Bill Gates: Windows 8 is exciting. One OS on PC, tablet and phone

NEW YORK (AP) — Microsoft founder Bill Gates on Thursday called the new Windows 8 operating system scheduled for release next month "a very exciting new product" and "a very big deal" for the world's largest software maker.

Gates said in an interview with The Associated Press that he is already using Windows 8 "and I'm very pleased with it."

Windows 8 is Microsoft's biggest overhaul of Windows in more than a decade and the company's attempt to stay relevant and exciting in a world where mobile gadgets have started to overshadow personal computers.

"Hardware partners are doing great things to take advantage of the features," Gates added. "It'll be a big deal."

Microsoft Corp. will release Windows 8 on Oct. 26 along with a new version of Internet Explorer.

Gates responded to a question about Windows 8 during an AP interview about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's key role in a new global campaign to eradicate polio.

Windows 8 will replace Windows 7 on practically all personal computers sold to consumers.

It features major changes in the way consumers interact with their machines, and versions of it will also run on tablet computers and smartphones.

Although Microsoft has grown into much more than a maker of computer operating systems — providing computer services to corporations and Xbox gaming machines to game enthusiasts — Windows still accounts for a significant chunk of the company's annual revenue.

In 2011, Microsoft's "Windows & Windows Live" division generated 27 percent, or $19 billion, of the company's $69.9 billion in annual revenue.

Facebook real gift from virtural world

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is rolling out a service called Gifts which, as its name suggests, lets users send chocolate, coffee, socks and other real-life presents to one another.

Facebook Gifts launched Thursday to a subset of users in the U.S. and will roll out to more over the coming months as people begin to send gifts to each other.

Users will be able to click on a "gifts" icon on their Facebook friends' pages on Facebook's website or on Android mobile phones. (IPhone and iPad versions are coming soon.)

The icon will also show up on the right side of users' Facebook pages with the notifications for friends' birthdays, weddings and other life events. For example, if your friend's birthday is coming up in two days, you'll now see a "give her a gift" link and the gift icon next to her name and photo.

Clicking the icon will display presents you can buy, such as a Starbucks gift card, cupcakes or a teddy bear.

The recipient will be notified through Facebook to enter a shipping address for the presents. In some cases, they'll be able to select their own cupcake flavors or size and style of socks. They can also exchange gifts for other items if they don't like chocolate or don't wear socks.

The move represents Facebook Inc.'s first real foray into e-commerce. The company will take an unspecified cut from each item sold. On Thursday, possible gifts included gourmet ice cream, Andy Warhol prints, flowers, organic dog toys and spa packages.

Facebook Gifts is the result of Facebook's acquisition of Karma, a 16-person startup based in San Francisco. Facebook bought the company on May 18, the day of its rocky initial public offering. Karma's mobile app let people send gifts to their friends on the go. Facebook Gifts, of course, works both on computers and mobile devices.

Lee Linden, the former head of Karma, is now head product manager for Facebook Gifts, which he says incorporates "the heart and soul of the Karma experience."

"We think gifting is a form of communication," he said.

Google map

What Makes Google’s Maps So Good

Google allows average citizens make corrections to Google’s maps as they find them.

Wow. Nothing makes you appreciate something like losing it.

Nobody ever raved about Google’s mapping app for phones until they saw how hard it was for Apple to come up with a rival. In my Times column today, I wrote about the challenges Apple has faced in replacing its iPhone GPS/mapping app, substituting its own data sources for Google’s. I noted that the new app is beautiful and will be really terrific someday — once it does a better job of incorporating all of its various data sources.

In researching the story, I interviewed representatives from Apple and Google. At Google, I spoke with Manik Gupta, senior product manager for Google Maps, and Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for Mobile.

What I realized is that mapping the world is a staggering, gigantic, vast, inconceivably huge and ambitious project. It represents years and years of hand-tuning and manual effort.

I was surprised to learn that, like Apple, Google began its efforts by licensing petabytes of data from outside geodata companies.

They include TomTom, the same company that Apple’s using. (The other big map vendor is NavTeq, which Nokia bought a few years ago; I guess that explains why Apple and Google aren’t using NavTeq’s data. Too bad — by all accounts, the map app on Nokia’s Windows Phone is pretty great; I’ll be trying it out shortly.)

But that’s just the basic data. “We start with licensed stuff, then expand and enhance it,” Mr. Gupta said. Google has supplemented it with years of additional data gathering, involving its Street View cars, satellite data and human labor.

And it shows. As of 2008, for example, onto those digital maps of the world Google had overlaid 13 million miles of turn-by-turn directions in 22 countries; today, it has 26 million miles of guidance in 187 countries.

“It’s fair to say that in the mapping world, you can’t just throw money at it and then you have it the next day. This takes time,” Mr. Gupta said. “It took a lot of time to get where we’re at.” He said that even now, Google is far from done; error reports still flow in by the thousands.

Many of them come from Google Map Maker, a Web site that is live in 200 countries (and just started in the United States) that lets average citizens make corrections to Google’s maps as they find them. You can, for example, draw a line to represent a new road.

Like Apple, Google also collects location and movement data (anonymously) from millions of smartphones as they’re driven around; from this information, Apple and Google can determine when, for example, a one-way street has been mislabeled in its data.

You may be familiar with Street View, a Google exclusive that lets you stand at a certain spot on the map and “look around.” You can see a photo of the address you seek, and use your mouse to turn right or left and actually move through the still photos. It’s an amazing way to see what it’s like to be at that spot.

Street View isn’t available for the entire world, but you’d be surprised at how many inhabited areas are covered: Google’s GPS- and camera-equipped Street View cars have, so far, driven five million miles through 3,000 cities in 40 countries.

What you may not realize, however, is that those photos are far more than just helpful references for you, the viewer. Google’s software analyzes what’s in those photos. Its image-recognition software can read the text on street signs, storefront signs, hotel names and so on. It can tell a major road from a minor one, a single-lane road from multilane and one-way streets from two-way streets. Street View, in other words, generates still more useful data for Google’s maps.

I asked Google why its satellite photos don’t seem to display the same jarring seams that are showing up on Apple’s — obvious borders between side-by-side tiles that were taken at different times of the year or in different weather.

“When you look at Google Earth,” I was told, “you can see that the globe is made from a mosaic of aerial and satellite photos, often taken in different lighting and weather. We license these photos from multiple providers, possibly the same ones that Apple uses; but we’ve had the time to come up with a smoothing algorithm. In January, we introduced a new way to render them, smooth them out, make them seamless. But by no means have we perfected this.”

On this call, Google pointed out a new feature that I hadn’t seen before: compass mode. On an Android phone, you can call up a location like Trafalgar Square in London. You hold the phone in front of you to see a Street View-like photo of the scene — and as you look left, right, up, down, or behind you, the view changes, as though you’re looking through a magic window at another place in the world. You can even use Compass mode to look around inside places — I tried Delfina, the San Francisco restaurant — to get a feel of the décor before you go there.

Can you imagine how powerful Compass mode will be once it covers most of the earth’s developed areas? It will give you a sort of instant teleportation, a way to travel without travel, a sense of a place without having to go there.

What I’ve learned from this deep dive into the making of map apps is that you can’t just license a bunch of data, bake at 350 degrees and come up with a useful tool. Gathering the data is only the starting point; from there, it takes years to reconcile it, correct it and make it useful. (This Atlantic article offers a good look at the kind of hand-tuning that Google’s minions do constantly.)

By the way, let me be clear: I have no doubt that Apple’s Maps app will get there. We’ve seen this movie before — remember MobileMe? It, too, was very rough when it made its debut. Today, its successor, iCloud, is smooth and sensationally useful. Maps will be, too.

But I suspect that Apple has just realized the same thing I have: that we may live on a small blue planet, but digitally representing every road, building and point of interest is a task of almost unimaginable difficulty. Let’s be grateful that another major player has just joined the attempt.

T

FACEBOOK

Nook HD

NEW YORK (AP) — Barnes & Noble is rolling out two new versions of its Nook tablet with sleek new hardware and a sharper high-definition screen. The bookseller's move heightens the already intense tablet wars heading into the holiday season.

Barnes & Noble said Wednesday that its new Nook HD will come in two sizes, one with a 7-inch screen (measured diagonally), starting at $199, and one with a new 9-inch diagonal screen, called the Nook HD+, starting at $269.

In addition to the new HD screen and a lighter body, Barnes & Noble is also increasing the services the Nook offers, adding a video purchase and rental service, allowing users to maintain different "profiles" and making it easier to browse titles in its book and magazine stores.

New York-based Barnes & Noble, the largest traditional U.S. bookseller, has invested heavily in its Nook e-reader and e-books. In its most recent fiscal quarter, sales of digital content surged 46 percent, but revenue from devices dropped partly due to lower prices. Nook prices in the May-July period were about 23 percent lower than a year ago.

The company is seeking to offset tough competition from online retailers such as Amazon.com, as consumers increasingly move away from traditional books and DVDs to electronic books and streaming video.

The Nook HD is an upgrade to the hardware and services offered by its previous tablets, the Nook Tablet and Nook Color, which Barnes & Noble is phasing out. The company will continue to sell its smaller black-and-white e-reader, called the Nook Simple Touch, for $99, and a backlit Nook Simple Touch for $139. The Nook HD runs on Google's Android 4.0 system and includes Barnes & Noble's own app store and browser.

Tablets are —once again— expected to be hot items this holiday. The new Nooks come on the heels of Amazon.com's announcement earlier this month that it will offer four new varieties of its Kindle, including a high definition version of its Kindle Fire tablet with an 8.9-inch diagonal screen, which starts at $299. That compares with Apple Inc.'s iPad with a 9.7-inch diagonal screen and $499 starting price.

Apple's iPad is the most popular tablet, and that is not expected to change. Seven out of every 10 tablets sold in the second quarter were iPads, according to IHS iSuppli. Meanwhile Amazon.com has a 4.2 percent share of the tablet market, while Barnes & Noble has a 1.9 percent share, according to iSuppli.

Even so, the category is growing rapidly. An estimated 112.5 million Americans, one-third of U.S. adults, are expected to have tablets by 2016, according to Forrester Research.

And tablet makers are jockeying to gain share on Apple. On specs alone, the new Nook presents a tough choice for consumers seeking a cheap option to the iPad this holiday, analysts say. The 7-inch Nook HD is slightly lighter and narrower, with a sharper display than the similarly priced 7-inch Kindle Fire.

"If the decision the consumer is making is whether to buy based on hardware, these new Nooks will beat out Amazon," said Forrester analyst James McQuivey. "But that's not the decision every consumer is going to make — hardware is only as good as the services the hardware enables."

So far, Amazon offers more services, McQuivey said, with a bigger app store, and more extensive video library, not to mention Amazon's vast product offerings and its Amazon Prime free-shipping service.

In an attempt to measure up, Barnes & Noble is launching a video service this fall that lets users buy and watch movies and TV shows on their mobile devices and televisions. The offerings will come from major studios including HBO, Sony Pictures, Viacom and Warner Brothers. Scrapbook and catalog browsing features have also been added.

One wild card working in Barnes & Noble's favor this holiday: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target, increasingly threatened by Amazon's online retail operations, won't carry the Kindle. The retailers will sell Barnes & Noble's Nooks, as well as other tablets like the iPad.

"This is going to be a lot of fun to watch over the next year," McQuivey said.

The new Nooks are available for pre-order online and in stores beginning on Wednesday and will begin shipping in late October and begin arriving in stores in early November.

IBM CEO takes an added role of chairman

ARMONK, N.Y. (AP) — IBM President and CEO Virginia Rometty is taking on the added role of chairman, as Samuel Palmisano prepares to retire at the end of this year.

The technology company said Tuesday that Rometty, 55, will take on the expanded role Oct. 1. Palmisano, 61, will serve as a senior adviser until he retires in December.

Rometty, the company's former sales and marketing chief, became IBM Corp.'s first female CEO in January. Joining the Armonk, N.Y.-based company in 1981 as an engineer, Rometty later was instrumental in the formation of IBM's business services division, including overseeing the $3.5 billion purchase of PricewaterhouseCoopers' consulting business in 2002.

IBM has sustained a nearly decade-long streak of earnings growth as it shook off the economic jitters that have undercut several other technology companies.

New CFO hired in Yahoo

New Yahoo Inc CEO Marissa Mayer laid out broad goals for the Internet giant in her first companywide address Tuesday, and received an enthusiastic reception from a workforce that has faced years of uncertainty and management turmoil.

Mayer mainly sketched broad visions rather than concrete details for her turnaround strategy, according to several people familiar with what was said in the tightly controlled meeting.

But her personal credibility as a long-time senior Google Inc executive, combined with some recent morale-boosting moves such as providing new iPhones and free food for employees, have had a dramatic and positive impact on the "vibe" at the company, one of the people said.

Speaking at Yahoo's Sunnyvale, California headquarters, Mayer stressed the importance of personalizing Yahoo's Web services and adapting the company's products to mobile devices, AllThingsD reported. Although her speech touched on frequently mentioned industry themes, Mayer's delivery nonetheless won spontaneous applause from the workforce, according to a second person with knowledge of the company meeting.

"It was some of the same types of lines that had been said before, but people believe it now," said the person, who declined to be identified because the information is private.

After a steady stream of occasionally embarrassing reports, Yahoo in recent months has clamped down firmly on leaks to the press. Attendees at Tuesday's assembly were instructed to shut their laptops during Mayer's address.

Yahoo declined repeated requests for comment.

Mayer first presented her strategy to Yahoo's board in meetings last week, outlining plans to bring back advertisers and expand the company's user base, said a third source, who declined to be identified because the information was not public.

Yahoo also announced that it appointed as its new chief financial officer Ken Goldman, formerly CFO at cybersecurity software firm Fortinet.

The appointment comes two months after Yahoo's board tapped Mayer to restore a household Internet name overshadowed by rivals like Facebook Inc and Google in recent years.

Yahoo remains one of the world's most popular websites, with more than 700 million monthly visitors who use products like its email service and read its news pages, according to the company. But Yahoo's revenue has stagnated as online display advertising prices have fallen and as it faces competition from Facebook and Google.

Mayer, Yahoo's third CEO in about a year, arrived after a tumultuous period in the company in which former CEO Scott Thompson resigned after less than 6 months on the job over a controversy over his academic credentials. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang had also stepped down as CEO, and an internal reorganization eliminated thousands of jobs.

Mayer's latest hire, Goldman, replaces Tim Morse, who served last year as interim Yahoo CEO while the company underwent another episode of leadership turmoil.

BOOST MORALE, SCANT DETAILS

Since taking the helm, Mayer has sought to boost morale at the nearly two-decade-old Internet company, eliminating corporate bureaucracy and introducing perks such as free cafeteria food and state-of-the-art smartphones for employees that are standard fare at other Silicon Valley Web companies.

But Mayer has so far offered scant details about her plan to revive revenue growth and to expand its audience - a challenge that has frustrated a string of her predecessors as well as countless shareholders.

Many analysts and investors believe Mayer will renew Yahoo's focus on Web technology and products rather than beefing up online content, as appeared to be the mission during interim CEO Ross Levinsohn's brief tenure.

That has raised concerns among some investors that Mayer will embark on an expensive acquisition spree.

Mayer assuaged some of those fears last week when Yahoo closed the sale of half of its stake in Chinese Internet company Alibaba Group. Yahoo said it would give shareholders $3 billion of the deal's $4.3 billion in after-tax proceeds.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday that will pave the way for driverless cars in California.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday that will pave the way for driverless cars in California.

The bill by Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla will establish safety and performance regulations to test and operate autonomous vehicles on state roads and highways.

The governor signed it at the Mountain View headquarters of Google Inc., which has been developing autonomous car technology and lobbying for the regulations.

Self-driving cars might sound like science fiction, but they are already cruising California's roads and could become sold commercially within the next decade.

Google's fleet of a dozen computer-controlled vehicles — mostly Toyota Priuses equipped with self-driving technology — has logged more than 300,000 miles of self-driving without an accident, the company said.

Autonomous cars use computers, sensors and other technology to operate independently, but a "driver" can override the autopilot function and take control of the vehicle at any time.

With smartphone-wielding drivers more distracted than ever, backers say robotic vehicles have the potential to make roads significantly safer, noting that nearly all car accidents are a result of human error.

The legislation requires the California Department of Motor Vehicles to draft regulations for autonomous vehicles by Jan. 1, 2015. Currently, state law doesn't mention self-driving cars because the technology is so new.

The regulations would allow vehicles to operate autonomously, but a licensed driver would still need to sit behind the wheel to serve as a backup operator in case of emergency.

The legislation is also aimed at keeping California at the forefront of the autonomous car industry since Stanford University and Silicon Valley companies have been working on the technology for years.

In February, Nevada became the first U.S. state to approve regulations spelling out requirements for companies to test driverless cars on that state's roads.

In recent years, automakers have been introducing autonomous functions such as self-parking, lane departure warnings and adaptive cruise-control, which allows vehicles to automatically accelerate and decelerate with the flow of traffic.

Carmakers such as Audi AG, BMW AG, Ford Motor Co. and Volvo have been working on autonomous car technology for years, and experts say commercial vehicles could feature an "autopilot" function in as few as five

5 Million iPhone 5 sold

Apple Inc. said Monday that it sold more than 5 million iPhone 5s in the three days since its launch, fewer than analysts had expected.

Oracle pay for CEO Ellison jumps to $96 million

Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corp. and one of the wealthiest people in the world, saw his pay jump to $96.2 million last year.

The pay, disclosed in a corporate filing, was up 24 percent from the previous year's total of $77.6 million. Most of Ellison's pay came from stock options that were valued at $90.7 million when they were granted in June 2011.

Those options, to buy 7 million shares at $32.43 a share, have value only if the stock is trading above that price. The options have been under water for most of the time since they were granted. But on Friday, Oracle stock rose 21 cents to close at $32.47.

The company cut Ellison's performance-based bonus to $3.9 million, down from $13.3 million a year earlier. Other senior executives endured similar cuts. That was because Oracle's profit growth for the year came in below its goals, according to the yearly filing it made Friday.

Oracle's net income rose 17 percent to $9.98 billion for the year that ended May 31. Revenue rose 4 percent to $37.12 billion.

The company said compensation was $51.7 million for both Safra A. Catz, its president and chief financial officer, and Mark Hurd, its president. Nearly all their pay was also in stock options that had little value as of Friday.

Oracle said its compensation committee recognizes that Ellison, 68, already "has a significant equity interest in Oracle, but believes he should still be eligible for an annual compensation package because of his active and vital role in our operations, strategy and growth."

Ellison's salary was only $1 for the year that ended May 31, 2012, unchanged from the previous year.

Forbes this week estimated Ellison's net worth at $41 billion. That ranked him as the sixth-richest person in the world and the third-richest in the United States, behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

The Associated Press' calculation isolates the value the company's board placed on the executive's total compensation package in the last fiscal year. It includes salary, bonus, performance-related bonuses, perks, above-market returns on deferred compensation and the estimated value of stock options and awards granted.

The calculation doesn't include changes in the present value of pension benefits. And they sometimes differ from the totals that companies list in the summary compensation table of proxy statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The statements to the SEC reflect accounting charges taken for the executive's compensation in the previous fiscal year. C

Space Shuttle Endeavor Past West LA to LAX

A German court has dismissed Apple Inc.'s claim that Samsung Electronics and Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility infringed patents used in touch-screen devices.

BERLIN (AP) — A German court has dismissed Apple Inc.'s claim that Samsung Electronics and Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility infringed patents used in touch-screen devices.

The Mannheim state court's ruling Friday follows similar decisions in Britain and the Netherlands.

The ruling can be appealed within 30 days.

Apple and its rivals are locked in a complex worldwide battle over patents and design rights covering the lucrative market for smartphones and tablet computers.

Last month a U.S. court ruled that Samsung phones and tablets infringe on Apple patents, and awarded the Cupertino, California, company $1.05 billion.

Meanwhile, Samsung is seeking royalties from Apple for sales of iPhones it says infringe on its patents.

IPhone 5 AD

Google to pass Facebook in display ads

 Google is expected to surpass Facebook in display advertising revenue this year, beating all other competitors with a 15.4 percent share of the U.S. market, according to a closely followed research firm.

EMarketer said Thursday that it expects Google Inc. to generate $2.31 billion in revenue from online display ads — the graphical advertisements people see on websites. Display ads are more lucrative than the text-based advertisements that appear next to search results and account for the bulk of Google's revenue.

The New York-based research firm predicts Facebook Inc. will hold 14.4 percent of the market this year with $2.16 billion in U.S. revenue.

In February, eMarketer predicted Facebook would stay ahead of Google. The social networking company had surpassed Google a year earlier. But Facebook's ad revenue has fallen short of the expectations it set in February, just months before its initial public offering.

Google, eMarketer said, is helped by strength in its advertising network, video ads on YouTube and AdMob, the mobile advertising service it bought in 2010. Facebook began showing mobile ads to users only as recent as this year.

In all, eMarketer expects the display advertisement market to grow 21.5 percent this year to nearly $15 billion in the U.S., helped by both Facebook and Google. By 2014, the two rivals are expected hold as much as 37 percent of the market, making it difficult for smaller players.

In 2011, Facebook had a 14.1 percent share of the $12.4 billion U.S. display advertising market according to eMarketer, above Google's 13.5 percent. A year earlier, though, Yahoo Inc. held the lead with 14 percent of the market. By 2014, eMarketer expects Yahoo's share to be half that. In the coming years, market share among former online powerhouses such as Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft is likely to decrease as Google and Facebook grow, according to eMarketer.

Facebook's stock slid 39 cents to $22.90 in morning trading. Google dropped $3.68 to $723.82.

Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebookand other Internet companies have formed a lobbying group calledThe Internet Association

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebookand other Internet companies have formed a lobbying group calledThe Internet Association to tackle regulatory and political issues in Washington, D.C., and it is due to kick off on Wednesday.

It will lobby on issues such as allocation of visas for engineers and matters of privacy and piracy, said the group's president Michael Beckerman, a former advisor to Fred Upton, the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee.

Other members include Expedia, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide,Yahoo! and Zynga.

Formation of the group marks a stronger alliance of Internet companies as they try to influence regulations pertaining to revenue repatriation, cyber security, and sales tax.

"It is the Internet's decentralized and open model that has unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurialism," said Beckerman. "Policymakers must understand that the preservation of that freedom is essential to the vitality of the Internet itself and the resulting economic prosperity."

Google and Facebook are among the companies that have been steadily ramping up spending on lobbying the federal government. Older tech companies, like Microsoft, have long been active in Washington.

Google, which is being investigated by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe, has lobbied officials at the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Commerce, according to disclosure forms.

Facebook has lobbied regarding online privacy and immigration reform while also talking to lawmakers and their staffs about matters concerning initial public offerings.

In May, Facebook became the first U.S. company to go public with a market valuation above $100 billion. Its market debut was marred by technological problems on the NASDAQ exchange and criticism that the IPO was priced too high.

Congress.gov search engine

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congress unveiled a new search engineWednesday to help politicos, lobbyists, researchers, students and any other interested citizens find legislation working its way through the House and Senate to become new laws.

The Library of Congress says the new website Congress.gov is in beta form and will eventually replace the THOMAS legislative search system after a year of fine-tuning the new system.

The new site is more like Google, with one box to search all data. It can filter search results like a shopping site with categories of merchandise. In this case, it can narrow search results by year, by subject, by House or Senate or other factors.

Congress.gov also is mobile friendly for Capitol Hill staffers glued to their Blackberries. It was built with responsive design technology to automatically rearrange a search screen to fit on a smartphone.

This is Congress' first new search engine since THOMAS was launched in 1995 after just three weeks of development when the Internet was in its infancy.

"It's like comparing a tricycle to a Cadillac," said Jim Karamanis, the library's chief of web services, before a test drive of the new site. "The web was not very advanced" when THOMAS was created.

THOMAS, named for Thomas Jefferson, gets 10 million visits each year. But the library found many users outside the political world didn't know what THOMAS was. The 17-year-old search systembecame slow and outdated, and it required insider knowledge to navigate.

For example, a search of "health care reform" on THOMAS only scans bill summaries for actions in the current Congress, and it returns a funding bill among other results — not President Barack Obama's signature health care law. Searching past congressional actions is a separate function, and finding the text of a bill is three links deep in the old site.

The new search engine, built by the library's tech and legislative experts, is more intuitive, designers said. It was developed entirely in-house with open source technology. Contracting out the project would have likely cost millions.

Now a search of "health care reform" on the new site scans bill texts, summaries and statuses and all available congressional years at the same time. Obama's health care law immediately rises to the top of the results.

It offers an easier identification of a bill's current status and new biographical profiles and legislative histories of each member of Congress.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who chairs a committee overseeing the library, said the new site allows people with different levels of expertise to follow developments and proposals in Congress. Rep. Dan Lungren of California said it would enhance transparency and save the library money. The old system has become costly to maintain.

For the first time, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing will be able to easily retrieve information from the site. The old system couldn't handle outside search engines crawling the site, except for a more limited indexing by Google.

Another big improvement: Web addresses for searches on Congress.gov will be permanent, standardized and can be shared. That means details on legislation could be shared from the site on e-mail, Facebook or Twitter — further elevating how they would appear in Google searches, Karamanis said.

By January, the library plans to add the full Congressional Record: every word spoken by senators and representatives in congressional debates.

When designers showed focus groups the new features, "there were audible oohs and ahs," project manager Tammie Nelson said. Still, she wants to hear feedback on the new site to help refine it over the next year.

The library predicts many users to make the switch quickly, but some will be sad to see the THOMAS name retired.

"I actually apologized to Thomas Jefferson at his memorial," Nelson said. "But we'll do him right, and we'll have a tribute when we retire the name."

___

Online:

http://www.congress.gov

Google refused to remove anti-muslim vedio, which caused the death of US ambassdor to Lybia

AN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc rejected a request by the White House on Friday to reconsider its decision to keep online a controversial YouTube movie clip that has ignited anti-American protests in the Middle East.

The Internet company said it was censoring the video in India and Indonesia after blocking it on Wednesday in Egypt and Libya, where U.S. embassies have been stormed by protestors enraged over depiction of the Prophet Mohammad as a fraud and philanderer.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in a fiery siege on the embassy in Benghazi.

Google said was further restricting the clip to comply with local law rather than as a response to political pressure.

"We've restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, as well as in Libya and Egypt, given the very sensitive situations in these two countries," the company said. "This approach is entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007."

White House officials had asked Google earlier on Friday to reconsider whether the video had violated YouTube's terms of service. The guidelines can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines.

Google said on Wednesday that the video was within its guidelines.

U.S. authorities said on Friday that they were investigating whether the film's producer, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year old Egyptian Coptic Christian living in Southern California, had violated terms of his prison release. Basseley was convicted in 2010 for bank fraud and released from prison on probation last June.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Toni Reinhold)

Yahoo sold half of Alibaba holding for $7.6 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Yahoo has completed a long-awaited $7.6 billion deal with China's Alibaba Group, generating a windfall that could help ease the pain of Yahoo shareholders who have endured the company's foibles during the past few years.

After Yahoo distributes most of the proceeds to its shareholders, its recently hired CEO Marissa Mayer will still have an extra $1.3 billion to finance acquisitions or hire new talent as she tries revive the company's revenue growth.

Tuesday's resolution comes four months after Yahoo Inc. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. outlined the details of a complex transaction that took more than two years of on-again, off-again negotiations to hammer out. The deal will give Alibaba greater autonomy as it prepares to pursue an initial public offering of stock within the next three years, while rewarding Yahoo for one of the few moves that has gone right for the troubled company in the past few years.

Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba in 2005 and is now reaping a huge return. Alibaba is paying $7.1 billion in cash and stock to buy back half of Yahoo's holdings. Another $550 million is being paid to Yahoo under a revised technology and patent licensing agreement with Alibaba.

After paying taxes, Yahoo estimates it will pocket about $4.3 billion to supplement the $1.9 billion in cash the company had as of June 30.

Yahoo, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., plans to spend about $3 billion of the Alibaba proceeds buying back its own stock in the upcoming months, leaving Mayer with some financial flexibility to pay for other items on her turnaround agenda.

"This yields a substantial return for investors while retaining a meaningful amount of capital within the company to invest in future growth," Mayer said in a statement.

The decision on how to handle the proceeds may have reflected a compromise between Mayer and Yahoo's board.

Before hiring Mayer away from Google in July, Yahoo had pledged to distribute virtually all of the proceeds from the Alibaba sale to its shareholders.

But the company wavered from that stance last month when it filed regulatory documents disclosing that Mayer was considering holding on to the money to help carry out her vision for Yahoo. Without providing specifics, the documents said Mayer was mulling possible acquisitions.

Analysts have speculated that Mayer may try to make a big splash by putting together a takeover offer for one of the Internet's hot websites, such as online scrapbook Pinterest or check-in service Foursquare

Another big payoff looms for Yahoo when Alibaba goes public, an event expected by the end of 2015. Alibaba, which owns China's version of eBay and e-commerce sites, has the right to buy back half of Yahoo's remaining 23 percent stake before the IPO. Yahoo then could chose to sell its remaining Alibaba stock after the shares begin trading.

Alibaba currently has a market value of about $40 billion, based on the prices paid for the stock that the company recently sold to raise enough money to finance the Yahoo deal. Yahoo, in contrast, has a market value of less than $20 billion.

A big chunk of Yahoo's value remains locked up in Alibaba. Based on Alibaba's market value and the preferred shares it just picked up, Yahoo is still sitting on Alibaba stock worth about $8.9 billion. That amount will increase if Alibaba is able to continue to thrive as more people in China get online access.

"The completion of this transaction begins a new chapter in our relationship with Yahoo," Alibaba CEO Jack Ma said in a statement.

While Alibaba has been growing, Yahoo has been shrinking. The contraction has occurred even as the advertisers that provide most of Yahoo's revenue have been spending more money on the Internet. Most of that online marketing has been flowing to Internet search leader Google Inc. and, to a lesser extent, Facebook Inc.'s popular social network.

Yahoo's financial funk has depressed its stock for years, increasing the pressure on the company's management to extract money from its Alibaba investment to reward its shareholders.

Since beginning its discussions with Alibaba in 2010, Yahoo has had five CEOs, including two interim leaders. The deal head already been agreed upon in May, while Yahoo was being run by Ross Levinsohn, who left shortly after the company hired Mayer in July.

Although Mayer is highly regarded in the Internet industry, investors still seem skeptical about whether she can find a way to pump up a stock that has been stuck below $20 for the past four years. The stock was trading around $35 when Yahoo invested in Alibaba seven years ago.

Yahoo shares added 22 cents, or 1.4 percent, to end Tuesday's session at $15.90. That's about the same level where the shares stood when Mayer took the helm. The technology-driven Nasdaq composite index has climbed 10 percent during the same period while the broader Standard & Poor's 500 has risen by 8 percent.

Buying back stock could boost Yahoo's stock by reducing the company's outstanding shares. With fewer shares trading, it w

Potential Facebook competitors in Asia?

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A handful of smartphone apps that began as basic instant messaging services have amassed several hundred million users in Asia in just a couple of years, mounting a challenge to the popularity of online hangouts such as Facebook as they branch into games, e-commerce, celebrity news and other areas.

Among them is Line, which has grown to 60 million users, mostly in Asia including at least 29 million in Japan. Its developer estimates the number of users will reach 100 million by the end of this year. Also popular is Kakao Talk with 60 million users, more than half in South Korea where it originates. Other successful messengers are Nimbuzz made by an India-based firm which has amassed 100 million users including 31 million in Asia, and WeChat by China-based Tencent, which is nearing 200 million users.

The rapid growth of such applications underlines that people are increasingly going online using mobile phones and other wireless devices. It is a trend that has proved problematic for the world's most popular social networking site. Facebook has lost more than $50 billion of its market value since its initial public offering largely due to doubts about its ability to successfully insert advertising into the mobile version that a large and growing number of its 955 million users access from smartphones.

"Japan, Korea and to a lesser extent China are leading the way in terms of mobile messaging-centric apps that move into diverse and potentially very profitable new service areas like gaming, affiliate marketing, next-generation emoticons," said analyst Mark Ranson at research firm Ovum. "Offering a free, high quality messaging service is a good way of building a large and loyal user base which can later be introduced to more readily monetizeable services."

Instant messaging, also known as IM, was first popularized on desktop computers with applications such as Microsoft Messenger that evolved from text-based chatting and sharing files to the voice calls and video conferencing that Skype is known for. The advent of smartphones took IM back to basics with services such as WhatsApp and Blackberry Messenger that allowed for real-time chatting, swapping photos and not much else. The new instant messaging apps such as Line have evolved into online destinations in their own right.

"I use Line messenger every day, about every hour ... instead of text messages or emails," Supinda Toochinda, a 31-year-old interior designer in Bangkok, said in an email. She said Line was the only mobile application she'd spent money with, buying elaborate emoticons called stickers that can be sent to friends while chatting.

Part of the appeal of the applications is the ability to create an unlimited number of group chats and the ease with which connections can be made — the apps automatically create a contacts list by harvesting the contacts list saved in the phone. At the same time, managing privacy is simpler than on a social networking site.

Analysts say these mobile messengers are showing more nimble and promising moves in the efforts to make such mobile services profitable without relying solely on advertising.

"Kakao Talk and Line are seeing opportunities as Facebook isn't making money from users of its mobile website and app," said Ryu Han-seok, director of the Technology, Labor and Culture Institute, a consulting company, in Seoul. "In the mobile markets in Asia, they are ahead of the game."

"It is probably tough to compete with Facebook in the U.S. or Europe. But in Japan, South Korea and other Asian countries, they have a good chance of beating Facebook," said Ryu.

While Line messenger is expanding to photo editing and sharing, social games and Twitter-like features that allow users to follow corporate brands or celebrities, its windfall came from sales of virtual goods. Sales of stickers — a $1.99 bundle of cute pictures of cartoon characters or animals — have been its biggest revenue generator. In August, users spent about $3 million to send the elaborate emoticons when they chat with friends.

Kakao Talk, which is only accessible on mobile devices, says it is trying to develop a business model that isn't dependent on advertising. Since its launch in 2010, it has added a free voice calling service, a gift shop to send Starbucks drink coupons to friends, and options for receiving weather and news, discount vouchers and music videos.

"We are not interested in displaying mobile banner ads just to make money," Kakao Inc. CEO Sirgoo Lee said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The app has been wildly popular in South Korea. Even a small disruption in service makes news and it has entered the local lexicon with the phrase "let's do ka talk." South Koreans are typically connected to multiple group chats on Kakao Talk, holding conversations in separate chat rooms with family, a group of close friends, co-workers and other circles.

According to Appsooni.com, which compiles data on Android applications, South Koreans used Kakao Talk for 62 minutes a day on average in August, compared with 17 minutes on Facebook's Android application.

In a move seen as bringing the three-year-old startup close to generating a profit, Kakao introduced mobile games to its users in July.

"Giving gifts or sending emoticons are business models that Facebook doesn't have. Facebook simply displays ads so its model is different from ours. (Facebook's) profit models are not tailored for mobile users," Lee said.

_

Net zero home created to test 2 adaults and 2 kids (8 and 12) 4000sqft home consuming zero energy from outside

GAITHERSBURG, Maryland (Reuters) - Perched on a hilltop outside Washington, the U.S. government's net-zero energy laboratory looks a lot like the luxury houses nearby, with two significant differences: it will make as much energy as it uses, and only sensors, not people, live in it.

Designed to fit in a typical residential neighborhood, the 4,000 square foot (372 square metre) net-zero lab on the suburban campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology is so energy-efficient that over the course of a year it is expected to produce as much energy as it needs.

Its total energy consumption should be "net zero."

To measure energy use, researchers at NIST have created a virtual family of four - two imaginary working parents, a 14-year-old and an 8-year-old - and scripted their every meal, move and shower. The energy use of this typical family will be monitored.

Sensors and computer programs will simulate virtual people entering the living area or moving from room to room, taking a bath, cooking a meal, turning on a computer, a television or a toaster. The appliances and plumbing do exist and are controlled from a command center of sorts, located in the detached garage.

Small devices will simulate the heat and humidity that actual humans produce in the two-story, four-bedroom structure.

"This family is very cooperative, they do exactly what we want them to do, every minute of the day," Hunter Fanney, chief of NIST's Building Environment Lab, said at the project's official launch last week.

To gauge water use, the master bedroom's shower is fitted with a scale. Step into the shower stall and onto the scale, and a weight read-out appears outside. When the lab is in use, the system will figure out by weight whether the virtual parents or children are taking a shower, and how much hot water they use.

The simulations assume that the 14-year-old will take the longest showers, Fanney said.

TESTING ENERGY-SIPPING TECHNOLOGY

Solar panels on the roof generate electricity and heat water. There are no roof gutters, partly as an aesthetic statement, but also because the lab-house is surrounded by a deep layer of gravel through which rainwater can percolate.

The garage is built across a breezeway from the main house so all the heat from the monitoring equipment doesn't add to the lab's energy load. There's an electrical outlet for an electric car and a wheelchair lift that allows no-stair access to the main floor of the building.

This is not the only net-zero house in the United States, but it is the first created to look and feel like an amenity-filled suburban home, according to NIST. Most net-zero homes make it to net-zero by cutting down on size and amenities.

A house similar to the lab was built in Concord, Massachusetts, for about $600,000, exclusive of the cost of the land, said Betsy Pettit of Building Science Corporation.

A lower-cost not-quite-net-zero home was built for Habitat for Humanity for about $150,000, Pettit said, but that one was about 1,200 square feet (111 square metres), less than one-third the size of the NIST lab.

NIST's lab cost $2.5 million, because it will do more than monitor energy use, and the monitoring equipment is costly; after the first year, it will be a test bed for new technology.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which made environmentally friendly construction a priority, almost every component of the structure was made in the United States.

The one exception was an air exchanger made in Canada. The project got a waiver to buy it when this item could not be found in the United States, a NIST spokeswoman said.

More information and images can be found online at www.nist.gov/el/nzertf/index.cfm

(This story was refiled to fix website link at end of story)

Amazon developing its own mapping services

Amazon is developing its own mapping API, the retail giant announced Monday, just days before Apple is set to release its own mapping service to the public as part of iOS 6. The announcement confirms earlier reports that Amazon had acquired 3D mapping application UpNext earlier this summer for that exact purpose.

[More from Mashable: Conan O’Brien Debuts $5 Amazon ‘Wendell’ Tablet [VIDEO] ]

Both Apple and Amazon, as well as third-party developers, have until recently relied on Google's Maps API to power location-based applications on iOS and Kindle Fire devices. Apple has also used a native Maps application powered by Google that will not make its way to iOS 6. Amazon's original Kindle Fire did not come pre-installed with any mapping application.

The move further sets Amazon's Kindle Fire devices apart from other tablets that run less customized versions of Android . It's biggest effect will be on developers releasing apps with mapping or location-based features for the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. Amazon promises the transition will be "easy" for developers, but it's one more step they have to make to ensure their applications run smoothly on Amazon's devices.

[More from Mashable: IMDB’s Error Page May Be the World’s Most Quotable]

Amazon is also setting the stage for its own location-based advertising business. Amazon is clearly interested in ad revenue opportunities, if the display ads it has plastered on the screensavers of its Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets are anything to go by.

Interestingly, neither the original Kindle Fire nor its upcoming Kindle Fire HD have GPS capabilities, though many will be able to take advantage of location services using a Wi-Fi connection.

Tax free online buying is over in California

Startinng from 12:01am, sept 15, online retailer like Amazon must collect tax for California from 7.25% to 9.75%

Apple worths $648B. The highest valued firm in history

Wii U is coming in Novenber

Future healthcare Cloud Medicine ?

Facebook helps get out the vote

Iphone 5 has a taller screen

Apple is holding an event in San Francisco during which it announced a new iPhone, capable of faster data speeds and sporting a taller screen. It also unveiled new iTunes software and new iPod devices.

The iPhone 5 will go on sale next week. It will work with fourth-generation, or 4G, cellular networks, something Samsung's Galaxy S III and many other iPhone rivals already do.

Apple Inc. is also updating its phone software and will ditch Google Inc.'s mapping service for its own. The two have become bitter rivals as Google promotes phones running its Android operating system.

In anticipation, several gadget makers refreshed their lineups last week, hoping to upstage Apple. Nokia Corp. and Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility division announced five new smartphones between them, while Amazon.com Inc. updated its Kindle Fire tablet computer and announced new stand-alone e-reader models.

Sales of Apple's iPhones are still strong, though the company lost the lead in smartphones to Samsung this year.

Samsung Electronics Co. benefited from having its S III out in the U.S. in June, while Apple was still selling an iPhone model it released last October. A new iPhone will allow Apple to recapture the attention and the revenue. Analysts are already estimating that Apple will sell 8 million to 10 million iPhone 5s before the company's quarter ends Sept. 30.

Even if consumers swarm stores to buy the device, the iPhone has been trailing Android phones in sales. On Tuesday, Google executive Hugo Barra declared on his Google Plus social networking page that 1.3 million Android phones are added each day, with 500 million devices activated globally. As of June, Apple has sold 244 million iPhones since the first one came out in 2007.

Apple's event Wednesday took place at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater, where the company has held many product launches.

Here's a running account of the event, presented in reverse chronological order. All times are PDT. Appearances were made by CEO Tim Cook; Philip Schiller, the senior vice president for worldwide marketing; Scott Forstall, senior vice president for mobile software; Eddy Cue, senior vice president

Roosevelt Island: New York’s New Tech Hub

Jul 30, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Will New York’s latest dream spawn the next Mark Zuckerberg?

In a sliver of land in New York City’s East River, where a lunatic asylum and smallpox hospital once stood, banners proclaim with unabashed assurance (or chutzpah): “Roosevelt Island: A Fresh Look at the Big Apple.”

The bleak cityscape on the lower half of the island, accessible by cable car and occupied by a hospital for convalescents with battered bricks and rusting air conditioners, will soon be home to a complex of buildings intended to transform the island from an image of urban decay to a bold statement about 21st-century urban design—and transform New York City into an enduring 21st-century economic powerhouse.

In an unprecedented cooperative venture between City Hall, Cornell University, and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, ground is about to be broken for a top-flight technology campus that Mayor Michael Bloomberg promises will give other hubs of entrepreneurial science around the country, and indeed the world, “a run for their money.”

For the moment, the campus exists as an interinstitutional agreement, some architectural drawings, and the glimmer in the eye of an ambitious city executive who made his own vast personal fortune with information technology. (“This is going to be a very big hit,” says Bloomberg, as of course he would.) But deliberately and relentlessly, the Big Apple has, in the last few years, been going after the same kind of power and preeminence in high technology that it enjoys in so many other fields; and the graduate school is a key to City Hall’s strategic plan for digital conquest.

To realize the project, the city will provide much of the land and about $100 million in funding. Add to that a huge donation by Chuck Feeney, an 81-year-old duty-free magnate and Cornell alumnus, who has put up $350 million to see the first stage of construction through to completion. Early drawings of what it might look like (such as the one shown here) were impressive. But the noted Los Angeles–based architect Thom Mayne, who created the provocative, twisted, and torn Cooper Union building in the East Village, is expected to make it spectacular.

Until the complex is built, however, students at what’s now called CornellNYC Tech will be studying in the big old brick building in Chelsea that Google bought for almost $2 billion two years ago: an outpost of the West Coast’s mellow intensity under the roof of the enormous structure that used to house the Port Authority in Manhattan. (It’s even got some real-life chutes and ladders for techies who want to have a little fun getting from one floor to another. The reviews on Google+ declare it, not surprisingly, “awesome.”)

An early Cornell–Technion team rendering of the project to build a tech hub on Roosevelt Island. (Photo Illustration by Cornell University-SOM-Getty Images)

The graduate curriculum is designed to draw on talent and innovation in the many fields—global finance, medicine, media, design, and fashion—where New York City is already a powerhouse. Greg Pass, a former Chief Technology Officer at Twitter who’s signed on with the Cornell–Technion team to help bring entrepreneurship into the mix, says the project offers “a huge opportunity to disrupt the higher-educational model.”

If New York has yet to make its mark in digital innovation the way Silicon Valley has done—with Stanford as its engine of innovation, or even Boston, with MIT—some vital trends are moving in its direction. “You’ve got to understand how big we are,” says Bloomberg, citing an encounter with a friend from Boston who told him, when the Roosevelt Island project was first being proposed, “Oh, you’ll never succeed because Boston is the education capital of the country.” Bloomberg says he told his friend bluntly: “New York City has more undergraduate and graduate college students than Boston has people.” That, he said with a chuckle, “sort of ended that argument.”

Like Google, with its $2 billion Chelsea building, some of the most important tech companies have been looking east. Twitter opened major offices on Madison Avenue last year, and eBay announced in May that it’s moving some of its units to the Flatiron neighborhood. “They want to be in a big city,” where, culturally, intellectually, financially, there are “more of the best and the brightest,” says Bloomberg. “If intellectual capital is what you need, New York City is where you want to be.”

Pass, who was packing up his house in San Francisco when I reached him on the phone, said New York offers something new. “There already is a Silicon Valley with its outcomes,” he says. “The fact that the culture is different is positive.”

GoDaddy was down - millions of websites went down as well

NEW YORK (AP) — Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours on Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.

A Twitter feed that claimed to be affiliated with the "Anonymous" hacker group said it was behind the outage, but this couldn't be confirmed. Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.

GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said the outage began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT. By around 5:50 p.m. EDT, the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up and running. Driscoll had said the company was investigating the cause.

GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses. Websites that were complaining on Twitter about outages included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.

Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who operates the site YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to stop sending emails with her website link in them while the outage was ongoing. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.

"If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent," said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already shopping around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy's customer service.

Earlier, Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses weren't working either.

"We run our entire business through websites and emails," Borg said.

The business even takes orders from its two physical stores through the Web, so clerks had to use their personal email addresses to send in orders to the printing shop, causing an administrative headache, Borg said.

Borg said he could empathize to some extent with the hacker, if one was involved. GoDaddy was a target for "hacktivists" early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics say they would result in censorship and discourage Internet innovation.

"I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he's going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I don't think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company.

HP cut more jobs - 29000 by October 2014

NEW YORK (AP) — Hewlett-Packard is planning to cut about 2,000 more jobs than it had previously announced, as CEO Meg Whitman tries to turn the company around.

In a regulatory filing Monday, the computer and printer maker says it will cut 29,000 jobs by October 2014, up from the 27,000 cuts it announced in May.

It didn't explain why it had raised the number. As before, it expects some of the job cuts to come through an early retirement program.

The company also says it expects to record charges of $3.7 billion, mainly for the job cuts. That's up from the May estimate of $3.5 billion.

Last month, HP posted the largest loss in its 73-year history. It's been hit by the shift in technology spending from PCs and printers towards cellphones and tablets.

LG front-runs Sony with ultra-definition 84-in TV

LG says an 84-inch TV that has four times the resolution of standard HDTVs is going to be in stores in October for $20,000.

That means LG Electronics USA is pushing out its set with so-called "4K" resolution before Sony Corp., which will have a similar set in stores in December for $25,000.

The set's resolution will be 3,840 by 2,160 pixels, which compares with 1920 by 1080 pixels for today's best HDTVs.

There is, for now, very little video content available that can take advantage of the higher resolution. There are no cable or satellite channels at that resolution, and Blu-ray discs max out at HDTV resolution.

LG warns that if and when a standard for "4K" broadcasts is developed, these first sets may not be compatible.

WebCubic New Website launched

WebCubic.Com

Amazon New Kindle - Amazon's new 7-inch Kindle Fire: twice the RAM, faster processor, longer battery life, $159

SANTA MONICA, Calif. (AP) — Amazon.com Inc. refreshed itsKindle line of gadgets on Thursday. It updated its Kindle Fire tablet computer and announced new stand-alone e-reader models.

The Fire will be an effort to take a larger share of a tablet computer market dominated by Apple's iPad. It could helpAmazon boost sales of digital goods such as e-books and movies.

The event came a day after Nokia Corp. and Google Inc.'s Motorola Mobility division announced five new smartphones between them. The two from Nokia will be the company's first to run the next version of Windows.

Consumer electronics makers are trying to generate interest in their products now, before Apple announces a new iPhone and possibly a mini iPad next week.

The Amazon event took place at a former airplane hangar in Santa Monica, Calif., with CEO Jeff Bezos presiding.

Here's a running account of the event, presented in reverse chronological order. All times are PDT.

___

11:55 a.m.

Just before the event ended, Amazon unveiled another Kindle Fire model, one with the ability to connect to the 4G cellular networks that phone companies are building. It will cost $499 and come with 32 gigabytes of memory and an 8.9-inch screen. A data plan will cost $50 a year.

___

11:50 a.m.

Amazon is revealing prices for the HD models. A 7-inch model will sell for $199 and ship next Friday. An 8.9-inch model will go for $299 and start shipping Nov. 20.

Amazon has pursued a strategy of selling lower-priced tablets at thin, if any, profit margins in order to boost sales of digital items from its online store. It's akin practically giving away shavers to sell razor blades later.

___

11:40 a.m.

Amazon unveiled a slew of other features.

There's "Immersion Reading," where Kindle books can be synchronized with Audible audiobooks. It lets you read and listen at the same time.

There's also "X-Ray for Movies" on the Kindle Fire HD, where you can tap the screen at any time to find out who the actor is. That uses the IMDb database service owned by Amazon.

"Whispersync for Games," meanwhile, will let you pick up where you left off when playing games.

The Fire will also come with parental controls, adjustable by content. A kid may have free reign on books but have limits on games, TV and movies, for instance. Different time limits can be set for different kids.

There's also a front-facing camera for the first time, and it can be used with a custom app for the video chat service Skype. The iPad has two cameras, which is useful for videoconferencing.

___

11:30 a.m.

Amazon is coming out with a high-end version of the Kindle Fire. Called Kindle Fire HD, it will have two Wi-Fi channels for faster transfers. That will be crucial for high-definition movies and other large files, Bezos said.

The HD model will also have more storage, starting at 16 gigabytes, compared with 6 GB for the old Fire. It wasn't immediately clear what the updated basic model will come with. The iPad also starts at 16 GB.

Bezos notes that the operating system takes up about 2 gigabytes, leaving an 8 GB model with just 6 GB.

"For a high-def device, 8 GB is dead on arrival," Bezos said.

___

11:20 a.m.

Amazon is updating its Kindle Fire tablet computer as it steps up competition with Apple's iPad. It will cost $159, down from $199 for the old model. It will start shipping next Friday.

That model will have a 7-inch screen, like the original one, but Amazon also revealed that other Fire models will be bigger at 8.9 inches on the diagonal. That's only slightly smaller than the iPad's 9.7 inches.

"We decided to go big," Bezos said.

The bigger Fire comes as Apple is believed to be working on a smaller version of its iPad, possibly at 7.85 inches.

___

11:10 a.m.

Amazon has introduced a new program called Kindle Serials. The idea is you buy a book once and get future installments automatically, without additional fees. Amazon will reissue Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" in serial form, for instance.

Amazon's stock hit its highest level ever Thursday, $252.28. The stock was up $3.42, or 1.4 percent, at $249.64 in afternoon trading during the announcement.

___

11:05 a.m.

Amazon is dropping the price of its low-end Kindle to $69, from $79. That will start shipping next Friday.

It's also unveiling a new feature that times your reading speed and tells you how much time you need to finish the chapter and the book.

___

11 a.m.

The first of the products Amazon unveiled wasn't the Fire tablet, but a stand-alone e-book reader. It has a black-and-white screen and is called Paperwhite.

It promises 25 percent more contrast. Bezos said "the whites are whiter, and the blacks are blacker."

The Paperwhite has a light source. Bezos says the device is "perfect in direct sunlight." Tablets such as the iPad and the Fire don't work as well in bright light because they are lit from the back. Bezos says the light on the Paperwhite is directed down at the display.

The device promises eight weeks of battery life, even with the light on.

It costs $119 and starts shipping Oct. 1. Amazon says it will start taking orders Thursday. There's also a model with 3G cellular connections for $179.

___

10:50 a.m.

Bezos has begun to talk about the Kindle Fire. He called it a service rather than a gadget — a reference to the fact that the tablet is about selling movies, TV shows and other digital content fromAmazon's store. Just a few days earlier, Amazon had announced a new content distribution deal with pay-TV channel Epix.

"People don't want gadgets anymore," Bezos said. "They want services. They want services that improve over time. They want services that get better."

___

10:45 a.m.

The music stops. An Amazon ad appears on screen, and Bezos appears on stage wearing a dark blue suit and a white shirt, with no tie.

"We love to invent," Bezos declared.

___

10:30 a.m.

The hangar is crammed with about 200 journalists awaiting the announcement. It's draped in black velvet as "Show Me The Light" by the Mystery Jets plays. Amazon's logo is on a huge screen at the front.