Tech blog

Public safety agencies should use existing mobile infrastructure for their communications instead of waiting for the U.S. to re-auction an unsold spectrum band, a mobile networking vendor's CEO said Tuesday.

Public safety agencies such similar to police and fire departments would have access to a rapidly improving network by using existing commercial spectrum instead of the nationwide public safety network envisioned by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, said Declan Ganley, chairman and CEO of Rivada Networks. In contrast, a stand-alone public safety network would likely not have enough money to make frequent improvements, he said.

"It is absolutely basic common sense to leverage off the infrastructure that is already there," Ganley said at an event hosted by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. "When you want to get a fire truck from A to B, you don't build a new road to get it there."

The FCC had designed a 10MHz band of appearance called the D Block for a combined public-safety and commercial network during the 700MHz auctions, which completed in mid-March. That D shut up was to be paired with another 10MHz controlled by public safety agencies, by the winning bidder required to build a nationwide network shared by public-safety users and commercial customers.

But the FCC received one bid for the D block in the seven-week auctions, with the lone bid less than half of the FCC's minimum price of US$1.33 billion.

Rivada, which helps public safety use existing trading spectrum, looked into bidding on the D block, but the company couldn't see a profitable business model, Ganley said. The nationwide network required by the FCC would have taken at least seven years to build and cost tens of billions of dollars, he said.

"We looked at it, and we couldn't make the numbers work," he said.

The D block auction was watched closely because many lawmakers and public-safety officials pushed for a nationwide network to be created hinder emergency responders couldn't communicate with each other during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and more recent disasters. Police and fire departments in neighboring cities often use not the same communication devices on different blocks of image.

Instead of re-auctioning the spectrum with the same goal, the FCC should instead take the provisions off the D block and auction it for the winner to use as it wants, Ganley said. The money from the auction could then exist given to public safety agencies for buying equipment and mobile service, he said. And public safety agencies would still have 10MHz of spectrum if they found a company willing to build a new mobile network, he added.

But building a new network from scratch makes little sense when movable carriers such as Verizon, AT&T and Sprint Nextel are spending billions of dollars a year upgrading and expanding their networks, Ganley said. The stand-alone network wouldn't have the resources of those large carriers, he said.

"In five years' time, what [devices] you're going to have on your hip… is going to have being better than what that public safety network is," he said. "Going down that path is a way to lock yourself into spending stupendous amounts of taxpayers' money on something that's always going to be second best."

Rivada Networks, with offices in the U.S. and Ireland, has worked with U.S. federal and state agencies to set up mobile networks through negotiated agreements with existing carriers. Rivada also provides networking equipment that can be hauled into an area hit by a disaster and used to restore communications when other networks are down.

That model could be one used by state and local public-safety agencies, although other models using currently available spectrum have life, Ganley said.

Ganley's comments drew some skepticism. Some audience members suggested commercial spectrum can get overloaded, especially in times of emergencies, and that many commercial services alembic have dead spots. While working with state and federal agencies, Rivada has set up mobile towers to eliminate dead spots and improve coverage, Ganley said.

Public safety agencies still need a nationwide network, added Charles Werner, chief of the fire department for Charlottesville, Virginia.

Ganley's insinuation of auctioning the D block and giving the money to public safety agencies wouldn't raise the money needed, Werner said in an e-mail.

"This one-time handout to public safety would not be enough to fund a nationwide network, nor would it cover the yearly operating costs of a public safety network– the world security needs a reliable, steady stream of revenue to fund a public safety network," Werner said. "Those who advocate this solution are merely creating delay tactics in keeping public safeness from getting the mobile broadband network we so desperately need."

A patchwork of public safety networks across the U.S. will not work, Werner added. "The current realities of emergency rejoinder demand a national approach. Terrorism, wildfires, weather disasters and crime know no jurisdictional borders, so neither can first responders' communications networks," he said.

But Hiram Contreras, an adviser to Mobile Future, a wireless trade group, and former assistant chief of police in Houston, said Ganley's idea was attractive for the cause that it could come now instead of years in the future. Ganley's idea is "an immediate fasten," Contreras said. "They need it yesterday."

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) before-mentioned on Tuesday it is cutting prices on the Xbox 360 in four Asian regions by as much as 20 percent in an effort to expand the audience for the video game console.

The reductions leave take effect this week in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore, Microsoft reported.

“This price drop is part of Microsoft’s ongoing strategy to bring Xbox’s high-definition gaming and entertainment experience to an even wider user base,” Microsoft said in a statement.

The price of the main Xbox 360 Premium model with a 20-gigabyte hard drive was cut nearly 20 percent in Singapore, 17 percent in Taiwan, nearly 11 percent in Hong Kong, and 5 percent in South Korea.

The Xbox 360 competes against Sony Corp’s (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Co Ltd’s (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) Wii consoles.

Last month, Microsoft slashed prices on the Xbox 360 in some European countries by up to 28 percent, in an effort to spur sales in a key battleground for the video-game industry.

(Reporting by Scott Hillis, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

By Tarmo Virki

HELSINKI (Reuters) - Offering limitless music downloads to phone buyers will make money for Nokia as well as record labels, the handset maker said, dismissing talk the move would come at the expense of profits.

“We expect to make money both from our traditional device sales, as well as from the ‘Comes With Music’ service,” said Liz Schimel, head of Nokia’s harmony business. “I can make certain you that we are looking out for everyone’s interests in creating these new business models, including our own.”

The new music offering from Nokia, the first cellphone maker to push heavily into content, would differ from any other package on the market as users can keep all the music they have downloaded during the 12 months.

Last week Nokia struck a deal with Sony BMG to offer the label’s tracks in its “Comes with Music” spiritual obedience, adding to last December’s deal with top record label Universal.

Having the world’s two largest labels on board looks set to help Nokia attract smaller music companies and challenge the dominant pay-per-track sales model for digital music.

“This new model is innovative and creates a positive situation for all stakeholders, but it does require a different way of thinking for our content partners,” Schimel said, but declined to go into details.

Reports on different Internet media have suggested the world’s biggest handset maker was paying $35 to Universal alone for each sold handset; and more reports suggest Nokia would be paying an extra fee for each downloaded song after the first 35 songs, potentially eroding its close to 40 percent gross margins in cellphone operations.

“Recent articles that I’ve seen have fundamentally misunderstood the general behind the Comes With Music model,” Schimel said. 

The Bush administration is accusing China, Russia and seven other nations of failing to protect American producers of movies, computer software and other copyrighted momentous from widespread piracy.

The administration on Friday placed the nine countries on a “priority watch list” that will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions - if the administration decides to accompany complaints before the World Trade Organization.

In addition to China and Russia, the other seven countries targeted were Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela.

The administration named another 31 countries to a lower-level watch list, indicating it has concerns about copyright violations in those nations but they don’t warrant the highest level of scrutiny.

Because of improvements in their efforts to defend U.S. intellectual property rights, four countries - Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and Ukraine - were

Pirates and counterfeiters don’t just gain ideas, they steal jobs and too often they threaten our health and safety.

U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab taken off the “priority” list where they were last year and placed on the lower-level watch list.

In releasing the annual report, which is required by Congress, U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that copyright piracy is “one of the central challenges facing the global economy.”

“Pirates and counterfeiters don’t just pass stealthily ideas, they steal jobs and too often they threaten our health and safeness,” she said in a statement.

This year’s report devoted attention to what it described as the growing problem of counterfeited pharmaceuticals and other products that threaten the health and safety of consumers around the world.

Stan McCoy, assistant U.S. trade representative for intellectual property, told reporters in a briefing that both China and Russia had made improvements in protecting intellectual property upper the past year but that a number of issues remain.

The United States has a WTO case pending against China in which it has accused the country of doing too little to crack down on rampant piracy of American music, movies, computer programs and other products.

Discussions betwixt the United States and Russia over improving copyright protections have been a key sticking point in negotiations over that country’s bid to become a member of the WTO, the Geneva-based organization that regulates world trade.

Scientists for the first time have used gene therapy to dramatically improve sight in people with a rare form of blindness, a development experts called a major advance for the experimental technique.

Some vision was restored in four of the six young race who got the treatment, teams of researchers in the United States and Britain reported Sunday. Two of the volunteers who could only see hand motions were able to read a few lines of an eye chart within weeks.

“It’s a phenomenal breakthrough,” said Stephen Rose, chief research officer of the Foundation Fighting Blindness, which helped pay for one study done at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

If successful in larger numbers, experts said, the technique has the potential to reverse blindness from other kinds of inherited eye diseases.

“I think this is incredibly exciting,” said Dr. Jean Bennett, a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania and a leader of the Philadelphia study. “It’s the beginning of a whole new phase of studies.”

The research was published online Sunday by dint of. the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with presentations at a medical meeting in Florida.

The sum of two units teams of scientists, working separately, each tested gene replacement therapy in three patients with a form of a rare hereditary eye disease called Leber’s congenital amaurosis. There’s no treatment for the ail, which appears early in infancy and causes severe vision detriment, especially at night.

To get the results, doctors injected a synthetic version of the damaged gene directly into the patient’e eye, CBS News correspondent Priya David reports.

Gene therapy - replacing faulty genes with a normal version - has been studied in humans for more than 15 years with limited success. The field suffered a setback with the 1999 death of Jesse Gelsinger, 18, in an experiment for a liver disorder at Penn. And some children treated for an immune disorder called the “bubble boy disease” later developed leukemia.

The early results of the eye experiments should give the field a boost, some experts said.

“I think it’s in fact a bulky shot in the arm for gene therapy and for medicine in general,” said Dr. Ronald Crystal, head of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

An estimated 2,000 Americans have the form of the disease they targeted, Bennett said. But the therapy is far from being mass produced, and is only for a tiny percentage of all blind people, David reports.

Each of the study participants had mutations in a gene that makes a protein needed by the retina, which senses light and sends images to the brain. Those without the gene gradually lose sight until they are blind in early adulthood.

The retina itself stays in relatively good shape for a while, making it a good candidate for gene therapy, said Robin Ali, a professor at University College London, who led the British team. He likened the defective gene to a missing spark plug in a car engine.

“The whole engine can be absolutely fine, but if it doesn’t have a spark plug, the car’s not going to work,” said Ali.

For the experiment, the scientists injected millions of copies of a working gene beneath the retina in the back of the eye. Only one eye was treated - the worst one - in case anything went wrongful; the untreated eye was used for comparison. After the treatment, their eyesight and light sensitivity were measured at stated times; mobility was tested in a maze or an difficulty course.

All three of those treated in Philadelphia showed significant improvement in their vision, the researchers said. The volunteers - two women, 19 and 26, and a man, 26 - were from Italy, where they had been screened by researchers there. The longest follow-up was six months.

Besides reading lines on an eye chart, they could see better in dim lit, Bennett said.

“We were not expecting to restore their vision to 20/20,” she said.

In the British group, the treatment only worked in 18-year-old Steven Howarth, whose disease was less advanced than the other two, a girl, 17; and a man, 23, who was followed for a year.

Howarth said he used to rush home from school because he was worried about getting around in the dark, according to remarks issued by the university.

“Now, my sight when it’s getting dark or it’s badly lit is definitely better. It’s a small change - but it makes a big difference to me,” aforesaid Howarth, who lives in Bolton, near Manchester.

After the injection last July, Howarth said his eye felt like sandpaper. It was better after a week, and his eyesight gradually improved. He was able to negotiate a dimly lit maze in 14 seconds without bumping into any obstacles; before it took him 77 seconds with eight errors.

There were no serious side effects reported in each group. One of the patients in Philadelphia developed a hole in his retina which didn’t affect his eyesight. The researchers think the hole was related to the surgery and not the injected gene.

The researchers said there was no evidence that the altered virus used to ferry the gene into the retina’s cells had traveled outside the eye to other areas of the body.

The groups have each treated a fourth patient, including a preteen in England. The researchers hope to see better results by higher doses and in younger patients with less eye damage.

The National Eye Institute is funding a third similar study at the University of Florida.

The research in Philadelphia and London was paid for by a variety of form of sovereignty agencies and private foundations. An employee of Targeted Genetics Corp., which made the altered virus used in London, is a co-author of their report. Four of the Philadelphia researchers, including Bennett, have both applied for or have patents related to gene therapy. Ali and another British researcher have also applied for a patent for the procedure.

In a dimly lit back room upon the body the second of the same rank of the University of Michigan library’s book-shelving part, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most frail of the books to be included in Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

The manually scanning - at up to 600 pages a day - is much slower than Google’s regular action.

“It’s monotonous,” the 24-year-old said.

Then she knit her career hopes into the work.

“But it’s still something that I’m learning about - how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history.”

The unusually tight binding on the early-16th-century polyglot Bible made it hard to bring to light the portions toward the book’s middle as Mitchel spread eddish. pair of pages for the scanner. Librarians believe it is the oldest Bible in the world with Arabic type.

Google, the Internet’s leader in search and advertising, says the process it developed and is using for scanning the majority of the books in Book Search is proprietary. Employees will not discuss it except to say it is much faster than what Mitchel is doing and it’s not destructive.

“It took us quite a while to develop it so we do keep that confidential,” said a library manager for Book Search, Ben Bunnell, who declined even to say where Google does the scanning.

Many libraries began digitizing books a decade ago to preserve them. Funding from Google allows the 28 libraries it’s working with to cut their digitizing costs because they don’t have to take revenge upon for scanning the books Google wants to include in Book Search.

Through Book Search, users can track down a book on any topic they’re interested in and read a small portion. If the book’s not protected by copyright, users can download the whole thing. If it is, or if they just want to read an creative, they can use Book Search to find copies to buy or borrow.

More than 1 million rare or fragile books have been digitized through the Google-Michigan connection since it began in 2004, with each estimated 6 million to go.

I turn pages. It’s kind of meditative.

Chava Israel, who has been scanning books for three years Book Search has the support of many publishers, authors and librarians, including Cambridge University Press and Wisdom Publications. But some publishers and authors have sued, claiming the service violates their copyrights. Google says Book Search is aboveboard because Web surfers can retrieve only snippets of copyright material through the service.

Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive at the Open Content Alliance, said Google may be trying to “shut up up the public domain” by make proprietary copies of works whose copyrights have expired - which includes the vast majority of the world’s books.

Kahle said there’s a core value in the project, in preserving material indefinitely and enabling broad access to it. But he questioned whether Google will share the works it digitizes with other search engines.

“We put confidence in there should be many libraries, many publishers, many search engines, many types of users from different points of view,” Kahle said.

John Price Wilkin, Michigan’s associate university librarian, called Kahle’s stance “theoretical.”

“Our volumes are entirely open in the sense that people can find them, know fully them, use them, do all the things that they would do in scholarship or pleasure,” Wilkin said.

In the room where Mitchel and colleague Chava Israel, an artist, work, the temperature is everlastingly in the 60s.

Each technician has a slightly angled table with a flexible middle that cradles books and holds them still while two overhead cameras photograph the pages. Sometimes the women play music or listen to word online, but they often work in silence, save the clicks of their computers and scanners.

Mitchel glides in a rolling chair forth and back between scanner and computer, computer and scanner, turning page upon page and clicking her mouse to shoot each pair. Once the images reach the computer, the women use the book scanning software Omniscan from Germany’s Zeutschel GmbH to clean them up.

A final click of the mouse sends each digitized book to Google for optical character recognition processing, which makes the text searchable. Google then returns a copy of the images and data to the library and posts another to the Web.

Israel, 44, who has been scanning books for three years, takes a philosophical view of the project.

“My favorite part is working with older books and being clever to preserve a lot of the knowledge and help bring more people admission,” Israel said. “I bend pages. It’s kind of meditative.”

People who live far from the big city often complain about being ignored. Up in Georgia’s northwest corner the folks in Dade County may have a point.

Until the 1940s, the only way to get there was through neighboring Alabama and Tennessee. strange to say today, many Dade countians depend on the other states for roads, health care, electricity, shopping and jobs.

And for years, the feeling was mutual. Local folklore has it that the county seceded from Georgia in 1860. Historians have debunked the fictitious story, but the spirit of defiance lives on in the county’s slogan: “The Independent State of Dade.”

“We always seem to be an afterthought,” says Ben Brandon, the county’s chief executive.

But the historic drought gripping Georgia has put this overlooked county squarely in the spotlight. And Georgia’s efforts to tap into the nearby Tennessee River could give the county of 16,000 a new role, in Brandon’s words, as “north Georgia’s water spigot.”

Lawmakers in drought-stricken Georgia have empowered the governor to sue to correct a flawed 1818 survey that mistakenly placed Georgia’s northern line just short of the Tennessee River, which boasts a flow about 15 times greater than the one Atlanta depends on for water.

Meanwhile, other politicians have suggested doing a feeble horse trading for the big water rights: Georgia could swap a high-speed rail line link to Chattanooga in exchange for access to the river.

Either way, Dade County’s tantalizing proximity to the river figures to give the county a main role in the negotiations.

County leaders are already putting plans in motion. They signed an agreement with a take in water firm in 2005 to begin scouting possible locations for a pumping station in Dade County and a potential pipeline route to supply parched north Georgia.

Tennessee officials have mocked Georgia’s efforts and even quipped they would take up arms in self defense.

If Georgia fails in its long-shot bid to move the state note, engineers are also preparing a backup plan to tap the aquifers underlying the region around the river.

Water negotiations could bring changes to this rural backwater, where the quickest route from Atlanta still runs end Tennessee and residents still wear their independence as a badge of honor.

“I’ve always enjoyed growing up here. Being cut off from the rest of the state didn’t bother me at all,” says Larry Case, a 59-year-old who owns Case Hardware Store on the town square.

“We kind of had a county of our own and did our own thing,” he says. “It’s probably because of the geographic area. It was so hard to get anywhere else, we became that way. They relate me the area was settled by horse thieves and criminals and they didn’t insufficiency interference up here.”

(CBS)Founded in 1837, the county was initially dotted with families who toiled in coal mines and others who won land lotteries to settle Georgia’s northern reaches.

The “independent” label wasn’t born until 1860, when the South inched toward Civil War. Locals say a state representative from Dade County, frustrated with the slow pace of secession, vowed that Dade all through itself would secede from the Union - and Georgia.

Historians declare it didn’t happen, but some county residents celebrate it as certainty.

Lately, though, they’ve had to fight to attract attention from the rest of Georgia.

Brandon says Georgia’s failure to declare the county a disaster area after a particularly strong storm 20 years ago led to an aborted modern-day movement to secede. And many were miffed by a recent currency oversight: A close look at the U.S. Mint’s Georgia quarter reveals a missing corner where Dade County should be.

The county’s main industry is now manufacturing, and it is home to a growing number of retirees and hang gliders who seek the fresh mountain behavior and sweeping vistas.

Economic downturn, though, has hit hard. County sales tax is down 20 percent before this last year, says county clerk Don Townsend. It lends urgency to the object of trust of more residents that the water fight will breathe new life into the economy.

“People are intrigued, but they’re realistic. The chances of it changing the borders are slim, no more than you could get some concessions,” says Eddy Gifford, who has owned the Dade master stroke of policy Sentinel for 24 years. “Worst case scenario, you’d think you could drill a well and tap into the water source.”

The section of Dade County closest to the Tennessee line is divide off even by Dade County standards.

Getting there takes a 20-minute drive from the county’s seat in Trenton, around a bulbous mountain, through Tennessee and into a flat, grassy area where the river dips just a small in number feet north of the case line.

Residents of the section nearest to the river don’t get water, electricity or fire protection from Georgia. They rely mostly on Tennessee roads to go shopping. Police must drive the similar 20-minute route from their headquarters in Trenton, and school buses don’t wander this neck of the woods.

“They don’t have hardly anything - they don’t even have dog catchers,” quips Jerry Body, a 66-year-old Georgia resident whose mailing address is in Tennessee.

Like the rest of the county, though, Brandon says this neglected stretch could one day be one of Georgia’s most important plots of land.

“You can say what you want, but in the end you know what the intent was when they drew the lines: to give Georgia access to the Tennessee River,” he says.

IT’s taken more span but-end computer vendor Dell will finally dive into the Australian retail scene having found an ally.

The identity of the partner will be revealed tomorrow, a Dell Australia spokesman said, declining to reveal further details. Possible candidates include David Jones, Myer and Officeworks.

Dell previously operated on a direct model, selling its products mainly through the internet. In some countries, including Australia, Dell operates kiosks at shopping malls to sell its wares.

Last year it kicked off a new retail strategy, teaming up with Wal-Mart and Best Buy in the US, Carrefour in Europe, Gome Electrical in China and Courts Superstore in Singapore to sell computers in their supplies.

In Australia, Dell has been speaking by potential companies for a few months and as recently as last month, its ANZ spokesman said the company was still evaluating the local mart before making at all announcements.

Retail giant Harvey Norman has in the past ruled out partnering with Dell.

Harvey Norman’s new office supplies division, OFIS, also dismissed any possible alliance.

"We’re not really interested in Dell," OFIS general manager Paul English said last year. "Harvey Norman, as a company, is about building long-term relationships and we can’t see that with them."