physicaltherapyhq.com

Big Blue also improved its gross profit margins, which inched up to 25.8 percent in the quarter, from 24.3 percent during the year-earlier period.

•  Europe/Middle East/Africa climbed 20 percent, to $9.8 billion.

In a prepared statement, CEO Sam Palmisano said IBM is sticking with its 2010 projection of $10 to $11 of earnings per share.

“Big Blue is firing on all cylinders. Wall Street doomsayers and recession buzzards had better look for trouble outside the IT industry,” he wrote in a note.

Make of this what you will, but another technology bellwether racked up a pretty good second quarter. On Wednesday, Intel surprised with stronger-than-expected earnings. Thursday, it was IBM that blew away estimates, as the company increased its profit forecast for the second straight quarter.

Palmisano called the quarter “outstanding,” demonstrating that IBM’s diversified product portfolio can sell in both established and emerging markets.

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano

(Credit:
IBM)

•  The Americas were up 8 percent, to $10.9 billion.

(Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which also reported after the close of trading on Thursday, each missed earnings estimates. Check back with CNET News for ongoing coverage on their respective conference calls.)

Perhaps more than most companies, IBM’s global footprint insulated itself from the slowdown in the U.S. economy. Here’s the geographic breakdown:

Annex Research financial analyst and IBM follower Bob Djurdjevic said IBM’s quarter allays concerns that the IT sector will follow the poor stock performance of financial stocks.

CNET News’ Martin LaMonica contributed to this report.

It was a better story for IBM, which posted $1.98 in earnings per share, up from $1.55 a year ago in the same period, as revenue climbed 13 percent to $26.8 billion. (The company’s 2007 results included a 5-cents-per-share gain from the sale of its printing systems division.)

•  Asia-Pacific revenue increased 16 percent, to $5.3 billion.

The effort is the latest example of Microsoft spinning out its technology to a start-up. A number of past efforts, such as Inrix and Zumobi (formerly ZenZui), have come from technologies developed within Microsoft’s research labs, while others have come from various product teams.

The new venture, dubbed InishTech, will be based in Ireland. Microsoft will retain a stake in the company as well as an observer seat on its board of directors. Microsoft also plans to be a customer of the company.

In the past two years, Microsoft has signed up 120 companies to use the software activation and licensing technologies, including its own eHome unit. But it decided creating an independent company was the way to go.

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it is spinning out as a separate business a two year-old effort that licenses its software protection technologies to other companies.

It’s part of a broader effort at the company to license its intellectual property, a push that dates back to late 2003.

Microsoft, which already had a business selling its software licensing technology to other companies, now plans to spin that out into a separate company, known as InishTech.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Not all of the start-ups have continued with their original business plans, however. Microsoft spun out a social-networking technology, known as Wallop, in 2006. A start-up by that name hoped to launch its own social network based on the technology, but ultimately decided to join, rather than try to beat the likes of Facebook and Bebo. The company now develops applications for social networks.

Sony Ericsson C905c

(Credit:
Sony Ericsson)

Like in previous weeks, more Samsung phones passed through the Federal Communications Commission since Monday. But Sony Ericsson also had a few new models, most notably the Sony Ericsson C905.

Because the FCC has to certify every phone sold in the United States, not to mention test its SAR rating, the agency’s online database offers a lot of sneak peeks to those who dig. And to save you the trouble, Crave has combed through the database for you. Here are a selection of filings from the past week on new and upcoming cell phones. Click through to read the full report.

HP FS88/FS90

Huawei U3307q

Kyocera S1300

LG L02A

LG AX265

LG CF750

LG KC910QA

Motorola

Motorola

Motorola

Motorola i9

Nokia (RM-494)

Nokia (RM-384)

Panasonic

Pantech C320

RIM BlackBerry

Samsung SCH-U650

Samsung SGH-F128

Samsung SGH-T201G

Sony Ericsson C905c

Sony Ericsson S302

ZTE GX761

ZTE Vodafone 1231

commentary

With 12 million Solaris licenses now in the market, Sun’s Solaris is no slouch. And while people like I talk up Red Hat’s clean-up of the “certification market” [PDF] (with over 3,000 applications certified for RHEL), the chart below indicates that Solaris actually has a pretty compelling application certification story to tell.

(Credit:
Sun)

The question is, “Is it enough?”

A few days ago I suggested that Sun would be wise to partner closely with Ubuntu (Read: Acquire Canonical). It seems the easiest route to continued open-source momentum as Linux vendors continue to cut into Unix. But there’s a compelling story in the Solaris numbers that suggests that it may live on for a very long time.

This isn’t to say that Sun shouldn’t be looking to Linux for continued growth in Linux. I believe it should. The market is behind Linux and Sun could send Linux into hyperdrive. Just consider what it brings to the Linux table:

(Credit:
Sun)

Not too shabby.

The future of Sun is to corral the expanding choices that open source offers, which includes Linux, as Marten Mickos underscored at the Linux Foundation’s recent conference:

“We are still committed [to Linux],” Mickos said. “If we are not committed, than any one of you can take the MySQL code and fork it to make a new MySQL product, which I am sure you would do” if Sun tried to converts LAMP to SAMP.

Mickos was peppered with questions from the Linux crowd. “What is Sun’s Linux strategy? What degree of freedom will the MySQL group have inside of Sun?”

“There’s a realization inside of Sun that the days of the monoliths are over, but the Web continues to grow.” Sun wants to participate in that growth, not by sticking to Sun-only technologies, but by offering a smorgasbord of choices to its customers, including a core set of Java/Solaris/Sparc technologies.

Amen. If Sun can get this right - if it can make choice a marrow-deep belief throughout its massive organization - then it’s very possible that Sun can lead the market again. It’s a big “If” today, but I like to see open-source advocates like Red Hat and Sun leading the software industry, rather than the proprietary dinosaurs of yore.

The government may have to take a new approach to securing the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, two senior administration officials said Friday.

The intersection of military operations and telecommunications policy is just one of the many facets of cybersecurity currently under review by the administration as it wraps up its 60-day, government-wide review of cybersecurity programs.

Two officials familiar with the review, led by Melissa Hathaway, the acting senior director for cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils, said the laws and policies governing telecommunications have not kept pace with the technology in the sector. Consequently, the administration is reviewing ways to balance the need to address evolving threats–such as viruses or organized cybercrime–with the maintenance of information infrastructure, they said, talking to reporters on a conference call.

Hathaway’s team has 14 days left to create a cybersecurity action plan for the president. That plan, to be presented on April 17, will be a springboard for White House-led cybersecurity plans in the coming years and will put the onus on the White House to direct interagency cybersecurity efforts, said the officials, who declined to be named.

The Obama administration has sought out unprecedented levels of input from government agencies, the private sector, and other organizations, the officials said. In all, the review so far as consisted of more than 40 meetings and has yielded more than 100 papers to inform the final action plan.

After reviewing presidential directives, strategic plans produced by advisory boards, and a host of other cybersecurity documents, the review team identified more than 250 requirements for securing cyberspace that were commonly recognized as critical. The team asked government departments to explain what plans were in place to meet those requirements relevant to their department mission. For instance, the team met with the Social Security Administration and the IRS to discuss their unique role in securing citizens’ personal information and maintaining public trust.

The review has emphasized the need for privacy and the protection of civil liberties and has included discussions with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology, the administration officials said.

There were also discussions with more than 50 universities about relevant research currently underway and ways in which it could be used to improve the country’s security. About 70 universities collaborated on a report on ways they could contribute to a national cybersecurity effort.

The review team is currently conducting a gap analysis to determine how best to coordinate interagency policy from the White House and how to architect cybersecurity efforts like standards in the procurement process.

Got a great idea for a TV show but don’t want to deal with going through the traditional Hollywood studio system vetting and production process?

Or maybe you don’t even want your show on TV at all, what with the Internet offering so many different distribution opportunities?

Then a Los Angeles start-up called 60Frames Entertainment may well be your ticket to the director’s chair.

The company, founded with $3.5 million from investors United Talent Agency (UTA) and Spot Runner, is geared toward providing a wide variety of content creators with the financing and resources they need to produce and distribute original programming across the sites of Internet partners like YouTube, MySpace.com, Bebo, and soon, Joost.

To begin with, 60Frames is supporting two projects, Cockpit, a comedy which “explores what really happens inside the cockpit of a commercial airline.” The series is by Big Fantastic, the team of Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb, and Ryan Wise, which produced Prom Queen for Michael Eisner’s start-up, Vuguru.

The new series Cockpit, by the producers of the online show Prom Queen, is one of the first series that 60Frames will distribute to partners like YouTube, Bebo, and others.

(Credit:
60Frames)

“It’s an incredible opportunity for creators to get their work out there,” McCaleb said of 60Frames. “It’s a whole new vision of what an entertainment company can be. It puts the power in the hands of the creators. It’s an artist’s dream.”

That’s because, McCaleb said, 60Frames is putting the creative power in the hands of the people creating the content. He said that while his team went through some production meetings with 60Frames, he didn’t recall having to submit a budget.

Another early 60Frames project is Erik the Librarian Mysteries, which “follows a reclusive librarian who falls in love with a mysterious stranger.” It is from Brent Forrester, a consulting producer for The Office.

Another future effort will be an as-yet unspecified project by well-known filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, otherwise known as the Coen Brothers.

60Frames is not talking much about its business model, though it does depend on advertising relationships with its distribution partners. And the company plans to share revenue from the projects with the artists, once they’re profitable.

“The basic spirit of the agreement (with artists) is that we’re going to spend money and resources getting (projects) to market,” said Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames. “And as soon as we’re profitable, we become financial partners with our artists and collaborators.”

To one Hollywood observer, however, 60Frames’ model is a little suspect.

“The problem is monetizing it,” said Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner, and Disney. “(That’s the) difficulty with any project such as this.”

Litvack, who has not been briefed by 60Frames, said that while projects such as LonelyGirl15 have managed to be successful financially online, it is extremely rare. More common, he said, are Internet hits that breed large fan bases, but few dollars.

“One of the classic cases is (Eepy Bird), the Diet Coke and Mentos guys,” Litvack said. “Those guys were a huge hit. Many, many people saw (their videos) but the people who made them didn’t become rich off it.”

However, the 60Frames model does afford artists some significant advantages, Litvack allowed.

“For those that think that the studios control all methods of distribution, they don’t,” he said. “The Internet provides a very low-cost way of distributing content to literally billions of people.”

And McCaleb agreed that for him and the Cockpit team, working with 60Frames and having the opportunity to have their work showcased on sites like YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, and others, is extremely valuable.

“As a creator, having all those different distribution platforms, it’s so key,” McCaleb said. “Having your content be so ubiquitous, it’s just awesome for us.”

And that’s what 60Frames is hoping to leverage. The company is not yet talking in detail about its financial arrangements with its strategic partners, but it does say that in arranging to have its artists’ content distributed on sites like YouTube, 60Frames worked with the advertising divisions of each distributor.

To Weinstein, the opportunity such sites offer is massive and wide-spread distribution for content that could bring in money from a variety of different advertising methods. Among them are product placement, as well as placing ads before or after the content.

For his part, Litvack said he is optimistic about product placement deals, but suspicious of putting ads either before or after content.

“It tends to discourage people from watching,” Litvack said. “If you have an option of watching something with an ad in it or not an ad in it,” you’re likely to choose the latter.

At its Government Leaders Forum in Berlin on Wednesday, Microsoft plans to announce that it is reinvesting in its Partners In Learning program, a global effort to provide software and training to teachers, students, and schools. The company is committing to another five years of the program.

In its first five years, Microsoft said the program reached 90 million people in 100 countries. The company plans to spend $235.5 million over the next five years, bringing its total investment to $500 million, but reach twice as many people in the next five years as it did during the first five.

Among other efforts, Partners in Learning provides training and certification for teachers, as well as an online gathering place where teachers can collaborate and share new curriculum ideas.

“We believe it is really the cornerstone of economic opportunity,” said Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft’s emerging segments unit, dubbed Unlimited Potential. “Our software has been an important enabler of economic wealth.”

Ayala highlighted several programs as recent highlights, including a Swedish teacher who partnered with a school in Madagascar to do a joint education project on biodiversity in Africa, and a robotics project in Malaysia where students created a mock disaster and used robotics to examine public safety issues.

In Colombia, Microsoft has a program in seven schools where students essentially do independent study on a laptop, using a curriculum that can move at exactly the student’s own pace. The program was quite controversial when it began five years ago, Ayala said. “Today those students are scoring better in the national tests than traditional (students).”

In the U.S., Microsoft is sponsoring the Philadelphia School of the Future, where students use tablet PCs instead of textbooks.

Partnering with local governments and nonprofits is an important component of the program, Ayala said. “We know that no single model is going to fit everybody.”

It also makes good economic sense, he said, noting that a greater level of partnership is what Microsoft believes will allow it to reach twice as many people in the next five years while actually spending slightly less than it had in the previous five.

commentary

Silicon.com assembled its IT executive council last week and heard from a majority of its CIOs that open source is playing an ever-growing role within their enterprises. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how increasingly open/public IT executives are being about the benefits of open source for their organizations.

Nic Bellenberg, IT director for publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, declared open source an “incredibly logical choice” and then went further:

There’s no point spending gazillions on a complex proprietary content management system to run a website that may have to be completely changed in only a year of two after go-live.

If you’re a CIO trying to make do with crotchety old proprietary software, you really need to wake up and smell the open source. Lower costs, improved flexibility, and increasingly, better performance. That’s the promise of open source.

In what may be an unprecedented decision, Microsoft said Thursday that it plans to lower the retail prices for several flavors of
Windows Vista.

For those in the U.S., Microsoft is cutting prices only on the higher-end versions of Vista, and only for the upgrade version used to move from XP or another copy of Vista. The suggested price for Vista Ultimate drops to $219 from $299, while Home Premium falls to $129, from $159.

Other developed markets will also see price cuts, while in emerging markets, Microsoft is eliminating the distinction between full and upgrade versions of Home Basic and Home Premium as it attempts to convince more users there to use genuine software.

News.com Poll Vista’s value
Will you buy Windows Vista now that Microsoft has cut the price?

Yes, and it’s about time.
No, I’m fine with Windows XP or Leopard.

View results

Analysts were surprised by Microsoft’s move.

“I can’t remember a big price cut like this,” said analyst Chris Swenson, who tracks retail software sales for NPD Group. “It’s very unheard of.”

Microsoft finalized Windows Vista in late 2006, but held back its retail launch of the product until January 2007. It has sold more than 100 million copies, largely on the back of a strong overall PC market, but retail sales have significantly trailed those of XP in its early days and Vista has received a number of critical reviews.

In an interview, newly minted Windows consumer marketing vice president Brad Brooks said that Microsoft had been testing lower prices over the past few months and was surprised to find that the amount of revenue lost was more than made up for by an increase in the number of PC buyers willing to shell out for an upgrade.

Brooks said that Microsoft had done a lot of research prior to Vista’s launch, but noted that both Home Premium and Ultimate were new products for the company. “We probably got the pricing mix wrong,” he said. “You don’t always get it right, but you make the adjustment.”

Gartner analyst Michael Silver said the move–which applies only to standalone versions sold at retail stores–is puzzling. “It’s sort of an odd move,” said Silver, who noted that the market for such upgrades is fairly limited. Those who bought XP in the fourth quarter of 2006 got a coupon for a free Vista upgrade, while most of those who have bought systems since then have gotten Vista. Machines purchased prior to 2006 probably aren’t all that attractive as candidates for a Vista upgrade.

“I guess at the end of the day anything that makes Vista a little bit more accessible is probably a good thing,” he said, but added that a cut in the price computer makers pay would have a far bigger impact, given new PC licenses account for 80 percent of Vista sales. “The whole notion of upgrading PCs has sort of fallen by the wayside.”

And, a retail price cut could actually hurt Microsoft when it comes to the market for new PCs and among businesses trying to decide when, or whether, to move to Vista.

“To the extent this ends up damaging Vista’s reputation instead of broadening its appeal, I think that’s a danger,” he said.

Brad Brooks

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Brooks discounted that, saying that if that were the case, Microsoft would have seen sales drop rather than rise when it tested the lower price promotions in France and the United Kingdom in December and January. As for the limited market for upgraders, Brooks said the new pricing should also make it more attractive for existing Vista PC owners that want to move to a higher-end version.

Swenson noted that while a Windows retail price cut may be unprecedented, Microsoft has seen some gains by cutting the price of other products, most notably when it added the Student and Teacher version of Office. Not only did unit sales go up, he said, but total revenue increased as well as Microsoft was able to tap a new wave of demand.

“Even though they have this huge market share they still have to price their products to move,” Swenson said. Swenson had called for such a Vista price cut last year, with standalone Vista sales badly trailing those seen for XP in its first six months.

“While the main culprit behind the poor performance of the ’shrinkwrapped box’ Vista (sales) is most likely the more stringent hardware requirements of the new version of the operating system, the lower sales volumes could also be a signal that Microsoft is not pricing its product appropriately,” Swenson wrote in a report looking at Vista’s first six months on the market. “If PC prices have plummeted almost 25 percent since the launch of Windows XP, then it makes sense that Microsoft would take such price drops into consideration when pricing (boxed copies of Vista). Thus, Microsoft should strongly consider instituting an across the board price cut for all editions of the operating system, the low-end editions in particular.”

Brooks also pointed to the increase in sales Microsoft saw when it cut the price to computer makers for Windows XP Media Center Edition. Initially pitched as a high-end version above Windows XP Pro, Microsoft eventually lowered the price to not much higher than Windows XP Home and saw it become the dominant consumer version.

“It went from a run rate of about 1 million (copies) a year to a run rate of several tens of millions a year,” Brooks said. “So yeah, we got it right.”

I’m one of the 20 million-plus members of LinkedIn but would be flummoxed for a good answer if you asked me why. The truth is that if I didn’t need to keep tabs on what’s new and groovy in the tech world, I very much doubt I’d bother.

Why? It’s as captivating as a sack of russet potatoes.

The site just doesn’t inspire or engage and I have no reason to visit other than to answer requests - usually from perfect strangers–to become “linked in.” But reading about the rollout of the beta version of LinkedIn’s business directory and I’m intrigued by the idea. To wit:

“Over 150,000 companies and organizations are indexed in the directory, working it into a Hoovers-esque database that ties into LinkedIn’s social features.

A LinkedIn Company Profiles page includes a number of basic statistics pulled from BusinessWeek’s database, such as company size and history. But for the most part, the rest of the business’ page consists of information from employees of that company who have LinkedIn profiles, like a list of “new hires” (LinkedIn members who have recently added a current affiliation with that company) and recent promotions, other businesses that have seen people hired from that company, and demographic tidbits like median age and education information.”

Now there’s something in it for me, either as a prospective job hunter or simply as someone keen on searching out pertinent data on a company. The social network that specialized in boring users to tears finally makes a move worthy of notice. Good job, guys. More of this and who knows? Maybe one day your CEO–quick, anybody know the name off hand?–will become as much a household name as The Zuckerface.