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June 1, 2003
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Electrolux charges forward with IBM
Appliance giant Electrolux is tapping Big Blue to tend to its desktop computers, the companies plan to announce Monday.
In a seven-year outsourcing deal that expands an existing relationship between the companies and continues IBM's "on-demand" computing push, IBM said it will manage the desktop environment in Electrolux's European offices. It will provide computer users there with Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration software as well as support, administration and help desk services.
The contract is worth $212 million to $259 million, estimates Stratos Sarissamlis, a Meta Group analyst familiar with the arrangement. The deal is not as big as some of IBM's other information technology contracts. But Sarissamlis said it is significant that Big Blue is offering on-demand pricing for a comprehensive set of desktop computer and local area network (LAN) services, rather than just for pieces of the desktop environment.
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Altnet to pay Kazaa users for swapping
A year after launching its sometimes-controversial alliance with Kazaa, Brilliant Digital Entertainment subsidiary Altnet is kicking off a new, ambitious stage of its peer-to-peer marketing campaign.
Later this week, Kazaa parent Sharman Networks and Altnet will jointly release a new bundle of file-swapping software that will include components of a new high-security peer-to-peer network and a program that will pay users to be a part of it.
The idea, says Altnet CEO Kevin Bermeister, is to harness the computing resources of the tens of millions of Kazaa users to distribute authorized files such as games, songs and movies. Giving people an incentive to host and trade paid files could create a powerful medium for distributing authorized content and could diminish file-trading networks' role as hubs of online piracy, he said.
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HP, Opsware to join forces on data center
Aiming to boost its products for managing large corporate data centers, Hewlett-Packard plans on Monday to announce a partnership with Opsware, the Marc Andreessen-led software maker formerly known as Loudcloud.
As part of the deal, Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP will integrate Opsware's software with Utility Data Center (UDC), its utility computing package with which companies can view a pool of shared computing and storage resources as a single entity, quickly shifting resources from one task to another.
While HP's existing UDC hardware and software package is able to automate the management of physical resources such as servers and storage, Opsware's software can help automate things like making changes to an application, such as installing a software patch.
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Macromedia updates e-learning tools
Software maker Macromedia plans to announce on Monday an update to Authorware, its collection of tools for creating computer-delivered educational content.
Authorware is one of Macromedia's oldest product lines, initially used to produce educational CD-ROMs for corporate and academic settings and later expanded to include extensive support for online delivery. The software lets designers combine text, images, video and applications into an interactive learning experience
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Nextel to up U.S. 'push to talk' range
U.S. wireless phone company Nextel Communications is set to begin a three-month scramble to expand the range of its popular DirectConnect walkie-talkie feature from coast to coast.
Initially, only Nextel subscribers in Boston, Los Angeles and Florida will be able to use Nationwide Direct Connect, which the company plans to introduce Monday. But a rapid-fire expansion is planned, with subscribers in San Francisco, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., being added to the mix by June 16, the company said. By August, Nextel intends to include every city and market that it covers.
The service will cost $10 a month for unlimited use, or Nextel subscribers can pay on a per-minute basis, according to the company.
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Europe's first Mars mission ready to go
Europe's first mission to another planet is due to blast off on Monday night on a Russian rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome, on the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan.
If all goes well, on the 400m-kilometre voyage from earth, the unmanned Mars Express craft will go into orbit around the red planet in December. It will release its UK-built Beagle II lander to parachute through the thin Martian atmosphere and bump on to the dusty surface on Christmas day.
Although the Mars Explorer orbiter carries instruments to map and analyse the planet from space, the potential star of the mission is Beagle II, the first lander designed specifically to look for signs of primitive Martian life.
Beagle II was built for about £45m ($73m) by an academic-industrial consortium led by Britain's Open University and Astrium. It packs formidable scientific power into a lander about the size of a garden barbecue, which will open up after landing like a large clam shell. At its heart is a robotic chemistry laboratory that can analyse samples of Martian soil, extracted by a "mole" burrowing under the surface.
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Asteroid-driven Tsunami in U.S. Eastern Seaboard's Future
A giant, 40 stories tall wave could one day drench the eastern United States, the result of an asteroid-driven tsunami. However seaside dwellers need not move just yet, the asteroid isn't due for another eight centuries.
Researchers in California have developed a computer simulation depicting the ocean impact of the asteroid 1950 DA, a half-mile wide (1.1-kilometer) space rock that swings uncomfortably close to Earth in 2880. Although the probability of such an impact is remote to say the least -- astronomers estimate it to be somewhere around 0.3 percent -- the computer model does give researchers insight into the destructive power of tsunamis caused by near-earth objects.
"You'd want to first decide how far away [from impact] the effects are going to be felt," Steven Ward, a research geophysicist at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), said in a telephone interview. "And once you know that, maybe you could set up a zone of evacuation." According to Ward's research, about 120 million people live in coastal areas at elevations within 65 feet (20 meters) of sea level and just over a mile (two kilometers) of the ocean.
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