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We’ve never heard of Monec, but the mission statement on its rather austere Web site claims it’s “a leading innovator for mobile, globally usable communication solutions…with user-friendly products and pioneering solutions, Monec provides companies and users with secure, wireless access solutions which offer highest degree of flexibility, functionality, speed and independence.”

Apple Insider says Monec’s beef centers on “Apple’s move to distribute digital book reading applications through the App Store, which it subsequently sees as an endorsement by the Cupertino-based company that its touch-screen handset can serve as a capable eBook reader.”

(Credit:
CNET)

There's some speculation that the Kindle for iPhone app may have sparked the lawsuit.

According to Monec, that violates a patent it filed for a “lightweight” electronic device with a “touch-screen” LCD display having the “dimensions such that (…) approximately one page of a book can be illustrated at normal size, this display being integrated in a flat, frame-like housing.”

Apparently, last year Monec also sued HP for patent infringement.

Earlier this month Apple got hit with a lawsuit over an “exploding” iPod Touch. Now it appears to be getting hit with a suit over the exploding e-book market.

Apple had no comment about the lawsuit. How about you?

A couple of blogs, including Apple Insider, are reporting that a Swiss communications firm, Monec Holding, has filed suit in a Virginia district court. Monec accuses the
iPhone maker of “patent infringement, unfair trade practices, monopolization, and tortious interference for allegedly treading on its January 2002 patent No. 6,335,678 titled ‘Electronic device, preferably an electronic book.’”

It’s unclear what exactly set off the lawsuit but there’s some speculation that it may have been prompted by Amazon’s Kindle for iPhone e-book reader software appearing in Apple’s App Store–even though Apple has had other e-book reader applications in the App Store for a while.

For every message, the caller’s number is automatically added to the contact list.

The service lets people manage all their contacts, greetings, and messages into groups. Users can edit a caller’s contact info and forward messages in e-mail.

SAN DIEGO–A new service announced at DemoFall on Monday allows people to use voice commands to retrieve and send e-mails and text messages over their mobile phone.

Message Sling’s hands-free messaging service also lets people send dictated text messages, use voice to reply to e-mail messages, and listen to text-based messages.

(Credit:
Larry Dignan/ZDNet)

Cisco Systems’ acquisition of Pure Digital Technologies, maker of the Flip camcorder, has sparked a lot of discussion about the networking giant’s intentions. One theory is that Cisco is looking to compete with Apple–especially in the digital living room.

Ben Worthen at The Wall Street Journal surmises:

It isn’t a big leap to see Cisco developing a home-media hub that cobbles these pieces together–some sort of device that allows people to upload and watch videos and listen to music throughout their homes. In fact, it looks like a next logical step. Apple has a similar device called Apple TV, which can direct music to a home audio system and videos to a television. It works with Apple’s iTunes store, naturally.

The only thing Apple and Cisco have in common is that they want to sell you a ton of hardware. Apple sells the fashion statements and Cisco sells most of the stuff you never see in the network, data center and telecom provider. Every once in a while Cisco puts on a nice front end–Telepresence and Flip camcorders–to entice you to use more bandwidth for video.

While this digital living room scrum is noteworthy–and pretty damn interesting–let’s not lose sight of Cisco’s big goal. Sell the big honking networking gear that will move all of this video around. Cisco really doesn’t care where the video comes from as long as enterprises and consumers move a lot of it over a network increasingly powered by the networking giant’s hardware and software.

The living room is only part of the equation for Cisco. In fact, it’s only part of the equation for Apple. Both merely see it as an avenue to sell you more hardware. Both companies are pursuing different halo effects.

Worthen connects a few dots and notes that the folks that make the Flip have proven they can create the right gadget at the right time. On that topic definitely read Michael Arrington’s history lesson on Pure Digital and how it arrived at the Flip.

Here’s a visual aid I cooked up to explain Cisco’s grand plan (all roads lead to the router, switches and the fancy new servers). Click to expand:

All of that is true. Cisco has a lot of living room parts. The cable box (Scientific Atlanta), the router (Linksys), software to bring video conferencing to the home, and now the Flip camcorder.

Of course, Page, Brin, and Schmidt are certainly not paupers. The 29,148,614 shares of Google’s Class B common stock Page held at the end of 2008 are worth $10.1 billion at Tuesday’s closing price of $347.17; Brin’s 28,611,862 shares are worth $9.9 billion, and Schmidt’s 9,372,740 shares are worth $3.3 billion.

Google has offered co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt “market-competitive” salaries every year since 2005, but once again in 2008, the three turned it down, according to a company regulatory filing Tuesday. “Due to their own preferences not to receive salary compensation, Eric, Larry, and Sergey each rejected these offers and continue to receive base salaries of $1,” the company said.

Also in 2008, the company decided that the stock-based compensation it had awarded to top executives in 2007 was “sufficient to help us meet our retention and business objectives through 2008,” so no new stock compensation was awarded to them except in the case of new Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pichette, who was set to receive compensation worth more than $2 million along with thousands of shares and stock options in his first year.

Wall Street executives feeling harassed by taxpayers outraged at their pay might take note of how Google’s ruling triumvirate fared in 2008: $1 in salary each, no bonus, no stock grants, and no stock options.

Schmidt received perks totaling $508,764 in 2008, up from $480,561 the year before. That covered $402,562 in personal security costs and $106,201 Google paid to fly his family members and friends on paid chartered flights.

Are there any other products that have been cut that I should know about? If so, drop me a line.

Although Microsoft announced layoffs and other cost cuts in January, the company has axed relatively few products. Among the products it has scrapped in recent months are Windows Live OneCare and PerformancePoint Server, a business intelligence product.

In a blog posting, Microsoft said it is closing the beta of Microsoft AdCenter Analytics.

“The insights you’ve contributed through your feedback and your use of the tool have served an invaluable purpose in shaping Microsoft’s future in this space,” Microsoft said in the March 12 blog posting. “You’ve helped us work towards making an informed decision about building a general Web analytics solution, and despite the end of life plan, the beta was very much a success. It enabled us to confidently determine that we can be of most value to advertisers and publishers by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.”

Those already in the beta will be able to continue using the tool until December 31.

This one flew under my radar, but Microsoft announced earlier this month that it is scrapping an effort to develop a general purpose Web analytics program.

“We recommend that you use the coming months to evaluate your Web analytics needs and leverage that information to conduct a search for an alternative Web analytics solution,” Microsoft said. The software maker has posted a list of alternatives that includes Google Analytics, Yahoo Web Analytics, and Omniture.

This can only be taken so far, of course, but I wonder if there’s something to it….

Enterprises should take note. I think company leadership has a material impact on the kind of technology that gets created within a technology vendor. If your vendor’s CEO is stuck in the Stone Ages of technology, perhaps its products are, too?

I don’t have any scientific proof of this, but it strikes me that open-source CEOs are different. Not just because some sport ponytails (Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz), or some speak with a light Southern drawl (Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst), or even that some swear in Italian (Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capobianco).

In this they’re no different (and probably a bit behind) the Web 2.0 crowd, but compared to an HP, IBM, or SAP CEO, the CEOs of open-source companies set new standards for connectedness and communication transparency. Perhaps it’s the relative youth of open-source CEOs, but perhaps it’s also a love of technology that stems from having to live so close to source code in an open-source company.

I first thought of this when I received notice that Whitehurst is following me on Twitter. I can’t imagine Steve Ballmer following anyone on Twitter. Then I thought to how actively Schwartz blogs, providing useful information on Sun and its place in the larger enterprise computing ecosystem.

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It also reminded me that I get text messages as often as emails from Whitehurst, and the same used to be true of Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, as well as others (except Capobianco at Funambol, because his company does email sync, so he’s not a big SMS user :-).

No, what really makes them different, at least as compared to their enterprise software counterparts, is their cutting-edge adoption of technology.

A security researcher has discovered fake profiles for celebrities on LinkedIn that have links to malicious code, according to a blog posting on Trend Micro’s site.

McAfee’s Avert Labs Blog has more details and screenshots.

“It’s a shame that LinkedIn (isn’t) keeping a closer eye on obviously bogus profiles being created on (its) site,” Cluley writes. “Undoubtedly, spammers, malware authors, and other cybercriminals may be abusing the system to link to their Web pages in the hope that it will generate a higher ranking in search engines like Google.”

Graham Cluley of Sophos also found many other fake celeb profiles and says that as recently as Thursday, the Troj/Decdec-A malicious JavaScript code was being found on them.

The celebrity profiles that are not to be trusted include ones created using the names: Beyonce Knowles, Victoria Beckham, Christina Ricci, Kirsten Dunst, Salma Hayek, and Kate Hudson. They were uncovered by Trend Micro Advanced Threats Researcher Ivan Macalintal.

In its blog posting late on Monday, Trend Micro said it was continuing its investigation. The links on the professional networking site attempt to lure viewers by purporting to be nude shots of the celebrities.

(Credit:
Trend Micro)

Fake Beyonce LinkedIn profile that contains links to malware.

“So when an unsuspecting user gets tricked to follow the lure, he will end up on different malicious Web sites trying the classical social-engineering tricks of either the ‘missing video codec’ or of showing a fake AV scan and telling the user (that) his computer was infected with malware and offering a ‘free’ AV scanner software, which in fact is the real threat,” the McAfee blog says.

Representatives from LinkedIn did not immediately return a call seeking comment on Tuesday.

Springfield got its first Apple store during Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, allowing the show’s writers to devote a good chunk of the show to satirizing Apple (Mapple), CEO Steve Jobs (Mobs), and “myPods.” The show makes several tongue-in-cheek references to Apple cultural touch-points like the Power
Mac Cube, the “Braniac Bar,” and the famous 1984 commercial in a scene featuring Comic Book Guy, who is definitely a Mac user.

The only thing they forgot was a desperate attempt by old Gil to sell an
iPod Hi-Fi.

It’s not the funniest Simpsons parody ever, but that show lost its fastball a long time ago. Apple references have been popping up in The Simpsons for years; perhaps the most famous one came when one of Springfield Elementary’s bullies tried to take a memo on his Apple Newton to “Beat up Martin,” which the quirky handwriting recognition software translated to “Eat up Martha,” prompting the bully to just chuck the thing at Martin.

Apple and Homer Simpson hooked up earlier this year at Macworld 2008.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

You can find the episode on Fox.com and Hulu, but the Fox lawyers seem to have placed a call to the YouTube people already.

I just hope your search for a solution to your notebook woes has a better outcome than mine did.

On Saturday afternoon, my Hewlett-Packard notebook computer was working fine. On Sunday morning, the machine wouldn’t start. The power would blink on and go off just as quickly.

I wasn’t quite ready to accept the fact that this machine was toast, though that conclusion was becoming more and more difficult to deny. I took the laptop to my local PC repair shop–definitely a last resort for me. The repair person disassembled the machine and concluded that the system board was fried.

What bugs me more than seeing a year-and-a-half old laptop turn into a doorstop is how difficult notebooks have become to repair. In fact, I’m beginning to think of the machines as closed-box systems. In the past, I’ve replaced several notebook hard drives, memory modules, and other components, but troubleshooting this HP tablet was a real challenge.

Next on my list of suspects was a bad memory module. The machine was only 18 months old, but it has been on a couple dozen road trips already, so it has been jostled and exposed to temperature changes quite a bit. Installing a new memory module had no effect.

If I held the power button in the on position, I could keep the power indicator and other of the machine’s LEDs lit, but nothing would happen: no power-on self-test, no BIOS message, and definitely no Windows.

My first thought was that it was a power glitch. I unplugged the machine and tried starting it on battery power, but no go. I removed the battery and tried using just AC power, but that didn’t help. I replaced the battery and tried again. Still nothing.

You’ll find a great notebook-troubleshooting guide on the Developer Shed site. The InformIT site has a useful section on troubleshooting portable PCs. Finally, there’s a tremendous amount of technical detail on laptop problems in this excerpt from the Laptop Repair Workbook by Morris Rosenthal.

It doesn’t help to learn that HP tablets are prone to motherboard failures. My machine is well out of warranty, and at 18 months old it’s probably not worth spending $350 for a new system board. I travel quite a bit for my job, so I rely on my notebook. That’s why I bit the bullet and bought a new machine (a Sony).

Ultimately, I needed the assistance of a PC professional to diagnose the problem. That doesn’t mean you should throw in the towel when you experience technical difficulties with your laptop, though.

I turned my attention to the hard drive. I was unable to boot from my system CD, nor from a Windows installation DVD. I went so far as to order a replacement drive, but unfortunately, the notebook remained inert, even with a new drive in place.

Chrome's privacy options are now in one place.

Google has big plans and goals for Chrome. Truly widespread adoption of the product won’t happen in businesses or on the pre-installed software suites of new computers until the product is not just known to be stable by users but vouched for as production-ready by Google — and that means taking it out of beta, even if the word itself means less than it used to.

What’s included
Sundar Pichai, vice president of product development, told me that this release of Chrome will have “tons and tons of bug fixes,” especially around audio and video playback, which should now be “more stable.” Chrome will also be faster. Pichai said Google’s browser is 1.4 to 1.5 times faster (depending on which benchmarks you use) than it was at launch.

How to get it
The first people to get the non-beta version will be new users who download the browser directly from Google. Also Thursday, a small proportion of existing Chrome users will automatically get the update. On Friday, all the remaining Chrome users (10 million, according to Google) will get the download. (You can also download it from CNET here.)

What’s in a Google beta?
For a Google product, Chrome is leaving beta very quickly — 100 days after public launch. Pichai said that Chrome now meets Google’s “internal standards for stability and performance” and that its heavy use inside Google before its public release has contributed to its rapid graduation to released product status.

But clearly there’s more at play here than that. For comparison’s sake, only recently did Google remove the beta tag from Picasa, and it was years old and in its third major version. Gmail is still in beta, despite being relied on by tens of millions of users.

Rate Google Chrome on Download.com.

There are new features, as well. The bookmark manager is being revised to do a better job for people who have lots of bookmarks, and for those who want to import or export bookmark lists. Privacy options have all been consolidated into one dialog box. And there are improvements in the security features of the browser.

Yesterday at the Le Web 08 conference in Paris, Google VP Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington that the move would be happening, but she did not say when. Google representatives have confirmed the Thursday change of status for Chrome.

Features that the team is still working on include autofill for forms, native support for RSS feeds, “and so on.” But the top three features that Pichai says he and his team are working on are extension support and
Mac and Linux versions.

Are you more inclined to use Chrome now that it’s officially out of beta?
( polls)

“All the developement is in the open,” Pichai said. Curious users can monitor Chrome’s progress at Chromium.org, or download the Google Chrome Channel Chooser, which will tell their installation of Chrome to download either the betas between major updates of Chrome, or even the nightly (and often buggy) builds of the browser as it is developed. Pichai recommends that last option for those dying of curiosity about Chrome’s upcoming extension support.

If you want to know whether you have the update, check Chrome’s About page. If you don’t have the current version, you can force the update from the dialog box. Normally, Chrome checks for updates every fifth hour of use.

The update system has been used for 14 updates of the beta product so far. This 15th update will be the first non-beta release.

Google’s browser, Chrome, is officially leaving beta today.