the injunction while it weighs Microsoft's appeal . I4i filed the patent infringement lawsuit in 2007. The new i4i brief charges that in 1991, "at the same time Microsoft was praising the improved functionality that i4i's product brought to Word, and touting i4i as a 'Microsoft Partner,' Microsoft was working behind i4i's back to make i4i's product obsolete." According to the brief, just days after a 1991 meeting in which Microsoft had sought to find ways to work with i4i, Microsoft executives discussed XML plans for Word that would eventually "make obsolete any competitive attempts by third parties to conquer that market." Microsoft must file its rebuttal to i4i's brief by Sept. 14; the appeals court is slated to hear oral arguments from the two sides on Sept. 23. Asked to comment on i4i's briefs, a Microsoft spokesman said, "We're looking forward to the hearing on the merits of our appeal." This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld 's print edition.

The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. "The goal of the program is national networking of all scientists," said Michael Conlon, interim director of biomedical informatics for the University of Florida, in a statement. "Scientists have problems finding each other.

But they don't always know people even at their own institutions." 12 cool ways to donate your PC's spare processing power Technologies used to support the effort will include VIVO, an open source discovery tool out of Cornell used to search for research information. We often find that researchers have pretty good networks with students or with scientists at institutions where they received their degree or worked before. It will also exploit concepts of the Semantic Web, Tim-Berners Lee's vision for an even more useful Web that enables better sharing of data. Of course this effort is by far not the only one looking to make it easier for scientists to find one another. In addition to the University of Florida and Cornell, also involved in the project are Indiana University, Weill Cornell Medical College, Washington University in St. Louis, the Scripps Research Institute and the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico.

One commercial venture, Epernicus, recently took the stage at the Web Innovators Group in Boston to talk about its effort to link life sciences researchers within companies with one another, and eventually across organizations. For more on network research news, follow our Alpha Doggs blog  Track Bob Brown on Twitter    

All right, Microsoft, 'fess up: How many takes did you need for your video of Samsung Intrepid's TellMe feature, which sends text messages and searches the Web by voice, to go smoothly? One that, given some of the things we've heard about Windows Mobile 6.5 in general, is particularly worthy of praise. Because honestly, it's a pretty impressive feature.

See, voice dialing has never really excited me. Using voice to replace typing, however, can be more convenient in more scenarios. It's useful for those occasions when your hands are busy, but anyone comfortable with their phone can generally get to a number easily with buttons. Here's how it works: The Sprint Intrepid has a dedicated button for the TellMe feature. Then, you can just dictate your message, and the phone will transcribe it.

Press it, and you can start a text message by saying "text" and the contact's name. You are, of course, able to check it before sending the message. I'm aware that the Google Mobile app for Blackberry, Android, and the iPhone also lets you search the Web by voice (and it's fairly accurate, too), but the difference with the Intrepid is hardware. The search function is even easier, as you can just say what you're looking for, and in one step the phone initiates a Bing search. Even on the iPhone, you've still got to slide out of the phone's lock system or get out of whatever app you're using, find the Google Mobile app, and then lift the phone to your ear to start a voice search. Indeed, I'd like to see other phone-makers (ahem, Apple) extend their phones' voice dialers to include these functions.

By fusing TellMe's voice features to a dedicated button on the hardware, Microsoft and Samsung make texting and searching much easier. Wait, did I just say other tech companies should copy Microsoft? I must be in the Bizarro world.

Startup Cloudera is introducing a set of applications on Friday for working with Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing and analysis. It allows an application workload to be spread over clusters of commodity hardware, and also includes a distributed file system. Cloudera, which provides Hadoop support to enterprises, developed the new browser-based application suite to simplify the process of using Hadoop, according to CEO Mike Olson. "It's an easy-to-use GUI suitable for people who don't have a lot of Hadoop expertise," Olson said. "The big Web properties with sophisticated and talented PhDs have been successful [with it], but ordinary IT shops ... have had a harder time." Hadoop is known for its behind-the-scenes role crunching oceans of information for Web operations like Facebook and Yahoo. But although the technology is "at its best" when data volumes get into multiple terabytes, Hadoop has relevance for a wide variety of companies, according to Olson. "It's increasingly easy to get your hands on that much data these days," especially from machine-generated information like Web logs, he said.

Cloudera and its partners are fine-tuning the suite, which is now in beta, before issuing a general release. The browser-based application set is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux, and includes four modules: a file browser; a tool for creating, executing and archiving jobs; a tool for monitoring the status of jobs; and a "cluster health dashboard" for keeping tabs on a cluster's performance. Hadoop needs many more tools like it, according to analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research. "If Hadoop is to consistently handle workloads as diverse and demanding as those of [massively parallel processing] relational DBMSes, it needs a lot of tools and infrastructure," Monash said via e-mail. "The three leaders in developing those are Yahoo, Cloudera, and Facebook. There's a long way to go."

As 2009 winds down, are you having trouble remembering exactly what you spent the past year doing? Anyway, if you'd like a bit of a jumpstart to the old memory, Apple's posted a feature called iTunes Rewind 2009 on the iTunes Store, recapping the best music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audiobooks, and apps of 2009. Music As you might expect, Michael Jackson gets prominent billing-the iTunes staff has picked him as the artist of the year. That happens to me sometimes: for example, it only started snowing on the east coast this week, and already I can't remember ever being warm.

Kings of Leon's Only By the Night took top album of the year, and best new artist went to the seemingly omni-present Lady GaGa. iTunes also doled out the same awards to each genre of music it sells in the store, so if you're itching for the best in hip-hop, jazz, or western, take a look. The list of top sales and rentals in the store was topped by-duh-Twilight, surprise second-placer Pineapple Express, and Quantum of Solace (Star Trek placed fifth, though it's only been out for a few weeks). TV shows Television, now, that's my bailiwick. There's also a list of the top-selling songs of 2009-and strangely enough, I own not a single one of them: "Boom Boom Pow" by the Black Eyed Peas took the number one spot, followed by Flo Rida's "Right Round," and Lady GaGa's "Poker Face". Movies The movies section features twelve top titles, including Pixar's Up, J.J. Abrams's Star Trek and indie titles like (500) Days of Summer and Sunshine Cleaning. iTunes pimped Fox's freshman comedy Glee for the best season in that category, with the top episode going to an installment of 30 Rock. The store also breaks out a number of other categories-I was pleased to see Dollhouse's unaired "Epitaph One" taking the top episode for sci-fi.

Drama saw an AMC sweep with sophomore series Breaking Bad taking best season and Mad Men's pivotal "The Gypsy and the Hobo" nabbing best episode. The top-selling season list was headed by Mad Men's third season, and followed by Lost's season five, and 24 season seven. Apps Meanwhile, in apps, iTunes made a distinction between the year's best and best-selling apps and games. Top-selling episodes were headlined by Family Guy, Gossip Girl, and Lost. Best game awards went to Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Real Racing, and Zenonia, among others, while top sellers included The Sims 3, The Oregon Trail, and the apparently Teflon Tiger Woods PGA Tour.

Free apps were apparently not recognized, however. Best apps, on the other hand, were headlined by titles like CBS Sports: Live College Games, Convertbot, and Leaf Trombone: World Stage, while the top-selling apps included MLB.com At Bat, QuickOffice Mobile Office Suite, and SlingPlayer Mobile. Audiobooks In the audiobooks category, the best of the year included fiction titles like The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley, Under the Dome by Stephen King, and Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked (which, incidentally, I just finished in dead-tree format and can't recommend enough). The non-fiction list was topped by Dave Cullen's Columbine, Thomas E. Ricks's The Gamble, and Tracy Morgan's I Am the New Black. Philosophy. On the best-seller side, William P. Young's The Shack amazingly edged out all four Twilight books slavering at its heels to take the fiction side, while Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture topped the non-fiction section, followed by Sun Tzu's unabridged The Art of War and The Ricky Gervais Guide to... Podcasts Finally, the best in podcasts was topped by The Adam Carolla Podcast for this year in audio, CNBC's The Suze Orman Show for this year in video, This American Life for "classic" audio, and The Onion News Network for "classic" video.

Except, of course, the actually important things. And that's it for Apple's 2009 year in review: everything you need to remember about this year compiled in a series of helpful lists of media. For that, we recommend shutting down your copy of iTunes, firing up your copy of iPhoto and browsing through the last year of photos for some real memories.

Among Microsoft's trials and tribulations in the mergers and acquisitions space, a Microsoft official on Tuesday evening cited fear of dealing with the company as an obstacle Microsoft has had to overcome. Brown made the comments at a Churchill Club event in Mountain View, Calif., during a panel discussion on mergers and acquisitions that also featured representatives from Cisco, Google, and Accel Partners. [ Microsoft and Yahoo recently agreed to partner in an effort to better compete with Google. | Stay ahead of the key tech business news with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: First Look newsletter. ] After the event, Brown said he was referring to a time when he started at the company years ago.  In general, people were just scared of Microsoft, he said. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 "[For a while] there was a fear of dealing with Microsoft and we've worked really hard to try to overcome that," said Marc Brown, managing director of corporate development at Microsoft. This fear existed with both the entrepreneurial and venture capital communities, said Brown. The three technology companies represented on the panel have made waves over the years with their acquisitions.  Cisco is known for numerous purchases, ranging from Scientific Atlanta to Grand Junction Networks; Microsoft has acquired companies such as Great Plains Software and attempted to buy Yahoo, while Google bought YouTube and others.

Panelists discussed their companies' mergers and acquisitions strategies. "The M&A and acquisitions strategy's pretty straightforward," Brown said. "We are a technology buyer. Panel moderator Steve Smith, senior managing partner with Arma Partners, noted Microsoft actually began with an acquisition. "[Founder Bill] Gates bought PC DOS for something under $100,000 and turned it into a thing called Windows and a company called Microsoft," Smith said. Most of our acquisitions are of earlier-stage companies."  Microsoft then leverages sales and distribution channels and processes to bring acquired technologies to the widest audience possible, he said. "What I would say is M&A  is not really the strategy. We start with the idea of what should be our growth strategy," said Carmel. M&A is the tool," said Charles Carmel, vice president of corporate development for Cisco. "The strategy is really about capturing innovation." Cisco realizes it does not have a monopoly on good ideas, he said. "We don't start with the idea of what company we should buy. When pondering an acquisition, Google looks at the caliber of leadership being brought over to the company from the acquired venture, along with factors including time to market and opening of new markets, said David Lawee, Google vice president of corporate development.

Panelists also cited increasing interest in potential overseas acquisitions in places such as China. "There's nothing to prevent us from being as aggressive internationally," Lawee said. The company's acquisition of Urchin resulted in the Google Analytics platform while Keyhole, also bought by Google, became Google Earth, Lawee said. But panelists declined to make any predictions when asked whether the European Union should approve the planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Tuesday's event was held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices. They also would not discuss what impact this acquisition would have on their own businesses. "Everybody's got their own twists and turns to their M&A activities," Carmel said. "No comment," Brown added. This story, "Fear of Microsoft subsides in mergers and acquisitions arena," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.

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Virtualization and cloud computing has taken off, despite strong concerns lingering over how companies can secure and manage those apps and data. Over the next year, Novell plans to release eight new products or upgrades to aid in what it calls "intelligent workload management." The upcoming Novell Identity Manager 4 will add the new ability for IT managers embed identity management and other security features into both Web-hosted and virtualized apps, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said in an interview last week. Novell Inc. says it can help companies with both sides of the equation, accelerating the creation of virtualized and cloud apps with built-in security.

Novell Identity Manager 4 will arrive by the middle of next year. These will work closely with a Novell's Suse Appliance Toolkit, which is due in the first quarter next year. That will work closely with Novell Cloud Security Service, also due in 2010, in order to extend identity and security policies onto apps and data hosted in the cloud. The Toolkit helps ISVs and large enterprises quickly build and deploy virtualized appliances, i.e. self-contained apps prepackaged with a thin operating system layer that can be moved from server to cloud-based server without crash or conflict. The most popular is a DIY version of the Chrome OS built with Google 's browser running on Novell's OpenSUSE Linux.

Hovsepian said customers are already starting to use Novell's existing generation of virtual appliance building tools in a major way. "In the last three months, we've had 40,000 registered users come into our system and build 100,000 different virtualized appliances and workloads," Hovsepian said. Hovsepian said that virtual appliance has been downloaded 750,000 times. Gerry Gebel, an analyst with the Burton Group, agreed, saying that other leading players in the identity management and security space, including CA Inc., IBM Corp. and Oracle Inc., haven't laid out a comprehensive roadmap for virtualized and hosted management. "This is pretty significant," he said. "It's the kind of capability that more advanced organizations with large virtual environments are going to need, as they continually stop, start, reactivate and archive workloads." Companies who push forward on virtualization or cloud computing, or let their employees and departments do so, without setting up an identity management and security framework, are putting themselves in "real danger," Gebel said. "You can't dismiss security and identity management just because the computing model is changing. Novell is also upgrading its Platespin virtual management product so that users can use it as their single console for managing all of these workloads, whether they are run virtually or hosted in the cloud, Hovsepian said. "We are way ahead of everyone else," he said. It's no excuse," he said. Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc., said it will be a challenge for Novell to make all of its tools work together elegantly. "A lot of moving parts and the trick is to get everything glued together in a coherent way," Haff said. "I also don't see it as fundamentally different from what other vendors are doing, whether it is VMware, IBM, Citrix, or Microsoft ."

Gebel said Novell has the technical goods to back up its marketing push, citing a demonstration of the beta for Novell Identity Manager 4, which he said was "pretty impressive." "The integration with the virtualization and cloud workloads looked like it was working well," he said.