When Debbie Gordon and her fellow health-care mission workers go to Belize, there's just so much they can do to treat people in the remote village of Gales Point.

Her group, which includes two or three doctors, can only treat the town's 300 villagers based on the symptoms patients describe or what the doctors observe.

"If we had the ability to take a device that could do field tests and get back the results in a few days, that would be very helpful," said Gordon, a health educator based in North Carolina, who teaches doctors and nurses about care for sick newborns.

How about in a few seconds? Such a device may be available in the near future, and it could turn a cell phone into a mobile medical lab -- and change the way doctors treat patients in rural areas far from hospitals.

Professor Aydogan Ozcan of UCLA has taken a typical Sony Ericsson phone, and by adding a few off-the-shelf parts that cost less than $50, he can get it to produce a remarkable image that shows the thousands of cells in a small fluid sample such as human blood.

"It is a new way of doing images of cells and bacteria," said Ozcan, an assistant professor in UCLA's electrical engineering department. While other small imaging systems use bulky optics, his group's invention offers "true miniaturization of a laboratory" because there are no lenses and the results are quick and accurate, he said.

The device is called LUCAS, which stands for lensless ultra-wide-field cell monitoring array platform based on shadow imaging. It uses a short wavelength blue light to illuminate a sample of liquid -- blood, saliva or another fluid -- on a laboratory slide. 

LUCAS captures the image to a chip in the cell phone. If the phone is loaded with an algorithm program, it then counts the microparticles much faster than a human can. The image also can be transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which analyzes it and sends back a text message with the results.

For instance, CD4 counts -- or the measure of T cells in a person's blood -- can determine if an HIV patient has AIDS. Or a red cell count can help determine if a patient is anemic or might have malaria.

Ozcan compares the images to the shadows you see when you walk down the street on a sunny day.

"These cells also have a shadow, but their shadows are not like our black shadows, they are much more rich," he said.

The holograms produced by the camera are fuzzy and cannot be read by the human eye. Doctors still need microscopes to examine a sample from a patient.

The cells are different in shape by type, so the LUCAS system counts the cells using an algorithm developed by the UCLA team. Ozcan said the report generated is 90 percent accurate.

The test is not meant to replace sophisticated optics. But the device could offer a fast, preliminary diagnosis in hard-to-reach areas such as remote villages in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV rates are the highest in the world.

"What makes it quite valuable is that it is small and inexpensive," said Skip Garner, professor of Biochemistry and Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. "It's also the scientific proof of a principle in its very early stages. Once the group puts more and more work into it there are going to be a huge number of applications that are going to come out."

Ozcan said he came up with the initial concept about two years ago. Major improvements have come in the past 18 months, but the system is still considered a prototype, he said. In the future if the LUCAS is built into a smart phone or similar hand-held device, it would add only a few dollars to the cost, he said.

Ozcan also wants to further develop LUCAS' imaging capability to record events at the molecular level.

"We want to go now from microscale to nanoscale," he said. "We want to detect DNA fragments or protein."

Garner wonders whether the device could differentiate between similar-looking bacteria. There is good E. coli and bad E. coli, for example, and they are almost identical in structure. 

Ozcan's team is also still trying to understand the density limits of LUCAS. When there are many cells in a sample, it becomes harder to count them all, Ozcan said.

"But if you are looking for a diseased person, it's not usually the count [that is important] but the morphology of the cells," he said.

Another potential pitfall is the lack of cell-phone coverage in remote areas. But many Third World countries are developing cellular networks, Ozcan said.

Gordon, who has made several mission trips to Belize, says a device with the LUCAS system would be ideal for her team. There are no doctors in Gales Point, so her group's visit is one of the few times medical professionals come to the village. 

The nearest hospital is more than 90 minutes away.
"To get results right away would be phenomenal," she said. "I'd want to test every villager on my next trip."

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Here's some food for thought: If you have nude photos of your wife on your cell phone, hang onto it.

Phillip Sherman of Arkansas learned that lesson after he left his phone behind at a McDonald's restaurant and the photos ended up online. Now he and his wife, Tina, are suing the McDonald's Corp., the franchise owner and the store manager.

The suit was filed Friday and seeks a jury trial and $3 million in damages for suffering, embarrassment and the cost of having to move to a new home.

The suit says that Phillip Sherman left the phone the Fayetteville store in July and that employees promised to secure it until he returned.

Manager Aaron Brummley declined to comment, and other company officials didn't return messages.
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Microsoft's new Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, is now available in a beta version meant for ordinary users, and it's a pretty good piece of software.

Besides the private browsing mode, called InPrivate, which Microsoft has already announced, there are other nifty features. When your cursor moves over, say, an address on a Web site, one of IE 8's so-called Accelerators drops down a menu bar of different Web mapping services. Click and the address is mapped. No copying and pasting across Web sites.

IE8 has also been designed so that tabbed Web sites are isolated. That means a poorly behaving Web site won't crash the whole browser, just that tab.

The list goes on, and Microsoft explains all the new features on its Web site.

IE 6, introduced in 2001, was a mess, really opening the door for the open-source project Firefox, which is richly supported by Google. IE 7, analysts say, was a major catch-up effort, while IE 8 is Microsoft's bid to move ahead of Firefox and Apple's Safari in performance, features and user experience.

"In things big and small, it is a better experience," contends Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer group.

We'll see. But Microsoft's new entry and the revived competition in the browser market brings a sense of deja vu. I think back to the comment made by Marc Andreessen, Netscape's co-founder, in the heady days of the browser pioneer's ascent. The browser, he said, could "reduce Windows to a set of poorly debugged device drivers." Translated: the operating system would be relegated to plumbing, while all the action for users and programmers would be on the browser, riding above the operating system.

On the witness stand in 1998 during Microsoft's federal antitrust trial, Jim Barksdale, Netscape's chief executive, tried to dismiss the Andreessen comment as a young man's flippant joke.

But it was no laughing matter to Microsoft, and that potential threat was the animating force behind the tactics Microsoft used to stifle the Netscape challenge.

Today, the browser challenge — though not Netscape — is alive and well. And it is far more realistic now. The tools for making richer Web-based applications have vastly improved. There is the rise of cloud computing, with its promise of shifting all sorts of computing tasks from e-mail to word processing onto the Web. And there is the proliferation of powerful cellphones that can handle many computing tasks via a mobile browser.

So the browser could become "the universal client," noted Peter O'Kelly, an independent analyst. And Andreessen was "just ahead of his time," O'Kelly said.

Firefox is now a credible competitor to IE, with its share of the browser market having climbed to 19 percent, according to Net Applications, a research firm. Microsoft's IE has 73 percent and Apple's Safari has 6 percent.

IE 8 is Microsoft's answer to the renewed browser challenge. "There's competition now and competition does amazing things," says Matt Rosoff, an analyst for Directions on Microsoft, a research firm.

 

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They're most often lost at security checkpoints, the Ponemon Institute says

June 30, 2008 (IDG News Service) Keep laptops close at airports, because they have a startling tendency to disappear in the blink of an eye, according to a new survey.

Some of the largest and medium-size U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to a Ponemon Institute survey released today. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey.

Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65% of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-size airports, and 69% are not reclaimed. The institute conducted field surveys at 106 airports in 46 states and surveyed 864 business travelers.
The five airports with the most missing laptops reported were Los Angeles International, Miami International, John F. Kennedy International, Chicago O'Hare and Newark Liberty International, the study said.

Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77% of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16% saying they wouldn't do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53% said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65% taking no steps to protect the information.

Airports, along with hotels and parked cars, are places where laptops can be easily stolen, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on its Web site. The confusion of going through security checkpoints can make it easy for travelers to lose track of their laptops, making it "fertile ground for theft," the FTC said.

The FTC recommends people treat laptops "like cash." Like a wad of money, a laptop in public view, such as in the back seat of a car or at the airport, could attract unwanted attention. The FTC also recommends using tracking devices such as Absolute Software Corp.'s LoJack, which can help track down a stolen laptop by reporting its location once it is connected to the Internet. Lenovo Group Ltd. last week announced that it would offer the LoJack option in its upcoming ThinkPad SL series of laptops.

Attaching bells and whistles that sound off after detecting laptop motion could also minimize the chances of theft, the FTC says.

Laptop theft is fairly prevalent in the U.S., said Mike Spinney, a spokesman for the Ponemon Institute. In a study conducted by the institute, 76% of companies surveyed reported losing one or more laptops each year, of which 22% were due to theft or other criminal mischief.

Many people are too ashamed to report lost laptops, knowing they left the computers out where they shouldn't have been, Spinney said.

The Ponemon survey was commissioned by Dell Inc., which today announced new security services to commercial customers, including tracking and recovery of lost laptops and data-theft prevention.

Dell's laptop-tracking service uses technology to locate and recover lost laptops, including GPS. The data protection services include the ability to remotely delete data on a hard drive and services to recover data from failed hard drives.
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NEW YORK - MySpace users will be able to add games, e-mail services and other features from outside developers without ever leaving the site under a new program the popular online community will fully launch next month.

MySpace already allows users to customize their personal profile pages. But they generally must go off the site, grab the lines of programming code they are interested in and cut and paste that into their profiles. Now, users will be able to add those features more directly.

Under the MySpace Developer Platform, an outside e-mail provider can write a program that sits on the personal home page users see when they log on. Users can check for new messages right there.

Or — instead of taking visitors to another site to view photo albums — a photo-sharing service can write a program that appears on a MySpace profile page that friends visit.

The company unveiled details of the previously announced platform Tuesday and said developers would be able to write and test interactive programs, called "widgets," on up to five users for a month before making them available to the broader MySpace community.

MySpace's launch of a developer platform follows a May decision by its smaller rival social network, Facebook, to open its platform to developers. That has proven a boon for music-sharing startup iLike.com, photo-sharing service Slide Inc. and other companies.

Those applications, in turn, have helped make Facebook more popular, although it still ranks second behind MySpace, a unit of News Corp.

By bringing features from other sites with the developer program, MySpace hopes users will have fewer reasons to leave the site — and view ads elsewhere.

Amit Kapur, MySpace's chief operating officer, said all applications would be treated equally, even though the openness means competitors could siphon traffic from MySpace's own products — such as the MySpaceTV feature that competes with Google Inc.'s YouTube.

"If somebody builds a better feature than we do, we want to see that succeed," he said. "It's shortsighted for us to think we can do everything."

Age, hometown, photo albums and video clips posted on MySpace profiles will be among the data available for incorporation into the widgets. The company said developers would have access only to data already publicly visible, and users can keep that information from developers by restricting profile access to friends only.

MySpace will let developers sell ads, sponsorships and products on special pages assigned to each application, but no ads will appear on the widgets themselves.

 

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SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Monday that its $44.6 billion unsolicited offer for Yahoo Inc was generous and it expects Yahoo's board and shareholders to agree to the buyout quickly.

"We trust the Yahoo board and the Yahoo shareholders will join with us quickly in deciding to move down an integrated path," Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said in an annual strategy meeting with analysts.

Microsoft's comments follow a weekend of maneuvering by Yahoo, which, according to sources familiar with Yahoo's strategy, is considering a business alliance with Google Inc to rebuff Microsoft's proposal. It has also received preliminary contacts from media, technology, telecommunications and financial companies, another source close to Yahoo said.

At the same meeting, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell also said the company may borrow money for the first time in its history to fund a portion of the 50-50 cash and stock offer for Yahoo.

"If you look at the cash component ... we could fund most of that through our cash holdings, but it's likely we're actually going to borrow for the first time," said Liddell. "It's going to be a mixture of the cash we have on hand plus debt."

Liddell said he expects Microsoft's revenue to grow at a double-digit percentage in the coming fiscal year starting in July despite a potential U.S. economic slowdown.

Microsoft also announced that its first major update to Windows Vista was released to manufacturing. Usually, large organizations wait for the first major update before deploying a new operating system.

Shares of Microsoft rose 5 cents to $30.50 in early Nasdaq trading, while Yahoo shares rose 44 cents to $28.82.

(Reporting by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Michele Gershberg in New York, editing by Dave Zimmerman)

Copyright 2008 Reuters

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Google issued a statement Feb. 3 criticizing Microsoft's bid for Yahoo, which the software vendor made public Feb 1.  

In a statement, Google's senior vice president of development and chief legal officer, David Drummond, said that "Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo raises troubling questions."

Drummond also suggested that Microsoft would attempt to dominate the market for Web mail and instant messaging in  the same manner as it has used its size in the past to dominate the market for PC software.

"Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies—and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets," Drummond said.

But rather than focusing on search and online advertising—two markets where Microsoft and Google have been competing fiercely—Drummond's letter focuses on IM and Web-based mail.

Indeed, each company has been making incursions into the other's territories in recent months. Google is developing Web-based applications that could replace Microsoft's office productivity suite of applications, while Microsoft has been looking to build social networking and community-based tools.

Forrester analyst Charlene Li blogged that a combination of Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook could emerge as "the media company of the future."

Microsoft acquired a 5 percent stake in Facebook, a popular social networking company. 

That prospect was clearly at the root of Drummond's concerns. He noted that a combination of Microsoft and Yahoo "equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and Web email accounts... Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?"

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t's been a busy 24 hours in the online space. First, Amazon.com announced it was buying Audible. And now Microsoft has made a $44 billion bid to acquire Yahoo! Such aggressive takeovers generally occur either close to a top-when buyers are really optimistic-or after a bust, when survivors pounce on opportunities to pick up companies on the cheap. But coupled with yesterday's disappointing earnings report from Google, the deal-making points to a new phenomenon: the first economic slowdown of the Web 2.0 era. After a few quarters of defying the broader economic decline, even the best-of-breed technology companies are showing themselves to be subject to the business cycle. The slowdown is gutting margins, causing executives to revise their Power Point presentations on growth, and depressing stocks. As a result, the hot young singles of the NASDAQ are seeking to cut costs and ride out the storm by shacking up together.

Audible is a new media company that old-media types like to root for. Its founder and chief executive officer is the excellent magazine journalist and author Donald Katz, and its services provided a potential new revenue stream for long-form journalists. Audible survived the dotcom meltdown in 2000, and quietly built a significant business. (Projected 2007 revenues: $106-$108 million). But as shown by its third quarter earnings, impressive revenue growth of about 30 percent has been unable to overcome persistent spending on technology, marketing, and operations. The upshot: Audible is still losing money.

Enter Amazon.com, which, though it continues to put up excellent numbers, remains a retail stock. And when the end of a business cycle approaches, retail growth frequently comes at the expense of margins. Amazon.com's fourth quarter earnings release, which came out on Wednesday, showed sales rose an impressive 42 percent from the 2006 fourth quarter, to $5.67 billion (with an assist from foreign exchange translations). But operating income grew only 38 percent, and operating margins fell in the core North American market. (Translation: Amazon had to discount, or throw in free shipping, more than it did last year to help goose sales.) For 2008, Amazon is expecting revenue growth to slow to between 26 and 33 percent. So why get hitched? Amazon's huge infrastructure investments and distribution capabilities may make it possible for it to run Audible profitably, even if sales growth is muted. And Audible represents a significant revenue stream that it can acquire without spending too much. The agreed-upon price is $11.50 a share. While that's a small premium to Audible's January 30 closing price $9.33, it's below where Audible traded for much of the past year. At the end of October, Audible's stock traded at about $13.75.

Economic slowdowns are also bad news for media companies, as marketers cut back on advertising spending. And it stands to reason that while online advertising is still growing at a much more rapid pace than overall ad spending, reduced budgets may take a bite out of interactive marketing. The darkening outlook for online advertising and e-commerce, as well as the continuing challenge of competing against Google, is likely behind Microsoft's bold bid for Yahoo.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft are struggling online. Yahoo's fourth quarter earnings, released earlier this week, showed that in the 2007 fourth quarter, revenues rose a meager 8 percent from 2006, while operating income fell 38 percent. In Microsoft's bright quarterly earnings report, the one dark spot was the online division, which lost money, despite rising revenues. In the six months ended December 2007, losses increased from $236 million to $510 million over the same period in 2006, even as revenues rose from $1.16 billion to $1.53 billion. Google has been eating their lunch competitively, and the overall market isn't growing rapidly enough to allow all the major players to prosper. The stock of Yahoo, which is in the midst of a long-running (and so far, unsuccessful) turnaround plan, closed yesterday at $20, its lowest level since the fall of 2003. That has given Microsoft, which has invested billions in its own efforts to compete against Google in search and advertising, the opportunity to acquire Yahoo for a decent price. Yahoo said it would evaluate the offer. (So did the Justice Department.) By sharing development and infrastructure costs, Microsoft and Yahoo will likely have a better shot of going head to head against Google.

But even Google is showing signs of challenge. The company announced its fourth quarter results yesterday (Thursday). Revenues grew 50 percent from the year-before quarter. That's an impressive gain off a large base, but Google's rate of year-over-year revenue growth is slumping, from 57 percent in the third quarter. Operating income as  percentage of revenues fell from about 33 percent to about 30 percent. The stock fell sharply on the news and is off by nearly 30 percent since its peak in November.
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RSS feeds, mashups and social networking poised for big year in enterprise

By Jon Brodkin, Network World, 01/30/08

Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration products will "continue to steamroll the [enterprise Web 2.0] market" in 2008, despite taking heat from some observers about SharePoint's wiki, blog and social networking functionality, Forrester analysts say.

Continued success for Microsoft was one of nine predictions Forrester made for the enterprise Web 2.0 market in 2008 in a report that says the implementation of Web 2.0 software will be a priority for 24% of businesses over the next year.

SharePoint users have sometimes found basic Web 2.0 features difficult to use, and complain about a lack of advanced features commonly found in best-of-breed products, such as tools that let you build lightweight applications on top of a wiki, says Forrester analyst and report lead author Oliver Young.

These concerns won't limit adoption rates of SharePoint, though, he says.

"IT departments taking a leadership role in enterprise 2.0 deployments will look at SharePoint first," Young writes. "While the rest of the market – analysts included – will continue to gripe about SharePoint in 2008, Microsoft is clearly in an enviable position and can afford to wait for the market to come to it."

Microsoft has answered concerns about SharePoint's Web 2.0 functionality by releasing a social networking tool pack and partnering with vendors such as Socialtext and Atlassian to plug advanced functionality into SharePoint, Young says. IT shops have to pay more for that extra functionality provided through partnerships, he says.

Young says he expects major Web 2.0 upgrades in the next version of SharePoint, whenever that is released, but for now says Microsoft executives have given customers "the best solution that they can." (Learn more about collaboration products in our Collaboration Buyer's Guide.)

Here are some more of Forrester's Web 2.0 predictions for 2008, based partly on a survey of enterprises and small businesses in North America and Europe (fellow industry watcher Gartner also issued predictions this week):

* Web 2.0 will make it big in the enterprise. "CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees' use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead," Young writes.

* RSS feeds will become substantially more popular. "In 2007, many firms discovered the value of blogs and wikis for knowledge workers," he writes. "However, for these tools to truly fulfill their potential, an RSS deployment becomes a must-have, otherwise new content goes unnoticed and most blogs and wikis will fall out of daily view of their users."

* Businesses will be more willing to buy social networking platforms. "Suite offerings that include social networking like Awareness Software, Jive Software and IBM's Lotus Connections offering stand to benefit greatly from the attention, but nearly any vendor that uses the term 'social networking' will get at least some consideration," Forrester states.

* Midtier vendors, rather than start-ups, will pour into the enterprise Web 2.0 market. Vendors from adjacent markets such as search and portal will unveil Web 2.0 offerings, and an increase in specialized services will fragment the market and intensify competition.

* Enterprises will have more choices of consultants and systems integrators. "Look for services vendors like Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte Development, and IBM Global Services to capture much of this nascent services market," Forrester writes.

* Trial deployments will spread through more of the enterprise. The vast majority of deployments in 2007 were limited to small groups and teams, and "as of yet very few have hit the point of pan-enterprise adoption," Forrester says.

* Mashups will get better. With innovations from IBM, Microsoft, Serena Software and others, "enterprise mashups will move from a few one-off pilots to true enterprise-class software in the coming 12 months," Forrester states.

* Don't expect major acquisitions and market exits. The Web 2.0 market will eventually undergo some serious consolidation because there won't be enough demand to keep every active vendor afloat, but "very few will cash out in 2008," Forrester predicts. 

 

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In a twist, security researchers have discovered a group of hackers who are exploiting a new category of victims: aspiring Internet scammers.

 

A Moroccan group called "Mr. Brain" is offering free phishing kits on a Web sitehosted in France, said Paul Mutton, Internet services developer at Netcraft, a security company in Bath, England.

The software packages make it easy to quickly set up a fraudulent Web site mimicking a known brand in order to trick people into divulging credit card details or bank account numbers. Templates for spam e-mail are also included, targeting brands such as Bank of America, eBay, PayPal, and HSBC.

Mr. Brain's Web site lists the kits and what kind of details each one is capable of collecting, such as usernames, passwords, or Social Security numbers. Netcraft posted screenshots on its Web site.

But what the aspiring scammer doesn't know is that the phishing kits are designed to send any sensitive information that's collected back to e-mail accounts controlled by Mr. Brain, Mutton said.

"Obviously, that's why they are offering this stuff for free," Mutton said. "I was impressed by it."

Mr. Brain hides the special e-mail function in a blend of PHP scripts, one of which is encrypted, Mutton said. Just in case someone decrypts it, Mr. Brain has written at the top of the file "Don't need to change anything here. Created by Mr. Brain Morocco Team."

The scheme seems to be targeted at new phishers, Mutton said. Mr. Brain benefits since other wannabe scammers shoulder the cost and risk of finding an ISP to host the phishing site, Mutton said.

"Essentially, they're exploiting all these novice phishers -- basically getting them to do all the hard work," Mutton said.

It's difficult to tell without further research how many of the free phishing kits linked with this latest scam are live on the Internet, but Mutton said Netcraft noticed one earlier this month targeting Bank of America.

"Clearly, these are actively being used in phishing attacks," Mutton said.

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