09/15/07 - Company patents playlists, sues everyone

HEADLINE:

Company patents playlists, sues everyone

STORY:

A company called Premier International Associates has filed suit against a slew of tech companies over infringement on two of the company's patents. Microsoft, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, Viacom, Real, Napster, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Nokia, and Sandisk are named in one of the two suits filed this week, while Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Gateway, and Yahoo are named in another. All of the above companies are accused of violating Premier's patents for an electronic "List building system"—the older of which was applied for in 1997 and issued in 2001.

The patents describe what essentially comes down to a playlist. "A plurality of works can be collected together in a list for purposes of establishing a play or a presentation sequence. The list can be visually displayed and edited," reads the "725" patent. Both of them describe ways to graphically display an arrangement of songs from CDs or any manner of media that can then be played back sequentially or out-of-order.

Faster: DirecTV may try broadband on power lines

NEW YORK - Satellite television provider DirecTV Group Inc. may test delivering high-speed Internet service through power lines in a major U.S. city in the next year, its chief executive said on Monday.

DirecTV and others are talking to companies that specialize in providing broadband through the electrical grid, Chief Executive Chase Carey said at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.

"We're not the only ones talking to them," Carey said, in response to a question on whether DirecTV would consider a test in a major city. "I think you'll see some meaningful tests in this arena."

DirecTV would like to test delivering Internet access on power lines in a "top 50 city where you're covering at least half the city."

While DirecTV and fellow satellite TV operator EchoStar Communications Corp. have managed to keep increasing their subscriber base in the face of stiff competition from cable operators, Wall Street analysts have long questioned what broadband strategy the satellite operators will employ to counter competitive pressures.

"We think it would be a good thing to have a third, a fourth or a fifth entrant in broadband and if we can be helpful in pushing that forward and if there's an opportunity for us to intelligently invest in doing so, we would," said Carey.

Full Story: REUTERS

MySQL hits $50 million revenue, plans IPO

MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006.

"It's still in the pipeline," Chief Executive Marten Mickos said of the plan to hold an initial public offering of his company's stock. He declined to discuss when the company planned to go public, but said, "We're making good progress, doing all the things we need to get done."

During the days of dot-com mania, companies would go public without being profitable and in some cases without much in the way of revenue, and with investor enthusiasm bubbling at the time, many of them raised millions of dollars during their IPOs. MySQL, though, is working on building its business first.

The company garnered about $50 million in revenue in 2006, Mickos said in an interview at the MySQL Conference and Expo here. That compares with $6.5 million in 2002 and about $34 million in 2005, according to earlier figures Mickos cited in a speech two years earlier.

Of the company's bottom line, Mickos said, "Profitability isn't a specific goal yet, but we aren't burning cash. We go a bit above breakeven, a bit below breakeven."

Full Story: NEWS.COM

Next X Prize: Build a practical, hyperefficient car

If your dream is to build the world's greatest car – not just a science project or a concept car, but a real-world, 100-mile-per-gallon vehicle that's safe, can be mass-produced, and emits almost no pollutants – there's a big, fat prize waiting for you.

It's expected to be at least $10 million, maybe much more.

But here's the rub: If the first X Prize put a man in space on a shoestring budget, the 2009 Automotive X Prize by comparison looks timid to some.

Why aim for just 100 miles per gallon or its energy equivalent? What about a vehicle that gets double that? What about a vehicle that burns no carbon-based fuel at all?

Such are the criticisms already being leveled at the Automotive X Prize "draft guidelines," to be formally unveiled this week at the New York International Auto Show. Most questions are being raised not by skeptics but by the contemporary soul mates of the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, true believers who would love to enter the "great race."

More than 1,000 people have already contacted X Prize organizers, including some auto companies. A number of concerns over the draft guidelines, which are open for public comment until May 31, are already being voiced by these Henry Ford wannabes.

Full Story: THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Researchers explore scrapping Internet

NEW YORK - Although it has already taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet, some university researchers with the federal government's blessing want to scrap all that and start over.

The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a "clean slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969.

The Internet "works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions," said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor overseeing three clean-slate projects. "It's sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today."

No longer constrained by slow connections and computer processors and high costs for storage, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was "generally healthy" because the current technology "does not satisfy all needs."

Full Story: YAHOO (AP)