Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson are back together. In the wireless world, anyway. Both are participating in a new mobile blogging service offered by Sprint called BlogStar, which also counts Wesley Snipes, the Game and Bam Margera as contributors. The rich and famous stars are documenting their lifestyles with camera phones and posting pictures, text and, eventually, video to their personalized mobile blogs. Access to each blog costs $5 per month. Subscribers receive alerts when new posts are uploaded, to which they can leave replies as well as discuss content with other subscribers. It’s just one example of how the blogging and social networking that have taken the Internet by storm are going wireless. At a time when ringtone and wallpaper image sales are beginning to flatten, the music industry is looking for new mobile revenue streams and promotional opportunities. MySpace has a tremendously strong impact on the music industry, and now the pieces are in place for a wireless version to do the same. BlogStar CEO Keith Yokomoto — founder of the original ArtistDirect service — says he and ArtistDirect co-founder Ted Field formed BlogStar to better capitalize on MySpace’s promise. “Just imagine if 100,000 of your fans were all connected,” Yokomoto says. “You send out a blog that goes straight to their cell phone, and you’ve got an army of folks out there blogging back in real time. How powerful is that?” On paper, the marriage of blogs and mobile phones seems like a perfect match. Everyone seems to have a mobile phone, and increasingly these devices have photo and video cameras included. Supporters say the ability to blog on the fly rather than hold off until reaching a computer adds a more intimate, real-time element to the experience.

Yet mobile blogging is no slam-dunk. Camera phones may be ubiquitous, but only the most expensive actually take decent pictures, and video phones are even more expensive. What’s more, carriers face a herculean task in convincing subscribers — who for years have been trained to view their mobile devices as a tool for making voice calls — to start thinking of their phones as a mobile computer.

Companies like Text100, MyMMSBlog.com and SMS.ac pioneered the mobile blog space by providing wireless subscribers a means of posting camera phone pictures and text messages online. But their services never grew much beyond their novelty factor.

Sprint’s BlogStar service is one of many attempts to put a recognizable face on mobile blogging to generate interest and awareness among mobile phone subscribers — in this case by relying heavily on star power.

In the last two months, however, the 800-pound gorillas of the online social networking scene began muscling their way into mobile as well. In March, MySpace — by far the most influential service, with 36 million unique visitors and more than 60 million members as of March — struck a deal with startup youth-oriented wireless operator Helio. Users will be able to update their MySpace profiles with text and photos, as well as access the profiles of others, from their mobile phones. It’s expected to go live later this spring.

At the CTIA Wireless 2006 industry conference in early April, MySpace rival FaceBook — with about 10.5 million monthly unique visitors — rolled out a mobile extension to its service with Cingular, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. Members initially will only be able to post text updates to their FaceBook profiles, with photos expected over time.

Others are following their lead. Intercasting’s Rabble mobile blog service now runs on Cingular and Verizon Wireless, which charge subscribers $3 per month to join. Los Angeles-based startup Juice Wireless launched its Juicecaster blog service at CTIA as well. Unlike online blogs now creating wireless extensions, Juicecaster was built from the ground up to integrate online and wireless posting and access.

Buzznet has been doing the same for the past two years, and recently won a contract with concert promoter Goldenvoice to power the integrated online and mobile social networking site of the upcoming Coachella music festival in Indio, Calif.

Wireless operators could not be more thrilled. The wireless industry has long believed that the successful mobile content and applications will be those that best take advantage of the communication elements of wireless. For years, the industry has been throwing everything it had at consumers to see what would stick.

Web auctioneer eBay Inc said on Monday it had bought Tradera.com, a small Swedish rival, for about $48 million.Tradera.com has more than 750,000 listings at any given time, eBay said in a statement, adding it had plans to expand online trading in Sweden using its new investment.

eBay said it did not expect the acquisition to have a material impact on its financial guidance issued with its first-quarter results last week.

Tradera’s investors include Provider Funds and TIME Vision bpart AB.

Software giant Microsoft Corp. said on Friday it hired away Steve Berkowitz, the chief executive of rival Internet company Ask.com, to head Microsoft’s own Internet business.Effective May 8, Berkowitz succeeds David Cole, a 20-year Microsoft veteran, who is set to begin a one-year leave of absence, Microsoft said in a statement. He had outlined his plans in a memo to employees in February.

Berkowitz is credited in the industry with orchestrating the turnaround of Ask.com, the Web search and media business acquired by Barry Diller’s conglomerate, IAC/InterActiveCorp, for $1.85 billion 13 months ago.

Under his leadership, Ask, originally known as Ask Jeeves, enjoyed a revival in its audience and market share gains in the highly competitive Web search business over the past year.

Berkowitz was named the senior vice president of Microsoft’s recently formed Online Business Group, which brings together the operations of Microsoft’s MSN Internet business unit with other consumer businesses within Microsoft.

The group includes MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live, with responsibility for generating greater advertising sales.

Microsoft’s Online Business Group competes against rivals such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit and Ask.com.

Berkowitz will report to Kevin Johnson, co-president of Microsoft’s platforms and services unit, Microsoft said.

He propelled Ask Jeeves into the contemporary Web search market with the acquisition of Teoma in 2001. He led the redesign of Ask, made the site easier to use by removing pop-up and banner ads and providing greater context on searches.

Revenue more than doubled under his leadership.

Previously, Berkowitz was president and chief operating officer of technology trade publisher IDG Books, where he built a hit consumer brand by expanding the “Dummies” series of books to cover topics ranging from the Web to pet care. He expanded IDG Books by acquiring publishing brands such as Cliffs Notes, Frommers Travel Guides and Betty Crocker Cookbooks.

Oracle is considering launching a version of the Linux operating system and has looked at buying one of the two firms dominating the technology, a newspaper reported on Monday.

The report, citing an interview with Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison, said the move will redraw the software landscape and open a new front in Oracle’s long rivalry with US rival Microsoft. It said Mr Ellison told the newspaper that Oracle wanted to sell a full range of software that, like Microsoft, included operating system and applications. “I’d like to have a complete stack,” Mr Ellison was quoted as saying.

“We’re missing an operating system. You could argue that it makes a lot of sense for us to look at distributing and supporting Linux.” The report said that like IBM, Oracle has counted on Linux — an open source system, whose code is open to anyone to view and adapt — to act as a counterweight to Microsoft’s Windows, which has expanded rapidly from desktop PCs into corporate IT systems.

As part of a recent study of the open-source software market, Mr Ellison told the newspaper that Oracle had considered buying Novell, which after Red Hat is the biggest distributor of Linux.

Google Inc CEO Eric Schmidt on Wednesday defended the search engine’s cooperation with Chinese censorship as he announced the creation of a Beijing research center and unveiled a Chinese-language brand name.Google is trying to raise its profile in China after waiting until January to launch its Chinese-language site Google.cn.

Activists have criticized the company for blocking searches for material about Taiwan, Tibet, democracy and other sensitive issues on the site.

“We believe that the decision that we made to follow the law in China was absolutely the right one,” Schmidt said at a news conference.

He said Google had to accept restrictions in order to serve China, which has the world’s second-largest population of Internet users after the United States, with more than 111 million people online.

Schmidt also announced the creation of a research center in Beijing that he said should have 150 employees by mid-2006 and “eventually thousands of people.” He said the center is meant to create products for markets worldwide, though he said planning was still in such an early stage that he didn’t know what they might be.

Schmidt was speaking at a ceremony to announce Google’s Chinese-language brand name — ‘Gu Ge,’ or ‘Valley Song,’ which the company says draws on Chinese rural traditions to describe a fruitful and rewarding experience.

Talking to reporters later, Schmidt said Google’s managers were stung by criticism that they accepted Chinese censorship, but said they haven’t lobbied Beijing to change its rules.

“I think it’s arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning to operate and tell that country how to operate,” he said.

Asked whether Google might try to persuade Beijing to change its restrictions, Schmidt said he didn’t rule anything out, but said it hasn’t tried to change such limits elsewhere. He noted that Google’s site in Germany is barred from linking to Nazi-oriented material.

“There are many cases where certain information is not available due to local law or local custom,” he said.

Schmidt said China accounts for only a small portion of Google’s revenues because the company has only recently obtain a license to allow it to carry local advertising. But he said the company expects China to be an important part of its future business.

One possible Google project in China would be to make Chinese books available online in digital form or to use translation software to produce English-language editions, Schmidt said.

He said the Beijing technical center could quickly become Google’s biggest outside the United States, surpassing its European lab in Zurich, Switzerland.

Chinese universities “are now churning out a very large number of very, very good programmers,” he said. “So we are moving quickly now to hire the best and the brightest.”

Google Inc. is introducing on Thursday a free Web calendar service for consumers to schedule events and share them with others, opening a new level of competition with rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.Google Calendar, available at www.google.com/calendar, offers a variety of features to make using Web calendars as easy as desktop calendars such as Outlook, allowing users to “drag and drop” events from one calendar to another.

The new service takes advantage of slick Web programming tricks using Javascript and XML along with RSS. But perhaps the biggest breakthrough is the calendar’s use of “natural language processing” technology that simplifies how events are entered.

The feature allows users to type simple commands like “leave work today at 5 p.m.” or “drinks Thursday with Elinor” that the system can interpret and automatically insert into the calendar. Events can be private, shared with friends, or made public on the Web, Google Calendar’s product manager said.

“Google Calendar takes all the events in my life and keeps them in one place,” Carl Sjogreen said in a phone interview.

“We enable the user to create multiple calendars, share them with other people and overlay Web calendars back on the user’s own calendar,” the Google product manager said.

Users of Google’s free e-mail service Gmail may find the Google Calendar particularly useful. Google’s software scours Gmail to recognize mentions of events and then automatically offers the user to add the date information to the calendar.

PRESSING OTHERS TO INNOVATE

Details of the long-rumored calendar, complete with screenshots of features and instruction guides, had leaked out in late February among Silicon Valley technology enthusiasts.

The calendar poses a direct challenge to Yahoo Calendar, the No. 1 Web calendar service in the United States, which was introduced in 1998 and has changed little in substance in recent years. But Google said it plans to “play nice” and allow users to share Google Calendar events with Yahoo Calendar.

While Sjogreen is careful to say that Google Calendar is not designed to replace corporate calendars, it could raise expectations among office workers that its features should be part of corporate scheduling systems like Microsoft’s Outlook or IBM’s Lotus Notes.

Sjogreen said Google is working to offer seamless connections to Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Treo smartphone and to various other mobile phone calendars in coming months.

The trial version of Google Calendar is being offered in English. Gmail users will begin being offered the service within the next week. In coming months, Google will translate the calendar into multiple languages, Sjogreen said.

The Sunnyvale, California-based rival of Google said in a statement that the company is working on updates to Yahoo Calendar, which it plans to release in coming months.

Last year, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org. (http://upcoming.org/), a social event calendar that helps users manage events, share them with friends and family, and post notifications to one’s own or to other Web sites.

If this detective takes off it will be more popular than Sherlock Holmes — it’s a software to trace lost mobiles. Inspired to create a mobile tracking solution after his 16-year old son lost his cellphone, P Sekhar, chairman and managing director of Micro Technologies, and his team began work on a programme to track phones.

The code, downloadable at Rs 200 to Rs 300 a year on most handsets from Micro’s website, allows the owner to track the exact location of his or her phone and the number of the new SIM (subscriber identity module) card that has been inserted. Explaining the technology, Sekhar said, “When a phone is stolen, the thief generally sells the device in the grey market.

When a new SIM card is inserted, the solution embedded in the phone will send an email or voice message to the original owner notifying him of the number on the new SIM card and the location of the phone.” “Most times,’’ he added, “the third party tends to return the gadget procured from the g rey market.’’

As of now, the only action a subscriber can take is to call the service provider frantically and seek to block his or her card — retrieving the handset itself is a lost cause. Called the Lost Mobile Tracking Solution (LMTS), the e-sniffer is awaiting a patent.

It was created with an investment of Rs 50 lakh, of which half has already been recovered in the four months of its launch in the Indian market. It would be safe to say that thousands of phones are stolen and lost in India every day, left behind in cabs, washrooms, restaurants and shops. In 2005, 20,000 cases of stolen mobiles (worth Rs 300 crore) were reported with the police.

About eight crore mobile handsets were retailed in India in the same year. Sekhar, who plans to take this solution global in the next two months, is in talks with five of the largest mobile manufacturers as well as the police, who say that lost mobile complaints are on the rise. He estimates that the market for such a solution could aggregate to Rs 30-40 crore within the next three years.

Legislation designed to put a dent in Internet gambling ran into opposition Wednesday from the banking industry and, surprisingly, the Traditional Values Coalition.

The Internet Gambling Prohibition Act proposes to make it illegal for Americans to use the Internet for gambling and would authorize law enforcement officials to stop credit card payments and other forms of electronic payments.

Violators would be subject to up to five years in prison.

“Our concern is that the added burden of monitoring all payment transactions for the taint of Internet gambling will drain finite resources currently engaged in complying with anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering regulations and the daily operation of our bank,” Samuel Vallandingham, representing the Independent Bankers of America, told a House subcommittee.

Vallandingham added, “Ultimately, we question whether the Internet gambling bills currently before the House will efficiently regulate the targeted behavior at a level which will justify the time and expense required by community banks to comply with another level of regulation.”

According to bill sponsor Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), Internet gambling is estimated to be a $12 billion industry with approximately $6 billion coming from U.S. bettors.

Under current federal law, the Wire Act, passed by Congress in the early 1960s, prohibits making gambling wagers over the telephone. It is not legally clear if the Wire Act actually applies to the Internet, a situation that Goodlatte’s bill hopes to correct.

“Technology has allowed for new types of electronic gambling, including interactive games on the Internet, such as poker and blackjack, which may not clearly be included within the types of gambling currently made illegal by the Wire Act,” the bill summary states.

The Internet Gambling Prohibition Act would crack down on illegal gambling by updating the Wire Act to clarify that it covers all forms of interstate gambling, such as lotteries and poker, and account for new technologies.

“While gambling is currently illegal in the United States unless regulated by the states, the development of the Internet has made gambling easily accessible,” Goodlatte said Wednesday. “It is common for illegal gambling businesses to operate freely until law enforcement finds and stops them.”

Although it was not invited to testify at Wednesday’s hearing, the conservative Traditional Values Coalition sent a letter claiming Goodlatte’s bill would actually expand Internet gambling.

“While the [coalition] supports the stated goals of H.R. 4777, that is, to keep gambling off the Internet, we remain deeply concerned about the legislation’s real effect,” the letter states. “The Goodlatte bill could more accurately be called the Internet Gambling Growth and Opportunity Expansion Act.”

The coalition contends that Goodlatte’s bill falls short by not banning all gambling in the United States.

As currently written, the legislation would allow intrastate Internet lotteries, interstate horse racing and online wagering on sports fantasy teams.

“If the bill’s intent is to prohibit people from buying lottery tickets from their living rooms, the bill could and should make such a prohibition explicit,” the letter states.

“In fact, with respect to lotteries and every other form of non-sports gambling — dog racing, jai alai, commercial casinos, bingo — the Goodlatte bill allows states to license anything they choose.”

Bruce Ohr of the Department of Justice (DoJ) told lawmakers at the hearing that the DoJ supports the bill because the legislation amends an existing criminal statute (the Wire Act) and applies it equally to wagering over the Internet and over the telephone.

Ohr also commended the bill for providing law enforcement with a method to cut off the transfer of funds to and from offshore Internet gambling sites.

“[The bill] will return control to the states by protecting the rights of citizens in each to decide through their state legislatures if they want to allow gambling within their borders,” Goodlatte said.

“This bill leaves the regulation of wholly intrastate betting and wagering to the states with tight controls to ensure betting or wagering does not extent beyond their borders or to minors.”

China and Russia’s “lack of political will” put the two countries at the top of a congressional group’s 2006 International Piracy Watch List.

Piracy in the two countries, according to the group, cost the U.S. copyright industry $4 billion last year.

The Congressional International Anti-Piracy Caucus, which includes 73 members of Congress, said at a Wednesday Capitol Hill press conference that the “scope and depth” of copyright theft in China and Russia make the two stand out in the international piracy world.

Other countries making the list include Mexico, Canada, India and Malaysia.

“International piracy is just a fancy way to say stealing on an enormous scale,” Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) said in a statement.

“Governments have the obligation to crack down on the systematic theft of intellectual property within their borders. Stopping the hemorrhage of U.S. revenue is critical to successful economic relationships with other countries.”

The caucus report follows a 2005 report by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) placing China on the United States’ Priority Watch List for intellectual property theft.

Beijing joined Russia and 12 other trading partners that Washington says are not effectively protecting or enforcing intellectual property rights (IPR).

“American innovation and creativity need to be protected by our government no less than our personal property, our homes and our streets. Theft of intellectual property is a crime, pure and simple,” Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said in the same statement.

“It costs our economy over $15 billion every year and results in over $1 billion of lost tax revenues.”

Biden noted the $15 billion could be used to hire an additional 13,000 local police officers to patrol streets or provide interoperable communications equipment for America’s 30 largest cities.

According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), software piracy in the Asia-Pacific region cost manufacturers close to $8 billion in 2004. Worldwide, losses due to software piracy were estimated at more than $32 million. The BSA puts piracy rates in China at 90 percent and Russia at 87 percent.

“A vibrant sector of the U.S. economy is at tremendous risk due to widespread piracy of U.S.-made movies, music, software, videogames and other creative works, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said.

“We must work with our international trade partners to secure the enactment of strong copyright laws and the vigilant enforcement of those laws.”

Democrat Adam Schiff said piracy particularly impacts his Southern California district.

“I see first-hand the toll that intellectual property theft takes on our economy,” Schiff said. “My district … is home to many hard-working Americans whose jobs are in the movie and recording industries, the software business and science and engineering. Their work product is being stolen and our entire nation is being put at a comparative economic disadvantage.”

Schiff added, “The United States must exercise its influence with Russia, China and other nations to take comprehensive action against global piracy.”

A fix for a widely exploited flaw in Internet Explorer is among five security patches Microsoft told users to expect next week.

Following weeks of speculation whether the CreateTextRange vulnerability would force the software giant to break from tradition and release a special patch, Microsoft said Thursday the patch is among four others slated for April 11.

The company expects to release five security patches: four (including one deemed “critical”) affect the Windows operating system and one addresses a “moderate” vulnerability in Microsoft Office.

“One of the updates will be a cumulative Internet Explorer update that addresses the publicly known ‘CreateTextRange’ vulnerability,” Microsoft wrote in an advance notification.

The official patch follows a series of third-party fixes unveiled by security firms as a temporary solution.

While Microsoft doesn’t reveal details of upcoming security updates, the company did say next week’s release will include a “compatibility patch” providing developers a 60-day reprieve from changes made to how IE processes ActiveX controls.

The compatibility software would forestall a permanent change to IE brought after Microsoft lost a 2003 lawsuit to Eolas.

Microsoft planned to update IE requiring users to manually enable ActiveX controls encountered on Web pages. The patch gives developers until June to test their Web applications for compatibility with the proposed IE alteration.

Security vendors, upset over Microsoft’s reluctance to break from its monthly security patch cycle, released several third-party patches to provide immediate cures for their customers.

The episode left onlookers questioning both the wisdom of applying unofficial fixes and Microsoft’s slow response.