Virtual carnations, memorial messages and tribute songs are some of the online services available to China’s Web surfers too busy on Wednesday to pay proper respects at the graves of their ancestors.As China passes Tomb Sweeping Day — a traditional festival where people pray, offer food and burn paper money at relatives’ graves — authorities are urging people to care for the environment and honor relatives online instead, Xinhua news agency said.

Several cemeteries and funeral companies in China have heeded the call, establishing online memorial halls promising access to relatives within seconds, 365 days a year.

Shanghai Funeral Service Center claims to have had 40 million visits from respectful relatives grateful to pay respects at the click of a mouse since the service was introduced in 2001.

The Qing Ming festival is a public holiday in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and members of China’s parliament have urged the government to reintroduce the holiday after it was scrapped in 1949 when the atheists Communists swept to power.

Online DVD rental company Netflix Inc. on Tuesday sued rival Blockbuster Inc. for patent infringement, asking a federal judge in Northern California to shut down Blockbuster’s 18-month-old online rental service and award Netflix damages, according to a copy of the filing.Blockbuster declined to comment, saying it had not received a copy of the lawsuit.

Netflix, which was founded in 1999, holds two U.S. patents for its business methodology, which calls for subscribers to pay a monthly fee to select and rent DVDs from the company’s Web site and to maintain a list of titles telling Netflix in which order to ship the films, according to the patents, which were included as exhibits in the lawsuit.

The first patent, granted in 2003, covers the method by which Netflix customers select and receive a certain number of movies at a time, and return them for more titles.

The second patent, issued on Tuesday, “covers a method for subscription-based online rental that allows subscribers to keep the DVDs they rent for as long as they wish without incurring any late fees, to obtain new DVDswithout incurring additional charges and to prioritize and reprioritize their own personal dynamic queue — of DVDs to be rented,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit says No. 1 U.S. rental chain Blockbuster, which launched its online rental service in 2004, was aware that Netflix had obtained a patent for its business method and was seeking a second, but willfully and deliberately violated the existing patent.

Netflix, which is represented by the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, is demanding a jury trial and asks that Blockbuster Online be enjoined from using Netflix’s business method and be forced to pay damages and court costs.

“We felt it necessary to take this action to protect our rights as inventors of the very unique business methods that Netflix offers,” Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said on Tuesday.

“Netflix created a very unique service, from the dynamic queue, to the idea of letting subscribers keep movies as long as they want with no late fees, to the idea of allowing customers to get new DVDs as soon as they return old ones,” Swasey said.

Since launching its online rental service in August 2004, Blockbuster has poured more than $300 million into setting it up and marketing it.

But a debt load of more than $1 billion and weakness in its primary business of store-based movie rentals forced the Dallas-based company to cut back its marketing investments this year in Blockbuster Online, which has 1 million subscribers, compared with 4.2 million for Netflix.

Shares of Netflix closed down 72 cents to $27.41 a share on Nasdaq before the suit was reported, while shares of Blockbuster fell 8 cents to $3.80 on the New York Stock Exchange.

Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter, who also is an attorney, said it was unclear whether Netflix’s challenge to Blockbuster’s online service would be upheld by the federal court.

“It’s my opinion that it won’t be,” Pachter said. “Blockbuster detrimentally relied on their silence as consent. If in fact (Netflix) feels so damaged they should have sought injunctive relief before Blockbuster rolled out its service.”

Some might call it an auction to die for, as the Chinese observe their traditional Qing Ming festival honouring the dead.A man in his late 20s in Jiaxing, a city near Shanghai, has attempted to sell his soul on Taobao, China’s top online auction site, attracting bids from some 58 soul-searching buyers before the posting was pulled.

“We reviewed Taobao’s policies and realized we had no specific policy on the selling of souls,” said Porter Erisman, spokesman for Taobao’s parent, Yahoo-backed Alibaba.com. “After reviewing our policies, the posting was taken down last Friday.”

Erisman said Taobao wasn’t opposed to the idea of soul selling online, but wanted more proof that the seller could provide the goods.

“After some discussion, we decided that we will allow the member to sell his soul on Taobao, but only if he can provide written permission from a ‘higher authority’,” he said.

Taobao made its decision as Chinese around the world on Wednesday observed Qing Ming, a traditional holiday where many travel to their ancestors’ graves to clean them and offer gifts to the spirits.

Taobao is no stranger to odd items being put up for auction, with past sale items including advertising space on one member’s forehead.

The firm’s chief rival, eBay, has also hosted its share of strange items for auction, including a second-hand Volkswagen once owned by Pope Benedict and a mangrove island in Florida.

Research In Motion will put such Yahoo Inc. Web offerings as search, e-mail, instant messaging, and news on its BlackBerry devices, and will start rolling out the service in 60 countries in about two weeks, the two companies said on Wednesday.The deal greatly expands RIM’s relationship with Yahoo, the operator of one of the Web’s most-visited sites. Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is seeking to widen its sales to include everyday consumers and enhance services to its existing, mostly corporate, base.

“Our job is to create a rich user experience for our community so that they want to use Yahoo on it, and hopefully we create such a rich experience for the Yahoo community that they want to buy a BlackBerry and run Yahoo on it,” RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie said in an interview with Reuters.

The two companies, who already offer a limited Yahoo service, did not say how much the deal is worth, but Marco Boerries, senior vice-president of Yahoo Connected Life, described it as “significant”.

“We have 200 million mail users worldwide, and we’re using that user base of Yahoo to connect them to the premier device today,” Boerries told Reuters.

Parts of the service, including Yahoo’s instant messaging and communications service, will be rolled out to new and existing BlackBerry users over the next two weeks, as RIM starts making it available to 160 carriers in 60 countries.

The Yahoo Go service, which includes real-time access to Yahoo’s community information and content services, will follow later this year, Boerries said.

“This is killer,” Boerries said. “The cool thing about this is that in the same way we now seamlessly connect personal communications, your personal address book to the BlackBerry, we also connect personal information you are already using on Yahoo, like sports, news or weather.”

He warns that it could make the BlackBerry, dubbed the “crackberry” because it is so addictive, even more habit forming.

Some new devices will have Yahoo preinstalled, and existing users will use a bookmark on their BlackBerrys to install the application.

The deal adds to Yahoo’s ongoing program to extend its services beyond the personal computer to mobile customers and into homes.

The California-based company announced a similar deal with wireless phone maker Motorola last year, and is working on others with U.S. phone partners AT&T Inc. and Cingular Wireless.

The widely hyped merging of the PC and TV is finally taking shape in a way that only a few people imagined in the late 1990s Internet boom.From independent producers like Mondo Media to big media companies like MTV, and even kids who post videos on community sites like YouTube.com, the World Wide Web is becoming a sort of worldwide TV network for audiences seeking offbeat entertainment not shown on mainstream television.

Mondo’s cartoon characters, “Happy Tree Friends,” survived the dot-com bust of 2000 and are now a thriving, worldwide phenomenon. And this week a little-known British rocker named Sandi Thom signed a record deal with Sony BMG after building an audience by webcasting her own concerts from her basement.

“I still don’t think people have a handle on the fact that, for all intents and purposes, we have a TV network working for us, essentially free, that is worldwide,” said John Evershed, co-founder of Mondo Media, which owns “Happy Tree Friends.”

The “Friends” are a collection of lovable forest animals with names like Giggles and Lumpy who get into trouble that inevitably leads to violence and death.

San Francisco-based Mondo shows 16 million, two-minute programs monthly on the Web which have spawned the sale of 750,000 DVDs. The “Tree Friends” Web site, its t-shirts, toys, and cell phone episodes are hot items in more than 20 countries in Asia, Europe, North and South America, Mondo Media says.

The “Tree Friends” were a product of the technology boom when venture capital and advertisers chased producers who were delivering TV-like episodes on the Web. When the boom ended, money dried up and only a few players like Mondo remained.

WORLD WIDE TV

Evershed said this new wave of Web video is fueled by the rising number of people with high-speed Internet access which makes video watchable on PCs. Moreover, younger audiences are increasingly accustomed to watching video on PCs and laptops.

Other independent producers building audiences with a TV network on the Web include Joe Cartoon, Homestarrunner and JibJab.

Community building sites like YouTube.com are thriving by making it easy for users to post video clips. Teens also turn to the Web when traditional TV shows get boring.

Seeing this trend, major media companies are getting in on the act so they don’t lose viewers and advertising to Web competitors.

Viacom Inc’s MTV has started “MTV Overdrive” at MTV.com. E! Entertainment webcasts “The Vine” at eonline.com and The Walt Disney’s Co.’s ABC Television Group has plans to stream shows for kids on its Disneychannel.com and Jetix.tv sites in coming months.

As with the “Friends,” keys to success for “MTV Overdrive” have been offering short programs and original content that fans do not see on broadcast or cable TV.

That philosophy is a far cry from the late 1990s when the dot-com boom fueled the notion that eventually all TV would be delivered on the Web, on-air broadcasting would become wired webcasting and computers would be the TV sets of the future.

“Really, I had this vision 6 years ago,” said Mike Tuinstra, chief executive officer of Joecartoon.com Inc. “It’s just now kind of happening.”

German police have arrested seven members of an international gang of so-called “phishers”, who hacked into computers of internet banking customers and raided their accounts, authorities said on Tuesday.”The investigation is continuing but what we can say now is they were able to obtain thousands of individual pieces of data,” a spokeswoman for the BKA federal crime office said.

Three other members of the ring are still under investigation.

The word “phishing” is said to derive from a combination of two words, which describes the act of hackers “fishing” for “passwords”.

A statement posted on the BKA Web site said the shutdown of the phishing ring of Germans and Lithuanians had prevented “millions of euros of losses” that online banking customers would have incurred if the phishers had carried out their plan.

The spokewoman said the amount the phishers had successfully stolen from bank accounts was in double-digit thousands.

The gang transferred the funds to German bank accounts set up using false names and planned to channel funds to foreign banks in eastern Europe, the BKA statement said.

The BKA said the phishing ring had obtained online banking customers’ user names and passwords and other sensitive data from their victims’ computers by means of a “Trojan horse”, a self-circulating, virus-like program that spreads by email and sends data from the infiltrated computer back to the phisher.

Now playing on a PC near you: downloadable movies available for purchase on the same day they’re released on DVD.

But movie fans will have to decide whether the convenience of quick access to the latest films compensates for higher costs and strict digital rights management restrictions.

The downloadable movies will cost up to twice as much as the DVD versions — $20 to $30 for the newest titles — and are only viewable via a personal computer running Microsoft operating systems and software. And don’t look too closely for the extra features typically added to DVDs.

Previously the only film downloads that major studios offered were online rentals, which can only be watched for a 24-hour period. But on Monday, Movielink began offering nearly 300 films for purchase.

Movielink is a joint venture among Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.

Another site, CinemaNow, is also selling downloadable versions of about 75 movies from Sony, MGM and Lions Gate, which is a large shareholder of CinemaNow.

“With more than 25 million broadband residences, we believe the market is now ready for the launch of a new Internet movie rental service,” Movielink CEO Jim Ramo said in a statement. “We are combining cutting-edge technology with the best in motion picture entertainment to offer consumers an exciting entertainment experience.”

“Cutting edge” is up for debate.

Movielink doesn’t support Macintosh or Linux users. Movie downloads are offered in RealNetworks RealPlayer 8.0 and Microsoft Windows Media Player formats and can run only on Windows.

Nor does Movielink work with Web browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which is likely to aggravate the presumably important tech-savvy early adopter market, a user population that tends to prefer the Firefox and Opera browsers.

The licensing rights allow users to use their digital downloads on up to three computers and create a backup DVD. Downloaded movies can be viewed only on PCs, unless consumers opt to connect their PCs to their televisions.

“Finding ways to keep track of content is important, but this doesn’t necessarily mean locking it up,” said Mike McGuire, vice president of research with Gartner Industries Media Team.

“This offering needs usage rules that are closer to what iTunes is doing with TV shows. The challenge then becomes not keeping honest people honest, but rather looking for the bad actors out there.”

CinemaNow’s site and product offerings have much the same restrictions as MovieLink with support only for computers running Microsoft’s software, but the company does provide a handy guide to hooking PCs up to the TV.

Some of the digital downloads also lack the special features that are often offered with DVD versions.

For example, Memoirs of a Geisha costs $16.96 on Amazon.com and includes a dozen in-depth featurettes on the life, history and style of geishas. Movielinks’ digital download is $25.99 and doesn’t offer the features.

Consumers will have to check digital versions against the physical (DVD) versions to gauge what features their desired downloads may be missing.

“If they [the studios] aren’t careful they’re going to get bypassed,” said McGuire. “Technology providers are making it easy to get content off hard drives and onto big screens. You’ve got to wonder what the studios are doing. Today’s consumers are expecting a much higher degree of portability.

“Frankly, these kinds of hurdles don’t make consumers feel particularly excited by offerings coming form conventional studios.”

Broadband and other high speed connection services promise to greatly enhance the quality of video on mobile devices, but transmission speed is not the only factor.

Today, IBM and Rapport, a Silicon Valley startup, previewed what they’re hailing as a “breakthrough energy-efficient processor design” that will be able to stream live and high-definition video on mobile devices five to 10 times the speed of existing processors.

The chip startup already offers the KC256, which has 256 processing elements, and provides more than 25 gigabyte operations/second under a single watt of power.

These Kilicore chips can be dynamically reconfigured for compute-intensive applications, including mobile gaming, homeland security, server components, image processing, consumer electronics and what Rapport referred to as “suitcase supercomputing.”

The forthcoming Kilocore1025 processor, based on both Rapport’s technology as well as IBM’s Power architecture, isn’t slated for availability until early next year. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company planned to publicly release details today at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, Calif.

As for products based on Rapport’s chips, “2007 isn’t too early to expect products based on our KC256,” Debby Hindus, VP of product marketing and co-founder of Rapport, told internetnews.com. “Products based on our 1025 will take a longer to come out.”

Rapport said its Kilocore-based processors address the shortcomings of conventional chips by putting hundreds or thousands of parallel processing elements together on small chips.

The Kilocore1025 has 1024 eight-bit processing elements together with a PowerPC core on a single, low-cost chip. Rapport said it offers tools and a development platform.

Analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 said software support will be key to Kilocore’s success. “Software is always a huge problem,” said Brookwood. “Hopefully, Rapport has a bunch of ISVs lined up or it will be an interesting chip all dressed up with no where to go.”

Rapport offers a software toolkit for developers and is building a library of applications. “It will take a while to build a large community of developers, but being part of Power.org gets us in touch with the people and companies we need,” said Hindus. Rapport’s president Frank Sinton added, “We want to mobilize the PowerPC.”

Sinton said Rapport is already in discussions with some of the largest handset makers about using the Kilocore1025 in future designs.

IBM plans to provide chip designer Rapport with engineering services, foundry and ASIC technologies.

“IBM developed the Cell Broadband Engine with Sony and Toshiba,” said IBM executive Nigel Beck, who also serves as Chairman of Power.org. “With new collaborative efforts with Power.org members like Rapport and others, we’re going to see future ‘Cells’ emerge.”

Dutch citizens will get a personalized Internet page giving them access to their records at public institutions and reminding them when to renew important documents, the government said on Friday.

The aim is to let citizens and companies, which will also get pages, access their data at any time, and eventually reduce administrative costs.

A trial Personal Internet Page (PIP) project will start later this year. Between 10 and 15 government organizations will participate, giving citizens on-line access to their tax information, grants, licences and social security data.

The PIP will also remind citizens when to renew their travel documents or driving license, and may show the status of a building permit. Forms can be filled in and submitted on-line, and will re-use standard personal data.

No date was given for when pages would be available to all.

“It is unclear when the Personal Internet Page will be fully functional, because a comprehensive introduction is a long-term and complex affair,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Several countries in Europe have put state, regional and local services on the Internet. Denmark even offers citizens a mailbox and a personal digital key to access all public services.

When the grand old man of consumer brands, Coke, found it had lost a little of its shimmer, it turned to the latest brand sensation — iPod — for inspiration.

The world’s biggest soft drink company, Coca-Cola Co., is set to launch its new “Welcome to the Coke side of life” advertising blitz this weekend, but only after studying a new icon, Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iPod digital music player.

Analysts said the company that taught the world to sing with “The Real Thing” in the 1970s and struck a chord with “Have a Coke and a Smile” in the early 1980s is still struggling to find a new catchphrase and imagery that will stick.

Apart from a series of television ads, Coke will emphasize outdoor advertising more than it has in the past with a range of colorful wallscapes — some as high as 200 feet — depicting myriad colors and images splashing out of a Coke bottle.

Katie Bayne, senior vice president of Coca-Cola brands, told reporters during a presentation this week that Coke studied Apple’s print and outdoor communication, noting that it had a lot of clarity.

Apple’s “Silhouettes” campaign, with its graphic imagery of shadowy figures dancing while listening to music on their iPods, served as a reminder about the product to consumers on the move, advertising experts said.

“It is important with big brands that we evoke the feeling of what we are trying to say to people as opposed to telling people. You feel what the benefit of iPod is in the creative,” said Esther Lee, Coke’s chief creative officer, adding that Coke is trying to do the same with its advertising.

Coke, going a step further to grab consumers’ attention, will have some billboards hold just the image of the Coke bottle with the splash of color from the bottle spilling all over the facade of the building it is mounted on.

But at least one industry watcher expressed reservations about Coke’s plans.

“iPod is all about being hip and cool and they can get away with billboards that are just colorful and are just there as a reminder, which is what outdoors is about,” said Jack Trout, president of marketing strategy firm Trout & Partners.

“If I were to use outdoor for Coke, I would do the exact opposite. I would run 19th century billboards. That would be startling,” Trout said.