Oracle vows fight as EC objects to acquisition of Sun Microsystems

The European Commission has objected on competitive grounds to the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by US business software giant Oracle, Sun.

Sun, in a filing with US regulators, said that the EC has issued a so-called preliminary "statement of objections" to the proposed $7,4-billion deal.

The EC objections were limited to the combination of Sun's pen source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and "potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products," Sun said.

The Santa Clara, California-based Sun noted that a statement of objections "does not prejudge the European Commission's final decision" and is subject to appeal, and Oracle said it planned to "vigorously oppose" the EC move.

The Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle said "the Commission's Statement of Objections reveals a profound misunderstanding of both database competition and open source dynamics.

"The database market is intensely competitive with at least eight strong players, including IBM, Microsoft, Sybase and three distinct open source vendors," Oracle said.

"Oracle and MySQL are very different database products. There is no basis in European law for objecting to a merger of two among eight firms selling differentiated products," it said.

"Mergers like this occur regularly and have not been prohibited by United States or European regulators in decades," Oracle said.

"Given the lack of any credible theory or evidence of competitive harm, we are confident we will ultimately obtain unconditional clearance of the transaction," Oracle said.

The US Justice Department, which gave the deal the green light in August, also reaffirmed its support.

"After conducting a careful investigation of the proposed transaction between Oracle and Sun, the Department's Antitrust Division concluded that the merger is unlikely to be anti competitive," deputy assistant attorney general Molly Boast said in a statement.

"At this point in its process, it appears that the EC holds a different view," she said. "We remain hopeful that the parties and the EC will reach a speedy resolution that benefits consumers in the Commission's jurisdiction.

"The Department and the European Commission have a strong and positive relationship on competition policy matters," Boast added. "The two competition authorities have enjoyed close and cooperative relations.

"The Antitrust Division will continue to work constructively with the EC and competition authorities in other jurisdictions to preserve sound antitrust enforcement policies that benefit consumers around the world," she said.

Sun, a one-time Silicon Valley star, is the developer of the popular Java programming language.

Sun is also the fourth-largest maker of computer servers but has been steadily losing market share to IBM as well as Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

IBM also made a bid to acquire Sun but was edged out by Oracle.

Oracle develops, manufactures and distributes company software and is the market leader in proprietary databases - big beasts fro large-scale management of commercial information by businesses.

Sun, meanwhile, has built up the leading open source databases - which are now able to support similarly large-scale commercial databases running to hundreds of computing gigabytes in size.

Oracle, IBM and Microsoft together control about 85% of the database market in terms of revenue according to the EU.

Nokia recalls millions of dangerous chargers

Nokia, the world's biggest mobile phone maker, a global recall for 14 million faulty chargers made by a subcontractor this year.

The recall concerned "approximately 14 million (chargers) globally," Nokia spokesperson James Etheridge told AFP.

Nokia said the chargers could cause an electrical shock and would be replaced without charge.

The Finnish firm said in a statement it was "not aware of any incidents or injuries related to these chargers."

Etheridge said the recall did not concern China, Britain, Brazil, Argentina and some other countries.

Nokia said the potentially dangerous chargers models AC-3E and AC-3U, manufactured between June 15, 2009 and Aug. 9, 2009; ans the AC-4U model, manufactured between April 13, 2009 and Oct. 25, 2009.

The AC-3E charger was marketed in Europe while the two others were sold to the North and Latin American markets.

All three models were manufactured by subcontractor BYD.

Nokia said customers could check if their charger was potentially hazardous on the company's website.

Netflix movie streaming coming to PlayStation 3

Playstation 3 owners will soon be able to stream movies and TV shows from Netflix to their TVs using the gaming console, just as Xbox 360 owners have been able to do for a year.

Sony Corp. and the DVD rental company announced the service and plan to launch it next month. It will be available for free to PlayStation 3 owners who have a Netflix subscription that starts at $9.

Netflix streaming is already available on a broad range of devices, such as the Roku digital video player, Internet-connected TV sets (including Sony's) and Blu-ray players - and the PlayStation 3's archival, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360. On the Xbox, however, the Netflix streaming is available only to Xbox Live "Gold" members, who pay $50 a year mainly to play games online with friends in other places.

For Netflix Inc., the deal brings millions of potential new customers, to add to the 11.1 million it already has in the United States. About 9 million PlayStation 3 systems have been sold in the US, and more than 25 million worldwide.

Movie streaming is an increasingly important service for Netflix even though it says it expects to keep renting DVDs until 2030. And Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said he would like the streaming service to be available on all three of the major gaming platform - the Xbox, the Wii and the PlayStation. Until now, however, the company had an exclusive deal with Microsoft.

"The PlayStation 3 is an amazing video platform," Hastings said in an interview.

This leaves the Wii as the last console without Netflix streaming. But even without it, the Wii is the top-selling console.

Netflix has about 17,000 movies and TV shows available for streaming, though few of them are new releases. This will expand the movies Sony already rents and sells through the Play Station 3, and will give the company another feature to tout as it markets the PlayStation as a diverse entertainment device.

Twitter becomes mutual friend of Google, Microsoft

Twitter, Inc. is selling the rights to mine its communications hotbed to both Internet search leader Google, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in dueling deals that underscore the growing importance of being able to show what's one people's minds at any given moment.

The announcements made within a three-hour span also represent the latest bit of gamesmanship between two of technology's fiercest- and most powerful - rivals.

Microsoft seemed to have seized the upper hand in the information arms race when its top Internet executive, Qu Li, took the stage at a technology conference in San Francisco.

Li used the platform to declare Microsoft's search engine, Bing, would become the best way outside to find out what people are saying in their Twitter messages, or "tweets."

The messages, consisting of no more than 140 characters, can be posted from Internet-connected computers of mobile devices, enabling people to share mundance details about their lives or intriguing news and commentary from all over the world.

It's real-time information that is didn't look like Google's search engine would be able to provide - the kind of competitive advantage that Microsoft has been seeking while investing billions of dollars in what so far has been a fruitless effort to narrow Google's huge lead in Internet search.

Refusing to be upstage, Google revealed on its blog that its search engine has secured the tweeting rights, too.

Neither Microsoft nor Google would disclose how mush it is paying for the rights to index the millions of public updates distributed by Twitter each day. The data is considered to be among Twitter's most valuable assets, raising the possibility that the Google and Microsoft deals will result in the first meaningful revenue for the San Francisco-based startup since its 2006 inception.

"There is a revenue component...but we've yet to see how significant that will be," Twitter chief executive Evan Williams wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

Micosoft has a head start in blending Twitter's feed into Bing's search results. A test version of Bing's Twitter feature debuted shortly after the announcement.

Google still isn't indexing and displaying all the tweets, although that will happen soon, said Marissa Mayer, a Google executive in charge of search products and user experience. She left little doubt that Google's search engine would become less useful without the Twitter access, especially when people are trying to get update about an event that just happened.

"You have to have the answers in order to return them to your users," Mayer said. "That's why a deal like this is so important. It allows us to find answers we couldn't previously have found."

Microsoft will offer another way to probe into the collective mindset by indexing a portion on Facebook - an online hangout with more than 300 million active users around the world. That's about six times the size of Twitter's global audience, but more Facebook users restrict who can see their updates than Twitter users do.

Facebook is only giving Bing access to the updates that its users choose to share with everyone, according to operating officer. It's unclear when the facebook updates will begin showing up in Bing's search results.

Palo Alto-based facebook already has a business relationship with Microsoft, which provides facebook's search results. Microsoft spent $240 million two years ago to acquire a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook.

Google, on the other hand, has a prickly relationship with Facebook, which has lured away many of its employees, including Sandberg.

Meanwhile, Twitter's growing popularity has emerged as a potential problem for Facebook. Their rivalry has intensified since Twitter rejected facebook's attempt to buy the service last year.

While Facebook expects to bring in more than $500 million from selling ads and other service this year, Twitter hasn't been trying to generate revenue until now. Twitter is possibly under more pressure to start making money because a group of investors just poured $100 million into the company and will be looking for returns. The deal valued twitter at about $1 billion.

In internal company documents leaked on the Internet earlier this summer, Twitter projected it would have $140 million in revenue next year.

Stand out from the crowd with Panasonic Lumix'x Face Recognition Technology

The Lumix iA mode has an innovation Face Recognition function that "remembers" registered faces. When the camera detects a registered face in the frame, it optimizes the settings to ensure that the face is sharply focused and brighter. The new Face Recognition feature makes it easier to capture stunning shots of friends and family in a crowd, every time.

AVCHD is a cutting-edge format developed exclusively for high-definition video recording in digital still cameras. Using the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard to compress the captured video signal and Dolby Digital Creator to record high quality audio, it allows longer recordings with breathtaking HD visuals and audio quality.

Report on iPhone in China ahead of official launch

At a Shanghai electronics market, row after of iPhones, real and fake are on display, as vendors cash in ahead of the official launch of Apple's trendy smart phone in China.

"The 'high imitation" iPhones sell much better than the smuggled ones," said one 20-something salesman, sitting behind his small counter piled high with handsets.

His candid words are not good news for mobile operator China Unicom, which officially start selling the iPhone in the world's biggest cell phone market, more than two years after the gadget's US launch.

Unicom and Apple announced a multi-year deal in August to offer the touch-pad iPhone here in a bid to turn around weak performance against riveals China Mobile and China Telecom by attracting customers with high-end tastes.

Unicom says it hopes to sell five million hand-sets in three years, but experts and customers question how realistic that goal is when tech-savvy consumers have been snapping up cheaper fake and smuggled model for months.

Shaun Rein, head of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group, said two million of China's nearly 720 million mobile phone users are already using authentic iPhones purchased here or abroad, and demand may already be met.

"When the iPhone came out in the United States in 2007, there was a huge demand here, and a lot or people were going to the United States, buying handsets, cracking the code and selling it here," Rein said.

"Almost everyone who wants an iPhone already has one."

On top of that estimate, countless more Chinese are using fake iPhones that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, some of which come pre-loaded with the popular QQ instant messaging system as an added bonus.

Hai Bin, a 32-year-old employee at an auction webiste, said he was doubtful the official handset would make much of a mark in China.

Alpha Protocol lets you play a spy.

Role-playing games (RPGs) offered gamers the opportunities to take part in adventures set within the realms of fantasy or science fiction. As a result, Sega and Obsidian Entertainment have joined forces to redifine RPGs with their upcoming title Alpha Protocol.

Alpha Protocol is a stylized RPG that deals with high-tech espionage. It is where you can play with Michael Throton, a skilled agents who gets betrayed bu his superiors and finds himself being hunted by the government. How he survives, where he goes and how his story turns out depends on your choices. Obsidian puts players in situations where thye encounter how the situation should be handled, and which path they want to take. The game allows you to customize and enhance your character the way you want when you gain experience points.

For most part, Alpha Protocol is a third-person adventure game that will remind gamers of Metal Gear as well as some of the recent James Bond games. Other than exchanging gunfire, players can sneak around or even setup booby traps on your enemies.

If you're the type of gamer who enjoys spy games and RPGs, this one is worth a look.