Apple sells one in six US laptops
Apple was the US' third biggest retail laptop vendor in June, market watcher NPD has revealed. The Mac maker is behind only HP and Toshiba, but ahead of Dell, Gateway and Lenovo. NPD said that Apple took 17.6% of the US laptop retail market in June, up from 14.3% in May and pushing it past the previous number three, Gateway. NPD only measures sales through retailers sales, so Apple's likely to have fared less well if the wider resale and direct-to-buyer channels are taken into account. However, figures released last month by market watcher IDC showed Apple's overall US market share, while only 5.6%, nonetheless put it in joint third-place. Both figures show Apple is clearly riding the wave of buyers shifting from desktops to laptops. It updated both its MacBook and MacBook Pro machines during Q2 - a move that NPD said had fuelled the jump in market share. It will also stand the Mac maker in good stead, the research company added, as the US market moves into the back-to-school sales period.

Chicago scraps plans for Wi-Fi network
An ambitious plan to blanket the city with wireless broadband Internet will be shelved because it is too costly and too few residents would use it, Chicago officials said Tuesday. "We realized — after much consideration — that we needed to reevaluate our approach to provide universal and affordable access to high speed Internet as part of the city's broader digital inclusion efforts," Chicago's chief information officer, Hardik Bhatt, said in a statement. The plan to blanket Chicago's 228 square miles with wireless Internet access was announced early last year when Chicago leaders said they hoped to become one of the largest cities to offer all-over access to the Web. Instead, the city said its negotiations with private-sector partners, including EarthLink Inc., have stalled because any citywide Wi-Fi would require massive public financing. The city had hoped to provide only infrastructure for the network. About 175 U.S. cities or regions have citywide or partial systems.. Meanwhile, Chicago will be among the first three cities nationwide to have access to a new high-speed wireless network that's part of an emerging technology called WiMax. Sprint Nextel Corp. announced plans this spring to offer wireless Internet speeds that match DSL and cable TV modems. WiMax is derived from the same technology as Wi-Fi. Unlike Wi-Fi, which provides wireless Internet access over a several-hundred-foot range, a WiMax signal can blanket a much wider area.

EarthLink's Wi-Fi dreams may be fading
EarthLink's dreams of competing against the big telephone and cable companies are fading as it slashes nearly half its total work force in an effort to cut costs. On Tuesday, EarthLink announced that it would shed 900 employees. The reason was simple, said Rolla Huff, CEO of the company. EarthLink, which has had four solid quarters of losses and a sinking stock price, needs to return value to its shareholders. And this means eliminating jobs that don't help the company add subscribers or increase revenue. EarthLink's traditional dial-up Internet access business, which has seen hefty declines in growth over the past few years, will likely see major cuts, especially in marketing. But the company's newest initiative, building and operating citywide Wi-Fi networks, will also be hit. Don Berryman, the head of EarthLink's municipal Wi-Fi initiative, will be leaving the company as part of the restructuring, Huff confirmed during a phone interview. Huff, who became CEO in June, also reiterated the company's decision, announced earlier this summer, not to make any new investments in muni Wi-Fi until it comes up with a new business model. For many, EarthLink's cutbacks signal a major setback in the company's evolution to break free of its dying dial-up business and become an Internet player with new services to attract subscribers. EarthLink's traditional Internet access, which includes dial-up as well as broadband access, still generates the bulk of the company's revenue. But its growth is slowing considerably. In the second quarter of 2007, EarthLink said it lost a total of 177,000 subscribers, mostly from its consumer narrowband access business. At that time, the company predicted it would lose a total of 450,000 to 500,000 subscribers in 2007. On Tuesday, it revised those figures and said it expects to lose an additional 200,000 subscribers by the end of 2007, bringing its total to 3.9 million subscribers. More than two years ago, EarthLink launched its citywide Wi-Fi business as a way to help increase its subscriber base.

Nokia emulates Iphone and Itunes
AT A press conference in London, Nokia demonstrated its next generation UI which it called the Experience Suite. Those owning an Apple Iphone would have experienced a strong sense of déjà vu. That's because it takes full advantage of the touch screen to manipulate video clips – the feature which most impressed about the Iphone. Navigation is controlled via an enhanced cursor pad. In the demo it was just like the central navigation pad on the N95, for example. But much larger. The new UI will enable the handset user to navigate between applications using one flick of the thumb. The applications are found by shuffling through various 'panes'. There's no need to use keys with the UI, although the UI will be employed on slider phones to make it easy for users to send texts. The new UI should make its first appearance with the Nokia N81 and an enhanced version of the existing N95 - the N95 8GB. Nokia also revealed that built into future phones will be the gaming technology which it has created with its dedicated N-Gage devices. There'll also be access to Nokia's new Music store which it also announced today. The Music Store will be a direct rival to Apple's Itunes store. But unlike Apple's store, Nokia's will be totally open. The company claims to have the support of not only the Big Four but independent labels too. Nokia will eventually provide a PC client that will enable users to rip CDs directly to their mobile phones. To say that Nokia has taken on Apple in both UI terms and in internet music provision is putting it mildly.

Google Gphone touted for next Month
The GPhone is set to be announced in September and it will be cheap, according to rumors spread by bogger Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins. Hopkins, who has a deep throat inside Google, claims that the device runs a modified version of the Linux kernel and has a built in GPS. This will mean that it can power Google Maps and other with other Google apps like Gmail, Calendar and Docs. The phone will appear in the US by the end of the year. Writing in his bog, Rizzn says that the gear "is less about beating the iPhone and more about beating the $100 Laptop" made by the OLPC project. Google will flog the phones cheap and make cash from the ad revenue from targeted, text-based ads served to the phone.

In Europe, a Push by Phone Companies Into TV
Several European phone companies plan to announce significant expansions of Internet protocol television, or IPTV, this week, led by Deutsche Telekom, which is spending 3 billion euros and has linked about 4 in 10 German households to broadband TV. The moves will put Europe, which some analysts say already is the leader in Internet TV, further ahead of the United States and Asia. But despite the flurry of worldwide interest in digital video, skeptics say it is not clear that IPTV has a future as a stand-alone business for telephone companies. With IPTV, subscribers pay a monthly fee of 30 to 60 euros, or $41 to $82, to receive digital broadcasts over the phone companies’ networks, to be watched on televisions or computers. These are part of “triple play” packages that also typically include flat-rate Internet access and domestic fixed-line voice calls. The TV lineup usually includes a standard set of 50 broadcast channels as well as 60 or more premium channels, some not available through other companies. About half of the IPTV consumers in Western Europe are in France, which says there are 2.3 million paid IPTV subscribers in Europe, less than 5% of households. International Data expects the service to have won over about 10 percent of households by 2011. ISuppli estimates that phone companies will spend $9 billion this year — $3 billion in Europe — building video-ready broadband networks. The phone companies, faced with dwindling voice traffic, are looking to IPTV to fill the gap. Some experts, however, question whether telephone companies will ever reap the same payoff as equipment makers from IPTV, which faces a challenge luring TV viewers from established broadcasters that use the airwaves, cable or satellites. The technology for IPTV, introduced in Europe in 2001 by the Italian company FastWeb, began appearing widely in 2004. Among the makers of IPTV set-top boxes are Cisco, Thomson, Philips, Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent. In France, four phone companies — France Télécom, Free (a unit of Iliad), Neuf Cegetel and Alice (a unit of Telecom Italia) — and two resellers, Darty of France and Tele2 of Sweden, are competing for IPTV business. A unit of Bouygues, Bouygues Telecom, is also planning IPTV service. France became Europe’s IPTV leader because the country lacked dominant satellite and cable broadcasters, said Jill Finger Gibson, International Data’s research director in London.

Britain Warns of Satellite Navigation Woes
Britain's first official road signs to warn drivers about the dangers of trusting their satellite navigation devices (satnavs) were introduced on Tuesday in a Welsh village. The signs, introduced by authorities in rural St. Hilary in South Wales, to warn drivers about placing too much faith in the directional gadgets, could be brought in across the country if the trial is successful. Problems were reported after foreign drivers found it difficult to understand phrases such as "unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles" but could understand pictorial notices, media reported. The four signs have been introduced around one particular black spot in the village, where the electronic devices direct truck drivers to a shortcut between a main motorway and Cardiff airport. The road is far too narrow for many to travel down, causing them to get stuck and sparking major traffic problems.

Beijing police will patrol Web virtually
Police in China's capital said they will start patrolling the Web using animated beat officers that pop up on a user's browser and walk, bike or drive across the screen warning them to stay away from illegal Internet content. Starting Sept. 1, the cartoon alerts will appear every half hour on 13 of China's top portals, including Sohu and Sina, and by the end of the year will appear on all websites registered with Beijing servers, the Beijing Public Security Ministry said in a statement. China stringently polices the Internet for material and content that the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening. Despite the controls, nudity, profanity, illegal gambling and pirated music, books and film have proliferated on Chinese Internet servers. The animated police appeared designed to startle Web surfers and remind them that authorities closely monitor Web activity. However, the statement did not say whether there were plans to boost monitoring further. The male and female cartoon officers, designed for the ministry by Sohu, will offer a text warning to surfers to abide by the law and tips on Internet security as they move across the screen in a virtual car, motorcycle or on foot, it said. If Internet users need police help they can click on the cartoon images and will be redirected to the authority's website, it said.

All of world's biggest firms hit by typosquatting
The world's 500 biggest companies have all fallen victim to typosquatting. New research has found that the fast-growing trend of making ad money from web domains similar to famous brands affects all the world's biggest firms. Typosquatting is the profiting, through adverts, from websites whose addresses are very close to famous brand names. A typical site could be microsift.com. When visitors go to a typosquatter's site they see adverts which, when displayed, pay the site operator a small fee. Though the money earned by each advert is often only a few dollar cents, the volume of traffic and the number of domains held by professional typosquatters means that some are earning millions of dollars a year. A common victim of typosquatting is Microsoft. It says that more than 2,000 domain names containing Microsoft trade mark terms are registered every day by other people. It believes 75% of those are owned by professional domain name holders, and that 25% of all Microsoft trade mark-related domains are held by cyber squatters.

Farecasing Hotel Pricing
Farecast, which focuses on predicting flight prices and guaranteeing users against increases, just expanded to help people find deals on hotel rooms as well. The hotels area of the site helps users see prices based on a number of travel search engines (Orbitz, CheapTickets and ReserveTravel). All the results are shown on a map along with price and other basic information. But the service also looks at each of the hotels to let you know if it’s priced attractively or not. For most hotels, the star rating isn’t enough to tell if the price is too high or low v. local competition. Over the long run market forces even the playing field, but a traveler unfamiliar with a specific hotel can (and often is) overcharged occasionally. Farecast will help you understand if you are getting a deal or not on that specific hotel. Hotels with good deals are marked in red. Over priced rooms are blue. This is much different than their flight business, which is based on helping people predict if airfares will likely increase or decrease before the flight date. But travelers looking for a good hotel at the best price possible will find this equally useful.

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