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Processors in the Xeon 5500 series range in price from $1,600 for the 130-watt W5580 (3.2GHz) to $423 for the 60-watt L5506 (2.13GHz). Intel, for the first time, is also listing each new Xeon chip’s giga-transfers-per-second rating (GT/sec). For example, the W5580 is rated at 6.40 GT/sec, while the L5506 is rated at 4.80 GT/sec.

The new LV and ULV processor models include the 17-watt SL9600 (2.13GHz, $316) and 10-watt SU9600 (1.6GHz, $289). More power-hungry Intel mainstream mobile processors are typically rated at 25 watts or 35 watts.

Other Xeon 5500 series models include the 95-watt X5550 (2.66GHz, $958), the 80-watt E5520 (2.26GHz, $373), and the 60-watt L5520 (2.26GHz, $530).

As reported earlier, Intel has introduced new power-sipping low-voltage (LV) and ultra-low-voltage (ULV) processor models for laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and Dell Adamo.

Intel Vice President Pat Gelsinger holds a new Xeon chip.

Intel also debuted the Xeon 3500 series, including the 130-watt W3570 (3.2GHz, $999) and the 130-watt W3520 (2.66GHz, $284).

And over a dozen new Xeon quad-core processors based on Intel’s new Nehalem chip architecture were added to the Intel price list.

(Credit:
Intel)

Intel updated its processor list Monday with new Core 2 chips for Macbook Air-class laptops and a crush of Xeon processors for workstations and servers.

The number of new processor models is 20 in all.

Haff notes that “Mosso takes care of patching and updating the operating system and other software stack components…it’s a bit different than what’s generally discussed in the context of cloud computing.”

CloudFS gives developers access to almost unlimited amounts of storage for 15 cents per gigabyte, including replicated copies of backed-up data.

Developers and businesses can sign up to take part in the initial beta service now.

Mosso in February launched an online service called The Hosted Cloud that so far offers e-mail hosting and managed hosting services.

The storage service, called CloudFS, is available to a limited number of customers in a closed beta test and will enter more a more widespread public beta test sometime later this year, the company said.

Mosso, the cloud computing division of hosting provider Rackspace, plans to add online storage to its menu of services later this year.

(Credit:
Mosso)

CloudFS will be accessible via the REST Web services API, and language-specific APIs such as those supported by .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby and Python, the company said.

The core concept behind Mosso’s Hosting Cloud is that many Web-based applications or sites are built up using largely common stacks of technologies such as PHP and MySQL databases. Mosso takes advantage of this fact by providing the means to provision applications running on one of these common stacks. Mosso is effectively offering cloud computing at a level of abstraction more akin to that of a Web hosting provider.

As Gordon Haff wrote at the time, Mosso takes a slightly different approach than other online service providers:

(Credit:
Google)

“Although privacy policies are not a guarantee of perfect privacy practices, they are still an important tool for consumers,” she said Saturday in an e-mail. Dixon added that such links are “something consumers have come to expect, and rightly so given that it is a standard practice.”

Updated at 12:35 p.m. and 3:50 p.m.: Comments from privacy advocates have been added.

Being a holiday weekend, reaction to Google’s change has been a bit sparse. At least one member of the blogosphere asserts that the link doesn’t resolve the issue because it doesn’t link directly to the privacy policy. Another concludes that the whole controversy was silly to begin with.

A couple of side notes: Google Vice President Marissa Mayer noted in the corporate blog that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin required the famously sparse home page to remain clean at 28 words, even with the change. Thus, the company removed the word “Google” from the copyright line and replaced it with “Privacy.” Also her blog’s title–”What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28…”–was remarkably obscure.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center had joined with the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and the World Privacy Forum in leading the effort to press Google to make the change.

The timing of Google’s announcement–the afternoon before a long holiday weekend–may have appeared suspicious to some. But Rotenberg noted that his group “helped draw attention to the 30-day time limit in the California law following notice. We literally counted to 30 after sending the letter. Day 31 arrived and Google posted the link.”

Google competitors Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Ask.com, by the way, all provide links to their privacy policies on their home pages.

Privacy advocates soon got involved, sending Google a formal letter on June 3 (PDF). Google had maintained that it was doing nothing unlawful.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Saturday that his group is “pleased” with the decision.

Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, also welcomed Google’s decision.

“This was not only required by California law (and Google is a California corporation) but is also the standard practice for commercial Web sites,” he said in an e-mail.

Google apparently decided to keep it clean, in more ways than one.

The company has made a minor change to its home page, adding a link to its copyright line that leads to its Privacy Center. Google’s decision, noted Thursday afternoon in a corporate blog and a public policy blog, was an attempt to quell a controversy over the posting of its privacy policy.

Saul Hansell, a reporter with The New York Times, first brought the issue to light in May when he asked whether the company was violating California law by not posting a link to its privacy policy on its home page.

The attempt succeeded.

Another change replaces the “minimum bid” price with an estimate for how much a particular advertiser would have to bid for ads to show on the first search page.

Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

“Queries with a high level of advertiser competition may have significantly higher first page bid estimates, because you’ll likely need to bid above the old minimum bid to rank higher than your competition and show on the first page,” Google said. “Remember that you can bid less than your first page bid estimate and still show on subsequent pages–as long as your keyword is relevant to our users.”

Attention advertisers: a promised change to Google’s AdWords quality-judging method will take effect in coming days.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET News.com)

The change adjusts Google’s calculation of advertiser’s quality score–a key factor in determining how much the advertiser must bid to ensure ads are placed next to search results. With the new system, quality is calculated at the time a Google user performs a search, though historical data such as an advertiser’s click-through rate still factor into the equation, Google’s Trevor Claiborne said on its AdWords blog on Monday.

Given the size of the industry that’s grown up around Google’s search-ad system, any changes can cause indigestion in the search-engine marketing (SEM) business. Google tried to encourage people to look at the big picture, though: “These improvements are part of a continuing effort to deliver relevant ads to our users, and also to provide you with more control over your bidding and more insight into the quality of your ads and keywords,” the company said.

Also key? It’ll be free. “Free is the name of the game,” he said, adding that Sling.com is “playing with some ad networks.” As for its hardware business, Sling’s SlingCatcher device will soon have “clip-and-sling” capability to take clips from their televisions and send it to their friends.

Above all, he reiterated that media companies and content producers shouldn’t be afraid of distribution, and suggested that exclusive deals are a bad idea–whether it’s a network TV show that’s not available on the Web or a Web series that’s limited to a single site.

“I love television, but television is probably a finite world,” he said. “You as the creator, especially when your model is different and smaller, the idea is that you need to go as wide as possible.”

He showed a preview. It looks a lot like Hulu, but with more video (that’s what it looks like from a preview, as Sling has not said whether there physically is more) and more social-networking tie-ins–and eventually owners of Slingbox devices will be able to watch streams from their own TVs on it as well. That’s key, because it will eliminate the need to install any desktop software, but Hirschhorn couldn’t demonstrate the TV streaming because the company has not finished building the Web-based Sling Player for
Mac.

But Hirschhorn, president of Sling Media Entertainment Group, also said it’s been worth it. Sling is getting ready to roll out some big new projects that he hopes will make it more than the company that made the Slingbox.

Most of this has been announced before, and in some cases it’s coming out belatedly–”Clip-and-sling” was first previewed at the 2007 CES trade show nearly two years ago. Hirschhorn said, not surprisingly, that the industry has faced serious difficulties when it comes to online video: securing rights, getting people to keep watching, and figuring out models for making money. These issues are “choking Hollywood,” as he described it.

In a panel called “A Hard Reset for Hollywood” at the beachfront WebbyConnect conference, Hirschhorn, the former chief digital officer at MTV Networks, talked about Sling.com, a video hub that’s is currently in private beta and promises to deliver a huge library of TV and Web video content. (Hirschhorn said later that while making it the biggest is a general goal, the company isn’t comparing catalogs and keeping statistics at this point.)

DANA POINT, Calif.–Jason Hirschhorn said negotiating with Hollywood has been “a soul-killing, ego-destroying experience.”

This post was updated at 3:56 p.m. PT with clarification from Jason Hirschhorn.

In a world where we expect results on-demand, online video’s slow crawl to maturity has left many frustrated, especially now that both the venture dollars and ad dollars are drying up. There continue to be plenty of dead ends and bad ideas. “We just landed on Plymouth Rock and we’re on the way to L.A.,” Hirschhorn joked. “Nobody knows anything.”

Hirschhorn elaborated after the panel that future releases of Sling.com–not the initial one–will be able to stream that content directly to SlingCatcher devices, something that has been rumored but not confirmed by the company. That means, yes, you’ll be able to watch Hulu or any of Sling’s other content partners on your TV. He is not announcing dates yet, but said that the press tour for Sling.com starts in very early November.

I hate audio plagiarism lawsuits–there are only 12 notes, and only so many ways to combine them–but the law has come down time and time again on the side of the plaintiffs. George Harrison was forced to pay damages for “unintentionally” ripping off “He’s So Fine” by The Chiffons. Ironically, Harrison’s manager at that time, Allen Klein, later sued The Verve when “Bittersweet Symphony” oversampled an orchestral arrangement of the Rolling Stones’ “The Last Time.” (Although it wasn’t just the sample–Verve singer Richard Ashcroft also lifted the vocal melody more or less directly from that arrangement, as you can hear on this YouTube video. Weirdly, the orchestral arrangement resembles the original song.)

(Credit: Gunthernet)

Correction: “He’s So Fine” was by The Chiffons, not The Supremes as I originally wrote.

The latest round was fired by Joe Satriani, who’s accusing Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” of ripping off his guitar instrumental “If I Could Fly.” Again, YouTube has the evidence, and it doesn’t sound too good for Coldplay.

Follow Matt on Twitter

But wait? Is it possible that both Satriani and Coldplay got their inspiration from a third source? Ooh la la!

Via’s most illustrious customer is Hewlett-Packard, which currently uses the older Via C7 processor in its 2133 Mini-Note PC.

“We just started shipping to customers last week and this week–literally right now,” Henry said.

He said products using the Nano processor will not appear immediately. “No product that actually uses this is for sale to the end customer (yet). So the parts we’re shipping are going into the (customer’s) manufacturing process or development process.”

(Credit:
Via Technologies)

(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)

The thermal envelope, however, is important because it can influence the design of a Netbook-type device. Typically, parts with lower thermal envelopes can go into smaller devices.

And what about a Via dual-core processor? “We’re working on it. When you see it, who knows. We’re implementing it but it’s not near at hand,” Henry said.

In an interview, Glenn Henry, the head of Via Technologies subsidiary Centaur Technology, said that Via has just begun commercial shipments of its Intel-compatible, power-sipping Nano processor. Centaur headed up development of the Nano processor.

On the upside, Nano can be plugged directly into a design that uses the older C7 processor. “One of the very interesting things about the Nano is that it’s plug compatible with our current C7s. You can plug the part into the same socket.” Though some adjustments must be made: A BIOS upgrade is necessary and “more importantly the part has a different power-versus-megahertz (paradigm) compared to the current part because it’s running benchmarks two times faster,” Henry said.

Via Nano processor

Why the difference? Nano uses a more sophisticated superscalar, out-of-order design, while Atom has a more simple “in-order execution” architecture. Because of Nano’s more complex design, it may deliver better performance than Atom in some cases.

The 2.6-pound HP 2133 Mini-Note uses the Via C7 processor.

Though Henry refused to talk about design wins, he did say that there is interest from major companies. “We’ve given them (HP) samples,” he said. Though Henry qualified this by saying that Via has given samples to a lot of potential customers. “There’s a great deal of interest in the part from people whose name you would recognize,” he said.

(Note: There are several ways to categorize a design as a netbook. One is screen size. Typically netbooks have 7-, 8-, or 9-inch screens. But this definition is in flux with, for example, the newest Atom-processor-based Eee PC 1000 that sports a 10-inch screen. So, as netbooks get redefined upward, the silicon inside–and other hardware–becomes the defining factor, i.e., low-power, low-performance processors and graphics that dictate how the computer should be used: primarily as a Net-centric device for Web browsing and email. Prices will also typically be lower than standard notebooks.)

Henry said there is a lot of demand for larger form factors. “Everyone wants to build a (Netbook) of some variety these days. Most of the interest we see from customers is for a larger screen than the HP (2133). There’s a lot of demand to move those things up to higher screen sizes. I’ve heard customers say they want to build 12- or 13-inch notebooks,” Henry said.

There is one crucial difference with the Atom. Nano has a thermal envelope of 5 watts at 1GHz. Though this is low compared with a standard Intel Core 2 mobile processor (typically drawing 25 watts to 35 watts), this is higher than Intel’s single-core Atom chip for netbooks which tops out at just 2 watts. At 1.3GHz, Nano has a thermal envelope of 8 watts, approaching that of Intel’s dual-core Atom.

The Nano processor is seen as the only real competition for Intel’s popular Atom chip, which is used in Netbooks from a long list of companies including Acer, Asus, Lenovo, and Dell.

Are Netbooks ripe to be resized? Via Technologies thinks so. The Intel-compatible chipmaker says larger Netbooks are on the way.

After an extensive investigation that was facilitated by the companies’ cooperation and agreement to provide the department time to investigate prior to implementation, the department concluded that Google and Yahoo would have become collaborators rather than competitors for a significant portion of their search advertising businesses, materially reducing important competitive rivalry between the two companies.

“Yahoo continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court,” the company said in a statement. “Google notified Yahoo of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.”

“While the implementation of the services agreement with Google would have enabled Yahoo to accelerate its investments in its top business priorities through an infusion of additional operating cash flow, this deal was incremental to Yahoo’s product roadmap and does not change Yahoo’s commitment to innovation and growth in search,” the company said in its statement. “Going forward, Yahoo plans to continue to provide the cutting-edge advances in products, platforms and services that the industry needs and expects, and intends to be the destination of choice for advertisers and publishers who want to reach one of the largest and most engaged populations of consumers on the Web.”

Updated at 7:51 a.m. PST:
But the deal ran into objections, and the biggest was from the Justice Department’s antitrust regulators. Today, those authorities expressed satisfaction with the demise of the deal.

The deal’s demise is a new blow to the struggling Internet pioneer, whose stock has plunged since Microsoft offered as much as $33 per share just months ago in an unfriendly acquisition attempt. Yahoo shares closed at $13.35 Tuesday, but rose 57 cents, or 4 percent, to $13.92 in trading Wednesday morning.

“The agreement would have enabled Yahoo to replace a significant portion of its own Internet search results advertisements with search results advertisements sold by Google.

And a proposed modification of the terms didn’t satisfy him.

Updated at 10:43 a.m. PST: Microsoft, which fought its own war with antitrust regulators, expressed predictable pleasure about the news–and the regulatory conclusion in particular.

Updated at 8:30 a.m. PST: Also, it’s easy to see why Google might not want to fight this particular fight. No doubt Google, which already had a hard time pushing through its acquisition of display-ad powerhouse DoubleClick, doesn’t want any more regulatory ill will than necessary.

And given Google’s trajectory, more government scrutiny seems inevitable. Google’s dominance over the Internet continues to grow in its first two priorities, search and advertising, and it clearly has high hopes for its third ambition, Web-based applications.

“The companies’ decision to abandon their agreement eliminates the competitive concerns identified during our investigation and eliminates the need to file an enforcement action,” said Assistant Attorney General Thomas Barnett, who leads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, in a statement. “The arrangement likely would have denied consumers the benefits of competition–lower prices, better service and greater innovation.”

Other objections came from Microsoft, which runs in third place in search queries and search advertising after Google and Yahoo, and, perhaps more notably, from the Association of National Advertisers.

The Association of National Advertisers, which raised its objections in September and updated its concerns this week with a letter to the Justice Department, breathed a sigh of relief.

Updated at 7:35 a.m. PST: Yahoo isn’t happy with the outcome.

Yahoo, which doesn’t have to pay any termination penalty, now says it’s moving on.

When Yahoo and Google announced the search-ad deal in June, Yahoo said it would generate $800 million and $250 million to $450 million in incremental operating cash flow in the first 12 months of operation.

“The proposed deal was anticompetitive and would have given Google too much power over online advertising,” said Larry Kilman, a spokesman for the World Association of Newspapers, which in September announced its opposition. “It’s clear from the announcement that government competition authorities were receptive to the concerns raised by the advertising and media industries. We’re delighted that Google and Yahoo decided to drop it.”

“When the fundamentals don’t change–concerns of pricing and concentration of power–then the fact that it’s a 2-year deal or a 10-year deal doesn’t matter,” Liodice said. “If a deal can’t stand up on its own under the longer terms, then it shouldn’t stand up at all under shorter terms.”

Also, from a raw financial perspective, Google would have benefited directly much less than Yahoo from the search-ad deal. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in October that Google typically gives the bulk of revenue to advertising partners that carry its ads.

“The Department of Justice’s finding is significant for advertisers, publishers, and consumers, who voiced overwhelming concern about this illegal deal to law enforcement and policymakers,” Microosoft said in a statement.

Google has pulled the plug on a search-ad partnership with Yahoo that would have given Yahoo major new revenue but that raised antitrust concerns.

And advertisers who opposed the deal applauded the decision by the companies to step away from the agreement.

“After four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement,” said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer in a blog post Wednesday. “Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.”

Under the deal, Yahoo would have placed Google ads on some Yahoo search results, and the companies would have shared resulting revenue. The deal would have let Yahoo show ads on pages where its own technology, called Panama, wasn’t able to provide results, the company said.

Although the companies proposed various modifications to their original agreement in an effort to address the Department’s antitrust concerns, the Department determined that such modifications would not eliminate the competition concerns raised by the agreement.

It’s not surprising that Google and Yahoo didn’t see eye to eye about how hard to fight for the deal. Google voiced its willingness to help out its chief business rival during a time when Microsoft was trying to acquire Yahoo and later, its search assets. Now, even though Yahoo’s new board member Carl Icahn still is interested in a Microsoft transaction and many observers believe it possible, the Microsoft threat to Google is much diminished.

Here’s how the regulators saw the deal, according to the Justice Department’s statement:

But the companies weren’t even close, as it turned out. The Justice Department remained unmoved, saying it would file an antitrust lawsuit to block the agreement, even after a recent proposed revision that would have limited the deal’s scope.

Updated at 9:17 a.m. PST: Yahoo and Google had lobbied hard to bring their partnership to fruition, trying to explain the deal to Congress, the public, and regulators. Schmidt professed confidence in the deal, saying the companies had structured it to satisfy antitrust concerns.

The Center for Digital Democracy applauded the outcome. “Today’s announcement in its own way underscores what we have been telling officials: that a very tiny handful of global digital giants–particularly Google–is increasingly dominating the most prevalent way online publishing is financially supported,” said Executive Director Jeff Chester. “The future diversity of online content–including news–is ultimately connected to the key question of whether one or two companies globally control the flow of most ad dollars tied to our use of broadband to PCs, mobile devices, and perhaps even digital TVs.”

“We knew some decision was coming soon and are grateful that the parties agreed to discontinue their agreement. It’s an important step for the industry to move forward…it will stimulate the level of innovation,” ANA Chief Executive Bob Liodice said.

“Over the course of the past year, we have seen use of mobile Internet evolve from an occasional activity to being a daily part of their lives,” Mark Donovan, comScore’s senior vice president of mobile, said in a statement. “This underscores the growing importance of the mobile medium as consumers become more reliant on their mobile devices to access time-sensitive and utilitarian information.”

According to a report released Monday by market researcher comScore, the number of U.S. residents using mobile devices to access news and information more than doubled to 63.2 million in January over the previous year.

Applications that can be downloaded to the phone, such as maps, have helped drive the growth in using mobile devices to access news and information, Donovan noted in the report. And text-based searches have also contributed to the rise in popularity of accessing news and information via a phone.

In the U.S., the number of unique mobile phone users who access news and information on a daily business has grown to 22.4 million in January over the previous year. And here’s a look at how the categories stack up on a daily usage basis:

Mobile devices are becoming the virtual newspaper.

While news and information accounted for the largest slice of mobile Internet users in January, social networking or blogging grew at an even greater rate, according to comScore.

This category grew more than four-fold to 9.3 million daily mobile unique users, according to the report.

(Credit:
comScore Inc.)

Using the caveat that only a few app makers were using Pinch Analytics’ library, he pointed out that as per their data, the ratio of free downloads to paid downloads is at least 10 to 1. He also said that the pace of downloads is slowing, which is expected because the early rush is behind us.

That rate would add up to $360 million by the first anniversary of the launch of the iPhone 3G and the App Store, Jobs told the Journal. “Who knows? Maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time.”

The top 10 developers have accounted for about $9 million, or just less than half of the total take for developers, Jobs told the Journal.

But back to Apple: in the App Store’s first month, Jobs said, iPhone users have downloaded upward of 60 million applications. Many iPhone applications are available for free.

Also this morning, see Tom Krazit and Maggie Reardon’s reporting on CNET News, “Apple, AT&T mum on iPhone 3G issues.”

While much of the glory for that accomplishment attends to Apple, a lot of the money does not. About 70 percent of the proceeds–or roughly $21 million so far, Jobs said–are going to the creators of the software applications for the Apple smartphone, leaving 30 percent for Apple itself–or about enough to cover expenses.

In a variation on the new math, 2.0 plus 3G equals $30 million now and about $360 million next summer.

According to data collected by Pinch Media, on average, less than 20 percent of an application’s overall unique users return to an application each day. Yardley also pointed out that people are using the apps for just under five minutes at a time, on average. The majority only use the applications once per day–average number of uses per day is around 1.2.

Or maybe the frenzy will slow down after the novelty wears off. GigaOm’s Om Malik reports that he has downloaded “nearly three dozen apps” but finds only four–Twinkle, Facebook, NetNewsWire, and Shozu–worth using day in and day out. He turned to Pinch Media for some statistical corroboration:

Or in plain English: Apple has raked in about $30 million in sales of
iPhone applications in the one month since the company opened its App Store and brought the iPhone 3G onto the market, CEO Steve Jobs told The Wall Street Journal. Jobs also sees big numbers ahead, if Apple continues its current pace of selling an average of $1 million worth of applications per day.