visacashbackcard.com

Nokia China’s new headquarters were completed on the 21st in Yizhuang, Beijing, marking the birth of the world’s first mobile phone industry chain fully integrating research and development, management and production, as well as sales, according to Xinhua Net.

Just read the first few sentences of this article from Xinhua, and tell me it doesn’t sound like a press release.

The article later references an interview with a Nokia source, but aside from Xinhua-style odd English this could have been released by Nokia PR. Then again, much better for PR was The New York Times Magazine’s admiring profile of Nokia’s corporate anthropologist.

Located in Beijing’s Yizhuang Economic and Technological Development Zone, Nokia’s new headquarters building covers 7 million square meters, and is Nokia’s largest regional headquarters in the world. Apart from being the headquarters for the management of China’s entire market, this environment- friendly building, wrapped in a green glass curtain wall, will also harbor the research and development of its global market business.

In an e-mail interview, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said that Microsoft was forced to respond to these other Web platforms.

See also Techmeme for more coverage of Live Mesh

“This time the centricity is the Internet which puts Microsoft on an even playing field as their desktop monopoly is negated through the network and new devices,” he said. “After a decade of using their monopoly to stop (software-as-a-service) innovation through false prophecy and rhetoric; Microsoft has relented by delivering a service that is still too little too late without the platform as a service customers are demanding to succeed.”

News.com’s Mike Ricciuti contributed to this report.

Also, Microsoft faces significant competition in both what it is offering initially and with what it eventually envisions for Live Mesh. It will need to convince consumers and developers alike that its way is the best one.

You can also check out Webware editor Rafe Needleman’s hands-on review here.

At its core, Live Mesh is vintage Ozzie, touching on themes that go back to his Lotus Notes days such as a focus on collaboration and synchronization. The core notion is deliciously appealing. All of your data should live in the places you need it and stay up-to-date automatically.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

I guess Ozzie can’t count Benioff among the Web 2.0 developers that will add-in Live Mesh support into their applications.

The Live Mesh widget tells you what's happening with your shares and syncs. Click the image for more early screenshots.

As for the current stuff, there are lots of Web services that offer remote desktop or file-sharing capabilities–Box.net, LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, SugarSync and Microsoft’s own FolderShare–to name a few.

The Live Mesh service that Microsoft unveiled Tuesday night is a peek of what Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has been working on all these months.

But Microsoft is not alone in trying to be the platform of the Web. There are consumer efforts like Facebook and OpenSocial, and business ones, such as Amazon and Salesforce’s Force.com.

Microsoft has said it is exploring several models, including paid subscriptions and advertising, though it vowed to always offer a free service with at least 5GB of cloud storage. At the moment, though, it is just a free service and a consumer-focused one at that. Microsoft said it would have more to say on the business possibilities later in the year.

But Microsoft’s approach holds the possibility of peril, in addition to its considerable promise. Microsoft has outlined broad visions before only to be thwarted by either technical challenges (Longhorn and Cairo) or customer concerns (Hailstorm and Smart Tags). One potential sticking point with Mesh–it requires users to use Microsoft’s Live ID for authentication, though the company said it is exploring whether it can support OpenID in the future.

“Microsoft’s answer to platform-as-a-service is just more .Net software in a world where cloud computing negates their monopolistic control of the Windows desktop,” Benioff said. “Microsoft has let us all down through their lack of innovation; fortunately, the SaaS and PaaS movements will finally release us all from their old software models and outdated business practices.”

Even assuming it finds developers more willing than Benioff to bet on Microsoft, there’s also the question of business model.

Obviously Microsoft hopes to go further, looking to make Mesh a place where developers can write applications that can live on all manner of devices with data and settings stored in the cloud and changes on one device automatically synchronized with other devices and the cloud.

We’ll have much more to say about Live Mesh in the coming days and I invite you to share your take below.

Microsoft is trying to woo developers by letting them write their code in any number of different ways, from RSS to Atom to Javascript.

In the coming months, Microsoft hopes to bring Live Mesh closer to the product it envisions: a way for users to connect all of their key devices and keep them up to date with important data, and to further blur the line between online and desktop applications. If things are on track, we will see Microsoft add support for more devices and testers in short order.

As previously noted, the version that launches Tuesday is limited considerably from the broad service Microsoft envisions. (See Ozzie’s recent memo to Microsoft employees for the big vision.) Although pitched as a way to seamlessly connect various devices, for now the only devices it is synching are Windows PCs (though Macs and Windows Mobile phones are just around the corner, we’re told). For now, it’s limited to a closed beta of about 10,000 testers, though Microsoft says it plans to bring on more people over time and have a broad beta around the time of this fall’s Professional Developer Conference.

In its initial incarnation, Live Mesh is mostly a file-sharing and folder-synchronization service, as well as a nice, easy way to access a PC remotely. Down the road though, it’s Microsoft’s latest attempt to find preeminence in a world in which Microsoft-based devices are just part of the mix.

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” one of the unwitting decoys, named Mike, said to the NBC station. As it turns out, they were simply placed there to confuse cops who were looking for a guy wearing a virtually identical outfit.

But here’s the hilarious twist. The robber had previously put out a Craigslist ad for road maintenance workers, promising wages of $28.50 per hour. Recruits were asked to wait near the Bank of America right around the time of the robbery–wearing yellow vests, safety goggles, a respirator mask, and preferably a blue shirt. At least a dozen of them showed up after responding to the Craigslist ad.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark was not immediately available for comment.

It appears to have unfolded this way, according to a Seattle-based NBC affiliate: around 11:00 a.m. PDT on Tuesday, the robber, wearing a yellow vest, safety goggles, a blue shirt, and a respirator mask went over to a guard who was overseeing the unloading of cash to the bank from the truck. He sprayed the guard with pepper spray, grabbed his bag of money, and fled the scene.

In an elaborate robbery scheme that’s one part The Thomas Crowne Affair and one part Pineapple Express, a crook robbed an armored truck outside a Bank of America branch in Monroe, Wash., by hiring decoys through Craigslist to deter authorities.

It gets better: He then escaped in a creek headed for the Skykomish River in an inner tube, and the cops are still looking for him. “A great amount of money” was taken, Monroe police said, but did not provide a dollar value.

Authorities eventually found the getaway inner tube (a getaway inner tube!) and suspect that accomplices may have picked up the robber in a boat. According to the NBC affiliate, police hope to track him down by figuring out who posted the Craigslist ad in the first place.

But Rothken said the case has no precedent-setting value because TorrentSpy never got its day in court. This may come as good news to IsoHunt, one of TorrentSpy’s former competitors, which has also been sued by the MPAA for allegedly violating copyright.

An MPAA representative could not be reached for comment.

“The decision means absolutely nothing as it relates to other (BitTorrent cases),” Rothken said. “It issue was not decided on the merits. It’s obvious we are going to appeal.”

According to Rothken, TorrentSpy filed bankruptcy in England last week and is without the ability to pay even a fraction of the $100 million, rendering the judgment’s dollar amount meaningless.

In December, TorrentSpy got into trouble with U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, who presided over the case, when she determined that TorrentSpy operators intentionally destroyed evidence, making it impossible for the MPAA to get a fair trial. TorrentSpy had earlier been fined $30,000 for violations of discovery orders.

Ira Rothken has defended TorrentSpy since 2006, when it was accused in a lawsuit filed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) of encouraging copyright infringement. In an interview with CNET News.com on Wednesday night, Rothken said the judge’s decision was an “abuse of discretion” and suggested that the large dollar amount was an attempt to draw attention to the case.

“What is really going on here is a Hollywood public-relations stunt,” Rothken said. “The reason for the size of the judgment was so a bunch of news organizations would write that ‘a $100 million judgment was issued against a bunch of pirates’ when, in fact, it was declared against a company with no appreciable assets that has already declared bankruptcy.”

TorrentSpy attorney Ira Rothken

TorrentSpy intends to appeal a court decision that requires the now-defunct search engine to pay $111 million in damages to the six largest film studios, according to the company’s attorney.

The MPAA disagreed, claiming that unlike Google, TorrentSpy existed primarily to help people rip off Hollywood.

Cooper took the unusual step of terminating the case, which meant that she had found in the MPAA’s favor and simply had to determine the damage amount.

In March, when TorrentSpy executives shut down the site, they noted that the cost of defending the case was hundreds of thousands of dollars.

TorrentSpy helps users locate BitTorrent files, and since BiTorrent is a technology favored by those sharing digital files illegally, the site was known as an important tool for pirates. But the company argued that it never hosted any unauthorized content and shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of its users–just as Google isn’t held accountable when people use its service to find pirated content.

A Dutch University will see if chemically tricked-out paving stones can clean the air.

The University of Twente (UT) has devised a concrete capable of converting the nitrogen oxide from
car exhaust–the source of smog and acid rain–into a nitrate, another chemical that will wash away in the rain.

Green chemistry: how green bricks convert nitrogen oxide air pollution into nitrates with the sun.

(Credit:
University of Twente)

When fertilizers are applied heavily, high levels of nitrates can enter the soil or water and be toxic to humans or livestock. Jos Brouwers from the University of Twente said that the nitrate production from its paving stones will be “harmless” and well below Dutch water standards.

The researchers came up with the air-purifying paving stones by tapping the properties of titanium dioxide, a chemical that catalyzes chemical reactions when exposed to light.

The top layer of the University of Twente paving stones contains the material mixed with concrete. So when sun shines, smog-producing pollutants will convert into nitrates and then wash away, keeping the stones surface clean in the process.

The university received a sustainability grant to test its invention in the municipality of Hengelo.

By the end of this year, researchers expect to complete construction of a road where one side is built with the specially coated paving stones. The other half will have tradition materials.

The results of how much the stones reduce air pollution should be ready by next year. If successful, the tests could be expanded further, the university said.

It’s not the first time that the Dutch have been inventive with road construction. A civil engineering firm has devised a paving technique to absorb heat from asphalt to melt ice and heat neighboring buildings.