Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

In a court filing that seriously jeopardizes a proposed settlement of the e-book publishing dispute between Google and members of the Authors Guild and other publishing groups, the US Dept. of Justice has raised serious allegations that the settlement as it stands now may violate the country’s antitrust law. The keyword here is “may,” as that final determination “may” be up to a judge.

The main problem is this: Google would like to be able to electronically publish a wide variety of titles, including out-of-print works whose publishers or former rights holders may not even exist anymore. The keyword here is still “may.” The settlement as proposed is clearly between those publishers that do exist and Google; but can Google necessarily claim the right to unilaterally assume that all those who didn’t respond, aren’t necessarily present?

Silence has never implied consent before, and this time is no exception, claim DOJ attorneys in a court filing last Friday. What’s more, Google may not have the exclusive right to claim just what it has the exclusive right to, if no one else claims it first.

“The rights conferred are so amorphous and malleable,” the attorneys write, “that it is difficult to see how any class representative could adequately represent the interests of all owners of out-of-print works (including orphan works). The parties appear willing to address this problem by limiting the future rights that may be controlled by the Registry and Google.”

The “Registry” to which the attorneys refer is an independent database of out-of-print titles, to be maintained and operated by an as-yet-undetermined source separate from Google. The government officially supports this aspect of the settlement, at least as an ideal. But since print publishing through the centuries hasn’t used such registries historically (imagine a comprehensive list of everything we don’t know about), it’s essentially impossible to determine for fact, the attorneys argue, which works are officially “orphans.” “One goal of the settlement — making large numbers of copyrighted works available to the public in electronic form while providing compensation to authors and publishers — is a public benefit that, to date, has not come to pass due to certain realities of the copyright system, including, for example, the fact that copyright owners are not required to formally register or otherwise assert their ownership,” writes the DOJ.

It’s all a bit of a conundrum, but the results are plain and simple, they argue: For the government to agree to the settlement, it would need to ask all parties whether it’s acceptable; and “all parties” in this instance would imply that somebody, somewhere, represents the interests of rights holders for orphan books. That’s not exactly like saying that dead people need to be alive to have their cases heard; there are matters of something called “estates.” Who knows just what types of injuries or infringements these estates would claim, if they could?

No one, says the government, citing a Supreme Court case involving a class-action settlement proposal that was supposed to benefit individuals who may have been exposed to asbestos at work, but who hadn’t filed claims yet because they hadn’t shown symptoms yet. On the surface, it would be nice to save them some money and settle on their behalf for the sake of their future; on the other, you can’t make up the amount of that settlement out of thin air.

In such cases, the attorneys wrote, “the courts have cast doubt on the circumstances in which class representatives could adequately represent absent class members with respect to as-yet uncertain injuries or rights that were far removed from the facts underlying the complaint.”

And what constitutes a “symptom” in the case of rights holders of orphaned works who may not know their rights today, but discover them in the future after Google has already scanned and published their books online? The settlement as proposed guarantees the existing rights holders the right to prohibit Google from scanning and publishing their works. That’s a little different than setting aside some cash; in this case, an orphaned works claimant can’t exactly prohibit Google from putting on the Internet something that’s already there.

The government’s other problem with the proposed settlement is that it would enable Google to negotiate with the existing rights holders for a fair price. Depending on how the market is structured at the time, that could constitute collusion under existing anti-trust laws, which would prefer that rights holders name their prices and that Google (and every other e-publisher in the market) accept them at face value. On the other hand, should Google wish to provide e-books at a discount, the settlement would have Google negotiate with rights holders to do this — which the DOJ says is unfair to Google. A physical book retailer has the right to offer discounts without making deals with publishers; Google should have that same right, says the DOJ.

So the settlement as proposed may be contrary to current antitrust laws, but in so many contrary respects to one another as to not favor one side or the other as the “trust” in this situation. No matter: The DOJ still recommends that US District Court reject the settlement.

Though Dell has extended its brand to consumer electronics of all sorts, the company’s latest drive is straight into enterprise services, a segment of the IT market which has helped HP retain a competitive edge on Dell in hardware sales.

Today, Dell announced it will be acquiring Perot Systems in a $3.9 billion all-cash transaction expected to be completed in January.

“We’ve really been transforming Dell in a number of ways,” CEO Michael Dell told CNBC this morning. “One of the ways we’re doing that is by becoming a solutions integrator, providing the best value solutions to help companies run a very efficient enterprise architecture…and the addition of the Perot Systems team here will really allow us to extend that to a much broader set of customers.”

Indeed, in the last year and a half, Dell has grown its IT services portfolio by acquiring IP Storage Area Network company EqualLogic, and then later enterprise e-mail service company MessageOne. This morning, Michael Dell said the market for services like those from EqualLogic has grown more than four times in just over a year.

With the addition of Perot Systems, Dell is expanding its IT consulting business; and the company today said this acquisition will let Dell offer a broader range of IT services and solutions by optimizing how they’re delivered, extend Perot Systems’ capabilities and customer segments, and supply Dell systems to more Perot customers.

This is important to note because nearly 80% of Dell’s revenue comes from enterprise hardware sales; and the company will need a diversified revenue stream to outgrow chief competitor HP.

HP, currently the world’s leading computer manufacturer, made a similar acquisition last year when it picked up EDS for $13 billion. EDS was founded in 1962 by none other than H. Ross Perot, who 26 years later founded Perot systems in the very same town of Plano, Texas.

If the European Commission’s antitrust case against Intel seemed completely clear and convincing up to now, this morning’s publication of its formal provisional explanation of its charges (PDF available here) — actually delivered last May 13 but only made public today — muddies the waters somewhat. For while there is indeed some smoke, and certain excerpts would imply the existence of a gun from which the smoke emanated, the presence of far more smoke from various other sources not only un-resolves some questions, but adds some new ones to the mix.

Most surprising of all is the EC’s explanation of rebates Intel allegedly provided to Dell Computer in exchange for limited exclusivity, the existence of which has actually not been denied. A thorough read of the evidence explained by the Commission reveals that the rebate program was apparently conceived by Dell, not Intel. And although e-mails between redacted Dell executives did warn of possible retributions by Intel had their deal not been kept as promised, those same e-mails indicate Dell had other reasons of their own to pursue exclusivity.

Though Dell had originally sold PCs with Intel CPUs exclusively since its founding, it started considering adopting some AMD chips as far back as 2002, according to Dell evidence cited by the EC. During this time, Intel typically sold CPUs to its OEM customers for a category of prices it called “Customer Authorized Price” — essentially a way of dressing up its typical prices to look as though customers deserved and earned them. Still, big customers negotiated discounts; and at the time, Dell was the biggest one. Intel admitted that its biggest customers tended to negotiate “discounts” (why wouldn’t they?); though some internal documents apparently referred to the earliest proposed forms of these discounts as “rebates.”

When Dell and Intel did settle on a name for these discounts, they were called the Dell Meet Competition Program (“meet-comp,” or MCP). Essentially, it enabled Dell to execute certain flexible pricing terms that it could specify, provided that it met certain sales goals. Although the goals themselves were redacted from the EC’s published document, it appears Dell was the one specifying what the goals were, at least in initial negotiations.

“Intel specifies that the [name of program redacted] MCP program was designed ‘to enable Dell to respond to unexpected marketplace conditions with enhanced flexibility,’” cites the EC’s provisional statement, quoting evidence provided by Intel. A separate citation from Dell’s evidence is described thus: “Dell negotiated with Intel that a small portion of the MCP discount could vary based on Dell’s success in meeting specific criteria negotiated on a quarterly basis.”

Here, Dell referred to the benefits it received from Intel as “discounts;” but from time to time in its own citations, it referred to them interchangeably as “rebates.”

As Dell began seriously examining including AMD processors in its product mixes, beginning with an evaluation of its server processors in December 2002, its accountants considered the potential future impact of introducing AMD into its product line. According to Dell evidence cited by the EC, it was during a private Dell executives’ presentation that month that the effects of a hypothetical Intel retaliation were first considered. Executives whose names were redacted from the public EC document considered Dell data suggesting that Intel could retaliate against a Dell pick-up of AMD-based equipment by providing competitive discounts, or rebates, to competitors (their names were also redacted). Those discounts could be executed by Intel in the interest of maintaining the balance of its market share.

The following February, another internal Dell presentation made the point, according to Dell evidence, that “Retaliatory [redacted] could be severe and prolonged with impact to all LOBs [Lines of Business].” And the next month, another: “Anticipated Intel response wipes out all potential [redacted] upside from going with AMD.”

These collective presentations apparently drove home their point to a Dell senior executive, whose name here was also removed. In an analysis memo directed toward other senior executives, this person stated, “Bottom line is that I don’t see how we make AMD a positive for Dell. The end game is inevitable, the cost to support AMD is high, […], and the net loss of MCP will far outweigh any gain we get by doing a limited toe-dip with a couple of server platforms.”

Most noteworthy about this citation is the phrase “the cost to support AMD is high,” which seems to come out of the blue. If Dell also estimated the cost to upgrade and improve its customer support services for the addition of AMD-based processors to the line (a reasonable assumption), the EC did not provide any evidence of it.

Next: Can Intel be held responsible for Dell’s assumptions?

The “Keep It Simple, Stupid” rule works in business as well as in everyday life, primarily because it forces us to focus on the one or two basic issues we need to make the right decision. My kindergarten teacher shortened it to “KISS,” perhaps in the interest of simplicity. When you’re driving a car: Know where you are, know where you’re going. Leader of the free world: Keep your hands clean, know what you’re aiming at. Reprogramming your iPod/in-vehicle audio system interface: Pull over, let the semi pass you.

More data, please

The computer market never got the memo — or if it did, maybe no one could make sense of it. This is a good thing, though, because when you’re investing in a technology, more data is always preferable to less. Whatever parameters you’re measuring — processor architectures and speeds, types of memory, hard drive spin velocities and capacities, or display resolutions and refresh rates — the more you know about what’s going on under the hood, the more likely you are to make a sensible buying decision that you can live and work with.

Now all of a sudden, AMD wants to dumb this process down because some people find it too confusing. And that scares me more than a little. The company’s just-announced Vision program aims to replace the information-stuffed process of buying a computer with one based on three categories: Vision, Vision Premium, and Vision Ultimate, each of which corresponds to a particular end user need. Plain old Vision machines define the low end, and will do the trick for Web browsers and basic game players. Vision Premium might be suitable for gamers interested in something more challenging than Solitaire or Sudoku, as well as HD video. Vision Ultimate addresses the most demanding gamers and content creators. Early next year, Vision Black-based machines that target high-end users will join the party.

There’s an eerie resemblance here to “Vista Premium” and “Vista Ultimate,” but I suppose AMD didn’t get that memo, either.

A slightly blurred vision

After a generation of PC marketing being driven by and targeted at technically inclined folks who used the often arcane parameters of hardware capability to measure bottom line performance and calculate value propositions, my mother-in-law is now calling the shots. If AMD’s strategy plays out, consumers who don’t understand the difference between level 2 and level 3 cache will now find it easier to choose the right solution.

I get that. I’ve seen my mother-in-law’s eyes glaze over when I try to explain the benefits of 7,200 RPM drives versus 5,400 RPM ones. She doesn’t much care that a quad-core processor lets her edit photos and video more smoothly than a dual-core one, and she wishes I’d stop trying to get her to upgrade her webcam from her current, lame VGA device that washes out in the low light of her home office to an HD-capable one that doesn’t make her and my father-in-law look like stop action ghosts. While I quote numbers to illustrate the benefits, she waits for Wal-Mart to drop the price on a cheap machine she’d like to install in the kitchen.

What about the rest of us?

So she’ll appreciate AMD’s gesture. It’s the rest of the world I’m worried about. Taken to its ultimate extreme, simplified computers will make it virtually impossible to make real, side-by-side comparisons. Want to know if $699 is too much? Tough. No longer will savvy customers be able to laugh off the know-it-all salesperson’s claim that no one else can match their price. How can you appreciate a product’s capabilities when its basic guts are deliberately hidden from view? Simplified marketing may make life easier for the uninitiated, but does the message have to be so diluted that folks with more than a little knowledge can’t dig a little bit deeper on their own?

When otherwise educated customers are forced to buy based on vague notions of role- or task-matched performance, the entire process begins to look suspiciously like the one from the most recent silent auction at my children’s school. In amongst the various items up for bids — the gift certificates, logoed clothing, and small electronics — was an envelope with a single word printed neatly across the seal: “Surprise.” Based on similar experiences from past years, there was an even chance that the envelope contained a booby prize, such as a yellowed old bumper sticker or a collection of discarded scripts from last year’s school play. Well-meaning parents, hoping this was a non-booby-prize year, nevertheless bid the mystery envelope up to $50 before the night ended, and ended up with a $25 gift certificate at a local coffee shop for their donation.

I’d hardly expect someone laying down hundreds or thousands of dollars at a profit-seeking technology store would be as understanding as these involved parents were. If the recession has taught us anything, it’s the value of a dollar. Computers are not sold in sealed envelopes, and customers aren’t supposed to guess, even vaguely, at what might be inside.

A better kind of simple

Intel already gets the message. While it arguably kicked off the simplification parade with the Centrino brand, and has been gradually moving away from feeds and speeds ever since, shoppers who understand GHz and Gbps can still pull out info sheets at the store and geek out to their heart’s content. To its credit, Intel recognizes that today’s PC buyers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and levels of knowledge. And a one-size-fits-all, universally-simplified marketing strategy fails to give the tech-savvy buyer sufficient background to make the right decision.

I appreciate why AMD is going simple. Data released last week by iSuppli shows its market share down by 1.4% to 11.5%, while Intel’s is up by 1.5% to 80.6% — its highest since 2005. Companies in decline need to do radical things to change their fortunes. But ticking off the large percentage of the market that still has a clue isn’t a great way to start. Even my kindergarten teacher would agree.

Carmi Levy is a Canadian-based independent technology analyst and journalist still trying to live down his past life leading help desks and managing projects for large financial services organizations. He comments extensively in a wide range of media, and works closely with clients to help them leverage technology and social media tools and processes to drive their business.

The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned “lifecasting” service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.

According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:

• “Working”
• “Home”
• “Work
• “Lunch”
• “Sleeping”

Extremely mundane stuff, not exactly the kind of content that would attract tons of new users to the service.

Your first question might be: Why did they study Jaiku and not Twitter, a perceptibly larger service capable of a much larger data set? One word: Finnish. Since the study was conducted in Helsinki, the same city where Jaiku was founded, the fit is natural.

The userbase of Jaiku has not been publicly disclosed, but the site’s traffic versus Twitter’s is pitiful at best. Compete.com says that Twitter had 23.5 million unique visitors during the month of August while Jaiku had only 36,610.

Furthermore, the Institute’s study found that most of the traffic on Google’s version of Twitter is driven by “a small supercore of the Jaiku population,” which receives over 50% of the site’s comments.

The question remains: Why did Google even buy Jaiku? In 2007, the MIT Technology Review took the Jaiku purchase as a signal of the eventual “Google Phone”. However, the microblog was not ported over to an Android app at the operating system’s launch, and still hasn’t been.

Instead, Google moved Jaiku to its hosted development environment Google App Engine and open-sourced its development. The service’s SMS integration was discontinued in June in the US, and was replaced with a mobile Web site.

While even Twitter, the most successful microblogging service by a country mile, suffered from poor engagement with new users, Jaiku managed to earn the reputation for being even less user friendly.

Now it’s got a study backed by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology that says its content is boring.

It’s not uncommon for bloggers and journalists to get hung up on the present. For Apple, there’s big noise about soaring stock price, even considering economic recession, and increasing demand for iPhone. But the past defines the present. For Apple, products or services launched in a single calendar year — and the consistent execution that followed — define current successes, including iPhone.

I contend that next to 1984, when Apple launched Macintosh, 2001 was the most important year in the company’s history.

Apple is on a remarkable role that even its strongest critics cannot reasonably deny. The stock closed at $184.02 today — about a buck off its 52-week high. Apple’s market capitalization is $164.85 billion, which is — get this — higher than Google, which valuation is $157.34 billion.

Apple’s brand is sizzingly hot, with iPhone being important factor. But none of this present would be anything if not for decisions made in the past. So, please, enter the Wayback machine for a trip to 2001:

• In January 2001, Apple unveiled the iTunes music player
• In March, Apple launched troubled Mac OS X 10.0 and relaunched as 10.1 in September
• In May, the company opened Apple Store, in two locations — California and Virginia
• In October, the first iPod debuted

At the time, Apple Store, iPod, iTunes and Mac OS X seemed innocuous launches, but they would later be the four pillars raising Apple’s brand from obscurity to mass popularity. In June 2002, Apple’s “Switchers” marketing campaign kicked off the first of many successful campaigns, including “Get a Mac,” supporting Apple’s “2001 Four.”

All other Apple products that followed depend in some way on the 2001 Four:

• If not iTunes and Mac OS X, no iLife
• If not iTunes and iPod, no iTunes Music Store
• If not iPod, iTunes and Mac OS X, no iPhone
• If not Mac OS X, no iMac, MacBook/Mac Pro
• If not iTunes and Mac OS X, no Apple TV
• If not Apple Store, none of the above

Some people will call my approach simplistic, wondering why I ignore, say, iMovie, which also contributed to iLife. Yes, but music and photos proved more important. That last bullet in the list is perhaps the most important and controversial assertion. I don’t believe that Apple could have achieved its current level of success without the retail stores. Apple Store is the supporting pillar.

The first Apple Store opened in McLean, Va., in May 2001. I was there for the official news media unveiling and launch days later. Timing struck most analysts I interviewed as strange: Gateway was looking to get out of retail just as Apple wanted in. But the stores increased exposure to Apple’s brand and provided a place to foster mac community and lifestyle, around digital activities like listening to music and watching, making or sharing videos.

In 2000, Apple CEO Steve Jobs started consistently talking about the Mac as digital lifestyle hub. But the company also later extended the Apple lifestyle to Windows PCs, through AirPort Extreme, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, iTunes Music Store, MobileMe and Time Capsule. Most of these products are sold through Apple Store.

But that’s not to diminish the importance of the other three. The 2001 Four all contribute to the Apple lifestyle, culminating in iPhone, which adds a mobile lifestyle component, extending from the others but more connected through the applications and the Web.

The question now: What next? The past first:

• In 2002, Apple launches iLife and the aforementioned Switchers marketing campaign
• In 2003, iTunes Music Store opens
• In 2004, iLife `04 launches with great marketing
• In 2005, iPod nano makes stunning debut
• In 2006, first Intel-based Macs ship; “Get a Mac” ads air
• In 2007, iPhone launches
• In 2008, App Store opens; unibody Mac laptops ship
• In 2009, Apple products defy economic recession’s gravity

Granted, the last bullet isn’t a product or service launch, but it’s the rightful culmination of all the others. Is there another year important to Apple’s success? Absolutely. But not just one:

• 2006, for the move to Intel processors
• 2007, for the launch of iPhone
• 2008, for App Store’s debut

The move to Intel processor opened the Mac sales spigot. Launch of iPhone and, more importantly, the supporting App Store opened up a new mobile platform. But none of this would really have been possible if not for the 2001 Four.

Before I move onto the topic of Microsoft’s most important year, I’d like to ask Betanews readers: What do you think it was — and why? I’ll incorporate feedback in the follow-up post on Microsoft’s most important year.

In March, Ericsson launched an always-on mobile broadband chip for notebooks which could leverage the power of a persistent HSPA/GPRS/EDGE connection on remote security and monitoring features in addition to standard wireless use.

Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Ericsson has announced it has made a similar module that’s one third the size, and that consumes 40% less power.

As a leading provider of wireless telecommunications equipment, Ericsson’s mission is to provide all devices with a means to communicate with one another.

“Our vision is clear: All devices that can be connected will be connected as the technology required for an all-communicating world is now here,” said Ericsson’s Vice President of Ericsson’s Mobile Broadband Modules, Mats Norin. “This module opens a new realm of possibilities and innovation for the consumer electronics industry as they can now easily and cost-effectively integrate the power and speed of mobile broadband in today’s and tomorrow’s devices.”

Like its predecessors, the C3607w mobile broadband module provides always-on 2G-3.5G radios but in a tiny, self-contained “plug and play” form factor, making it perfect for other consumer electronics devices such as e-readers, personal navigation devices, MP3/media players, and mobile Internet devices.

When Betanews talked to Ericsson last week, the company put a certain degree of emphasis on e-book readers, like the Amazon Kindle and the forthcoming Barnes & Noble reader.

“The whole industry is looking into e-book readers, it’s an excellent target for these types of modules,” Norin told Betanews. “Following that, it could fit into new types of devices we can’t even imagine yet, it may be point and shoot cameras, it may be some other device.”

The C3607w will come to market in the first quarter of 2010, and consumer devices equipped with it will turn up later. Ericsson could not formally discuss what companies will be using the module, but it noted that it has won “several major customers” with the new product.

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced support for Windows Mobile 6.5 from North American mobile carriers including AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Telus, and Bell Mobility; along with major phone makers Samsung, HTC, LG, HP, and Toshiba. But not Palm…and it’s that fact which got the most attention.

But while Palm shoveled out plans last week to dump Microsoft’s mobile OS, support for Windows Mobile is now popping up from places ranging from AT&T to innovative new VoIP provider Zer01 and media content specialist (and iPhone/Android/RIM developer) FlyCast.

Recently, a memo leaked from AT&T showing that two of its Samsung phones, the Epix and Jack, will move from WinMo 6.1 to 6.5 when the Microsoft upgrade becomes available later this fall. Though AT&T is recognized as “the iPhone carrier” and as Apple’s US partner, it officially remains on board with Windows Mobile-based phones.

According to statistics from Canalysis, WinMo’s share of the global smartphone market fell to 9% in the second quarter of this year, down dismally from 14.9% the previous year. So this new and renewed backing from consumer service providers, both large and small, comes at a crucial time for Microsoft, as it seeks greater penetration for Windows Mobile beyond just SMB and enterprises.

Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD, told Betanews he thinks Microsoft is likely to get a better shot at the consumer space beginning with Windows Mobile 6.5.

For its part, Las Vegas-based Zer01 plans to lead off with WinMo — ahead of phones based on any other mobile OS – with a new contract-less, “unlimited” 3G service set to launch in November, said Benjamin Piilani, Zer01’s CEO, in an interview with Betanews at the Showstoppers press event in New York City last week.

Zer01 will offer US customers unlimited 3G voice, data, and mobile calling for about $70 per month prepaid, Piilani said. After trialing the service with an as yet unnamed CE retailer in November, Zer01 anticipates expanding it to other stores as well as to phone companies.

The new 3G service from Zer01 will be different from any others, insisted Lance Dascotte, chief operations officer. “There’ll be absolutely no usage caps,” Betanews was told. Zer01 will handle voice calls through a VoIP application of its own design.

Zer01’s Windows Mobile phones will operate on GSM networks such as AT&T’s and T-Mobile’s. However, ZerO1 has also purchased its own IP backbone, and intends to use roaming agreements with the GSM carriers. Every phone on the Zer01 network will get its own fixed IP address, connecting via a virtual private network (VPN) tunnel through the wireless nets to ZerO1’s servers.

Along somewhat similar lines, Virgin Mobile is now testing a contract-less, pay-as-you-go 3G consumer service with Best Buy. Virgin expects to grow the service to more CE retail chains in November, said a company rep, speaking with Betanews at the Pepcom press event.

But where Virgin Mobile is initially offering its pay-as-you-go service on LG’s Java-based Rumor 2, Zer01 will start first with WinMo phones, moving from there to Symbian, Android, RIM BlackBerry, and Java devices, Zer01’s Piilani said.

Meanwhile, Livermore, California-based FlyCast has now added WinMo to the list of environments for its second-gen streaming media service, which allows radio music to be cached on mobile phones, said Joe Monastiero, FlyCast’s VP of business development.

Monastiero told Betanews that, with WM 6.5, Windows Mobile will join BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, “and possibly Symbian,” among the mobile operating systems supported by its version 2.0. He credited WM 6.5’s greater browser support for “aggregating media streams” as the reason why. FlyCast 2.0 caches songs on devices “in the context of the radio station,” for either three playbacks or 30 days.

Effectively, you can tote songs aired over the radio earlier in the morning along with you on the subway ride to work. An earlier generation of FlyCast technology — delivering live streaming from more than 1,000 talk radio and music stations, but without caching — supported BlackBerry, iPhone, and iPod Touch, along with T-Mobile’s Android-based G1 phones, but not Windows Mobile.

“We couldn’t have done this with Windows Mobile until 6.5,” Monastiero said.

Although the capabilities of WM 6.5’s successor aren’t really known yet, bloggers over the past week have been spreading rumors that Windows Mobile 7 will show up in 2010 on a pair of smartphones from Sharp, supposedly codenamed “Pink” and “Turtle.” If true, that would give WM 7 an actual hard shipping date, even though it’s an entire year.

Speculation has also galloped that WM7 will be “socially oriented.” This conjecture — which actually seems quite solid — is based on a help wanted ad placed by Microsoft for a senior program manager on the Windows Mobile 7 team. In the ad, Microsoft proclaims that its “vision is to bring social networks to life by integrating them into the core experience of the phone.”

Yet a Microsoft spokesperson declined comment on the Windows Mobile 7 scuttlebutt, telling Betanews that Microsoft “hasn’t announced anything by that name,” and can only talk about “initiatives that are public and in market.”

Microsoft has already announced that Windows Mobile 6.5 will include a redesigned mobile browser, a new engine, and built-in Adobe Flash Lite support for better rendering. The next WinMo will also integrate consumer-friendly items such as a music player and picture viewer, and its user interface will be less dependent on a stylus.

In yesterday’s highly anticipated policy speech from newly appointed FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the FCC under the Obama Administration has officially appointed itself the federal regulatory body overseeing “net neutrality.” Since the term was coined by Congress in 2006, the phrase has morphed radically to mean many things. Originally conceived as a principle preventing an ISP from offering certain content providers premium bandwidth unavailable to, or unaffordable by, others, it came to mean a principle preventing an ISP from limiting users’ access to certain content or applications.

But the concept has morphed so many times now that even the reader discussion of yesterday’s Genachowski speech centered around an argument over what it meant. Yesterday, local TV news reports about the speech defined the principle as preventing Apple from denying access or placement of applications on its mobile App Store.

As the Chairman took possession of the hot potato yesterday, he too began a now-familiar process of re-morphing and re-shaping the issue, though perhaps not as drastically as local TV news suggested. Still, his proposed introduction of two new principles for Internet regulation, in addition to the four originally proposed by former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, slipped in some new language that sounded the alert sirens of Republicans on Capitol Hill, who acted immediately.

Acting on a suggestion last April from FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (one which was based on a suggestion from a former Obama campaign official named Julius Genachowski), the Chairman proposed an “Internet non-discrimination principle,” the ostensible purpose of which would be to prevent ISPs from using any means to block users’ access to content. While ISPs would retain the right to monitor and regulate traffic, he contended, that right would not interfere with this new principle: “This principle will not prevent broadband providers from reasonably managing their networks. During periods of network congestion, for example, it may be appropriate for providers to ensure that very heavy users do not crowd out everyone else.”

But the morphing began with a key paragraph which at first appeared innocuous enough, praising the evolution of the Internet as a technology: “In considering the openness of the Internet, it is also important to recognize that our choice of technologies and devices for accessing the Internet continues to expand at a dizzying pace. New mobile and satellite broadband networks are getting faster every day, and extraordinary devices like smartphones and wireless data cards are making it easier to stay connected while on the go. And I note the beginnings of a trend towards openness among several participants in the mobile marketplace.

“Even though each form of Internet access has unique technical characteristics, they are all are different roads to the same place,” Genachowski continued. “It is essential that the Internet itself remain open, however users reach it. The principles I’ve been speaking about apply to the Internet however accessed, and I will ask my fellow Commissioners to join me in confirming this.”

If you weren’t looking for an offending passage, you might not see it. But Congressional Republicans were definitely looking for it, and they found it here, in the way Genachowski extends the breadth of his Fifth Principle to cover mobile and satellite. There is considerable legal debate over whether the FCC has the right to regulate transactions over carriers’ private networks, which existing law such as the Telecommunications Act of 1996 would classify as telephone traffic — outside the FCC’s purview. The “foot in the door” for regulating telephone traffic is to create a trail of breadcrumbs that leads this way: “Telephone > Smartphone > Broadband > Internet.”

Genachowski leads us to that point with this sentence: “The principles I’ve been speaking about apply to the Internet however accessed.” In an effort yesterday to immediately suspend the FCC’s ability to draw that conclusion for itself without extensive debate, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R – Texas) and colleagues quickly drafted an amendment to an Interior Dept. appropriations bill — something which has nothing to do with net neutrality — that would, as an afterthought, cut off funding to the FCC for regulating in this manner. The entire amendment reads, “The Federal Communications Commission shall not expend any funds from any account in fiscal year 2010 — (1) to implement any Internet neutrality or network management principles; or (2) to promulgate any rules relating to such principles.”

Sen. Hutchison tried similar measures to prevent Genachowski’s predecessor, former chairman Kevin Martin, from trying a different approach to achieve the same goal. Specifically, Martin had advocated opening cable TV systems to a la carte programming options, although doing so would, by default, declare the FCC the official regulator of content availability through CATV-owned pipelines. Genachowski’s Fifth Principle takes another route, but would achieve the same goal. And while there are many in Congress who are fine with the FCC assuming that role — including high-ranking Congressman Ed Markey (D – Mass.), who previously introduced legislation declaring the FCC the regulator in such affairs — others in Congress are unwilling to cede what they see as their own authority over these matters.

Hutchison, among others, has been a supporter and author of legislation over the last several years (which, like net neutrality legislation, also went nowhere) that would open up broadband franchising beyond the local and municipal level — in Hutchison’s case, to the level of states. In such instances, state regulators and state courts would be the arbiters of fairness and neutrality; though as Hutchison sees it, loose regulations should enable ISPs to set service standards and requirements for their own networks. It was the political effort in 2006 by Senate and House Republicans to deregulate how private service providers manage their own networks, that led to the opposition creating “net neutrality” as a popular mantra for regulated fairness.

In a joint statement released yesterday afternoon, Republican FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker expressed skepticism over the implications of Genachowski’s Fifth Principle, and acknowledged they saw his play to get a foot in the door for wireless regulation: “We hope that all of the stakeholders affected by the Chairman’s proposed endeavor have sufficient time to investigate the facts thoroughly and deliberate openly before the Commission acts to codify more government involvement in the Internet space,” Baker and McDowell said. “Although we have not been given any draft or summary of proposed net neutrality rules, it is clear from the Chairman’s statements that they will be monumental in their scope. In the meantime, we are concerned that both factual and legal conclusions may have been drawn before the process has begun.”

Today, Google has announced that Gmail push updates have been added to Google Sync, the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync-based tool that lets BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile devices to share calendar entries and contact info with a user’s Web-based Google account. The service, which debuted in beta earlier this year, automatically pushed Gmail inbox content to the synched phone’s native e-mail reader.

This announcement comes as good news for iPhone users who have, until now, had to pay for push Gmail updates by including it in their MobileMe subscription, or by paying for apps like PushMail or G-Push Mail. But it’s also especially unfortunate for Tiverias Apps, makers of GPush for iPhone, an application which received a considerable amount of attention in mid-Summer, but didn’t get approved until August, and has only been available in the App Store for a month and a half.

The setup, however, is not exactly straightforward. To set up Google Sync on the iPhone, users must have iPhone OS 3.0+, and then add a mail account under “Microsoft Exchange,” and not “Google.” From here, the user adds his Gmail account name and password, and selects m.google.com as the server.