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Leaders from the technology industry reiterated the importance of trade.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates donated to Locke’s gubernatorial campaign in 1996, and in 1999, he endorsed Locke at a campaign fundraiser, just one week after a federal court declared Microsoft a monopoly.

As governor of Washington from 1997 to 2005, Locke was generally popular and fostered a relationship with Washington’s technology sector. He convinced Boeing to locate its 787 jetliner plant in Everett, Wash., with a package of tax breaks.

“He’s done a lot of negotiating on behalf on U.S. businesses in China, and I think he’d be a great advocate for U.S. businesses there,” she said.

A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity told CNET News it is likely that the president will nominate Locke to run the department. Locke would bring to the position a strong expertise in business relations with China, knowledge of the clean energy sector, and a familiarity with the high tech industry.

“He has been a firm supporter of technology and clearly understands the issues of climate change and the environment,” said Graham Evans, the executive director for the Washington Clean Technology Alliance. “He comes from a state where we have a deep tradition of sustainability in the culture and the way we operate.”

President Obama may soon announce former Washington Gov. Gary Locke as his third choice for secretary of commerce.

Locke will also be able to help facilitate the United States’ efforts to collaborate on clean energy technology with China. He has been a partner since 2005 with the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, where his specialties are China, energy, government relations, and corporate diversity counseling. Locke could help the United States encourage China to lower tariffs on U.S. products, Cantwell said.

Experience in technology policy will also be important for the next commerce secretary, Cantwell said, since he will have to appoint the next director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, oversee the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and provide leadership on issues like cybersecurity.

“In Bill’s case the judge’s ruling will be overturned, and Microsoft will ultimately prevail,” Locke said at the fundraiser. “No company and no individual has done more to empower people, to level the information-playing field, to serve the consumers than Microsoft and Bill Gates.”

At a time when the president is emphasizing the energy sector’s role in revitalizing the economy, Locke would bring experience to the Commerce Department in cultivating a climate for green jobs. In 2002, Locke announced the formation of the Northwest Energy Technology Collaborative, with the aim of positioning the Washington region as a center for research and product development in energy technology markets.

Locke was the first Chinese American to serve as a governor in the United States. Before supporting Obama, he served as the Washington co-chairman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.

“I think Governor Locke would be a great commerce secretary,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had a strong technology sector in Washington which will be helpful to him.”

“Locke is someone with an outstanding background and a good sense of the value of the high tech industry to the economy and good appreciation for the role that open markets can play in creating new opportunities for everyone,” said Dean Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council.

As governor, Locke in 2000 enacted a package of laws to encourage rural broadband development in Washington. That same year, however, he supported keeping the Internet tax moratorium temporary.

(Credit:
Mobile.163.com)

China Mobile introduced a new mobile platform Monday, and one of the presenting partners on hand has raised a few eyebrows.

Reports from the China Mobile event, which introduced the wireless operator’s Android-based Open Mobile System, or OMS, say the Mini 3i was confined to operate on a 2G GSM network–no Wi-Fi access–but had a 3-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, and a slot for a microSD card.

There was, however, a “proof of concept mobile device prototype” shown off at the event, Parretta said. That explains the photos, which depict a black, candybar-style handset that had a touch screen and was stamped with the Dell logo on the back.

Industry observers and market analysts have been largely underwhelmed both by the idea of a Dell smartphone, and according to some who saw early prototypes, the execution of it as well.

A prototype of a Dell smartphone seen at a China Mobile event.

“Dell was there supporting China Mobile as a development partner. We did not confirm or announce anything,” said Dell spokesman Matt Parretta.

Details of a Dell phone, reportedly called the Mini 3i, began to circulate on the Web almost immediately after being presented at the event, but Dell says it has not yet announced any smartphone for the China market.

In a first-time investment, Intel Capital backed CPower, a New York company which offers energy-efficiency services such as demand-response where commercial customers get paid to dial down energy use during peak times. Intel’s money is in addition to the $10.7 million CPower raised in April.

Limerick, Ireland-based Powervation got a second investment from Intel Capital to further build efficient power controllers for computers and communications equipment.

Intel Capital said it is seeking to fund new companies in efficiency, alternative power generation, storage, transportation, and materials. It developed Open Energy Initiative, a program for funding new companies, developing standards, and lobbying.

SpectraWatt is a solar manufacturing company that was spun out of Intel last year.

Intel participated in a series C round for Grid Net, which makes network management software for utilities to manage energy flow to buildings with smart meters. The company has licensed its WiMax smart meter design to General Electric which is testing it with utilities.

In home energy management, Intel was part of the previously announced C-round investment in iControl, which is developing a system that combines home security services with energy tracking and automation.

Intel was part of a $24.5 million investment in Convey Computer in Richardson, Texas, which does energy-efficient high-performance computing with Xeon processors.

Intel said on Wednesday its venture capital arm invested a total of $10 million in five energy-related companies, giving a glimpse into the product areas that the chip giant considers promising.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Neelie Kroes

commentary

The EU, however, has made itself an enemy to Oracle, Sun, and MySQL by holding up the merger, a situation that will only get worse due to its glacial pace, as CIO.co.uk’s editor Martin Veitch suggests. Customers are not the beneficiaries of its intervention: Sun’s server competitors like IBM are.

UPDATE @ 6:59 Pacific on 9/4/09: I solicited comment from Gartner vice president and Distinguished Analyst, Donald Feinberg, who had this to say:

If you haven’t been paying attention, the delay on the merger due to U.S. and EU scrutiny has already resulted in two shockingly bad quarters from Sun. Many enterprise customers are already moving to competitors like IBM because of the uncertainty surrounding the future of Sun products, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Commission doesn’t have to. MySQL’s open-source license already does. It’s open source: even Oracle can’t put the open-source genie back in the bottle once it has been released, as MySQL has, under the GNU General Public License.

Though the EU purports to be in tune with open source, its meddlesome muddling reveals a surprising ignorance of open source, and shows a complete disregard for MySQL’s true market opportunity.

(Credit:
European Commission)

When asked in April if Oracle’s bid for Sun would end up hurting MySQL, Mickos responded: “MySQL works for Web-based applications. Oracle is for older, legacy applications.” The vast majority of Oracle’s revenue comes from enterprise IT. The vast majority of MySQL’s revenue comes from Web companies like Facebook, Google, etc.

So, if anything, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun helps it leverage MySQL into a market–the growing Web database market–that its own technology is ill-equipped to manage. It also gets a lower-cost product with which to bludgeon its real enemy, Microsoft, coupled with a greater footprint in the rising open-source developer community.

The EU is entering deep water here, water that it clearly does not adequately understand.

Consider: some of the folks cheering loudest for the EU to clamp down on the proposed merger, like representatives from Monty Program, have already demonstrated Oracle’s (and Sun’s) lack of control over MySQL. Monty Program has created a significant fork, or derivative, of the MySQL database, and stands to gain much by the EU’s obstructionism.

Competition within and around MySQL is alive and well, regardless of Oracle. After all, as former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has been saying for years, MySQL has never really competed with Oracle, anyway. MySQL serves (and has helped to create) a very different market: the Web database market.

Systems (like MySQL) based on open-source software are increasingly emerging as viable alternatives to proprietary solutions. The Commission has to ensure that such alternatives would continue to be available.

In delaying the merger, the EU isn’t helping MySQL. It’s helping its competitors, including Drizzle, OurDelta, MariaDB (Monty Program’s fork), Percona, etc.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard could not have planned it any better.

Open source is not the enemy in this deal. Microsoft is.

Further delay will only compound the problem.

Unlike the U.S., which approved the deal, the EU’s Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is concerned that Oracle’s takeover of Sun will end up diminishing competition:

MySQL and Oracle don’t really compete. They live in two very different markets.

The European Union has launched an in-depth investigation into Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, potentially delaying the merger by several more months. In doing so, the EU is actually guaranteeing the demise of Sun’s hardware business and gifting it to Sun’s competitors by misunderstanding the deal’s impact on open source, generally, and on MySQL, specifically.

The EU does not understand open source. This is clear by using DBMS (MySQL) to extend the deadline. It also is clear that this is an attempt to use MySQL as a cover-up to a political agenda. It is protectionism at its worst.

Updated 10:20 a.m. PDT - Apparently the transfer of the case to the U.S. offices of Google, rather than Google Italy, was merely a procedural thing since Google U.S. runs Google News, not the subsidiaries in a particular country.

IDG News Service reported Friday that Italy’s Antitrust Authority wants to now take a closer look at Google’s overall operation, a week after it followed up on complaints from news publishers that Google was excluding them from search results unless they agreed to be in Google News. Google denies the charges.

“This is a technical change because Google Italy doesn’t provide Google News. We pointed this out to the Authority when they visited us last week so we’re not surprised by this decision,” Google said in a statement.

Google’s 90 percent search share of the Italian market is apparently causing regulators to wonder whether Google is having a disproportionate effect on online advertising in Italy.

Italian regulators have expanded their investigation of Google News to include the company’s search engine in that country, according to reports.

Google has faced increasing competition-related scrutiny in its home country, but so far that has mainly concerned areas other than search, such as Google Books and CEO Eric Schmidt’s former role as a member of Apple’s board of directors. Some observers, such as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, think Italian regulators are either confused or looking for a fight, given the clear instructions Google has provided on how to opt out of search or news separately.

The antitrust scrutiny is likely to be more intense in the U.S., where Google has about three quarters of the search market and Microsoft and Yahoo combined have about one fifth, than in Europe where Google’s market share exceeds 90 percent.

The issue that remains in Europe is “determining whether or not the deal requires formal notice before the (European) Commission and if not, do we need to file notice” in individual countries that might have an interest in reviewing the deal, said Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans.

Update 3:25 p.m. PDT: In a statement, a Yahoo spokesperson said “As we indicated at the time of announcement, the agreement is subject to regulatory approval and Yahoo and Microsoft are engaging in discussions with the regulators in Europe about the agreement. Yahoo and Microsoft are committed to engaging positively with the Commission about the agreement and firmly believe that the information we will be providing will confirm that this deal is not only good for both companies, but it is also good for advertisers, good for publishers, and good for consumers. As we have indicated previously, we’re hopeful the agreement will close in early 2010.”

Yahoo representatives familiar with the matter did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Last week, the companies said the U.S. Department of Justice had asked for more information about their deal under which Microsoft would provide search for Yahoo’s Web pages, thus bringing to a close Yahoo’s tenure as a search provider.

Representatives from Microsoft and Yahoo have filed paperwork for regulatory clearance in the U.S. for their proposed search deal but it remains unclear how to proceed in Europe, a Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday.

These jurisdictional issues are being discussed in ongoing talks Microsoft and Yahoo have been having with EC officials that were the subject of a Reuters report, according to Evans.

“We have had informal discussions in Europe about the agreement just as we indicated we would when the deal was announced,” he said.

Making data centers more energy efficient has been a growing priority for technology managers for the past few years, as companies seek to trim spending on electricity and reduce their environmental footprint. The Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 estimated that data centers alone use about 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S. and are on a pace to double consumption in the coming years. In IBM’s case, it deals with high volumes–its wikis are used by 365,000 people–and a growing number of applications.

Just office buildings or hotels heat or cool rooms even when there are no people in them, many data centers operators don’t have fine-grained control over cooling systems. That means the temperature can be set lower than it needs to be or a “hot spot” emerges when one piece of equipment has a heavy computing load.

SOUTHBURY, Conn.–IBM’s “green” data center here is kind of like a techie version of the “This Old House” television show. But in this case, the project was to build a showcase for energy-efficiency computing, rather than construct a new addition for a suburban home.

Also, the influx of data on energy use lets data center managers better track related costs.

IBM’s main problem was data center sprawl. Five years ago, internal IT staff could barely keep up with growing demand for computing resources from employees, causing an expansion from one data center location to four–a situation that was costly and inefficient.

And the investments IBM made in making the center more efficient are “very cost justified,” said Patrick Toole, the company’s newly named chief information officer, in an interview. IBM as a company has wrung $3 billion in costs over the past year, which it plans to continue, he said.

IBM is looking at a variety of other ways to lower energy consumption, including using solid-state hard drives and using outside air–filtered to clean out contaminants and humidity–to cool the building, Guasti said.

“The bright idea is not so much putting the sensors in. It’s what you do with the data–you get reams of information so you have to try to figure out what’s important and not,” Guasti said.

Operators can get a “thermal map” of the data center based on the sensor data to help find trouble spots. They are also beta testing an upcoming version of IBM’s Tivoli Energy Management software, which will be able to incorporate the sensor data into the systems management program.

“You have to physically integrate the IT and physical (cooling) equipment so you can adjust the air conditioning to match the thermal load–the system should be very dynamic,” said Peter Guasti, program director for IBM’s Green Innovations Data Center.

IBM’s tech staff did what many others in their position have done: they consolidated their computing workload with virtualization and upgraded to new, more energy-efficient hardware.

Air flows along a predetermined path with “cold aisles” pumping cooled air to the front of equipment from the floor and hot air behind server fans being sucked upward from the ceiling in “hot aisles.”

Combining IT and building architecture
To keep the air conditioning well tuned, IBM is gathering lots of data. Sensors are placed behind, in front of, and top of server and storage racks to monitor the temperature. The data is collected and analyzed so that the air and water cooling systems can be automatically adjusted as needed, Guasti explained.

For example, the data center allows IBM to operate an internal “cloud computer.” Employees can procure computing resources–server processing and storage space, for example–for a certain amount of time on a subscription basis. In the past, employees asked the IT group to install a server for each new application, which is less efficient than a shared-resources model.

Photos: Inside IBM’s deep green data center

Updated at 7:15 A.M. PT with corrected title for Toole and video added.

“The instrumentation we have with what is going on is so much more granular than before. We haven’t had dashboards with regard to the green aspects before,” Toole said. “Now we can see things like energy on a smartphone and we’re able to manage that.”

But packing more servers–each with multicore processors–into smaller spaces creates more heat, exacerbating the challenge of keeping the space cool. IBM is using a number of techniques to cool efficiently, but the guiding principle is to match the cooling with the required heating load.

Now, those four data centers have been consolidated into a single spot with the latest in energy-efficient tech gear, including a network of 200 sensors and water-cooled servers. It also uses what are considered the best practices for physically laying out a data center, with close attention to everything from cabling to air flow.

To lighten the overall cooling load, IBM is using its liquid-cooling systems, originally code-named Cool Blue, which fit onto the back of server racks. These heat exchangers cool the hot air coming from servers’ fans by circulating cold water through coils, which absorb the server heat and then are cooled using the building’s chiller.

Saving green or green PR?

The Green Innovation Data Center was designed for tours so customers can get some ideas on how to lighten their own data centers’ energy load. But it’s not just for show–the center runs applications used by thousands of people.

But the company measures the “payback” from upgrading its data center not only with energy savings and environmental benefits. It’s also measured in business process improvements, Toole said.

The Department of Energy on Wednesday detailed $30 billion in loan guarantees available to promote renewable energy and grid upgrades.

Ford, Tesla Motors, and Nissan were the first awarded loans from the $25 billion ATVM program in June.

The DOE is soliciting applications for projects in renewable energy and added electricity transmission. This phase of loan guarantees also makes loans available for “cutting edge” biofuels projects.

The solicitations for applications are the sixth and seventh step in the DOE’s loan guarantee program, funded by the stimulus act. Billions of dollars of loans and loan guarantees had been authorized before the stimulus but few had been awarded until earlier this year.

Awards for projects to promote domestic car and auto battery manufacturing–the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program (ATVM) and Advanced Battery Manufacturing grants–are expected to be announced as early as this week.

What’s your experience?

Maybe I should pose that question to all the iPhone users who can’t make a basic phone call with their phones much of the time.

“We recognize unique challenges have been posed by all of these smart devices being increasingly used by more and more people and I think we are on the forefront of architecting our network to continue to stay ahead of the demands that those devices place on our network,” he said.

Asked what AT&T is doing to address the reception problems, Siegel said the company is rolling out 850 MHz frequency, which penetrates walls better than the higher frequency 1900MHz band; adding 2,000 cell towers to increase coverage; beefing up its back-haul capacity that connects the cell towers to the Internet; spending as much as $18 billion this year to upgrade its wireless and broadband networks; and moving to the LTE, or 4G, network standard next year.

While I can’t speak for other parts of the country, there do seem to be problems in San Francisco at least. This is significant given the high percentage of iPhone users in the area.

This is not a new problem. AT&T was criticized when traffic from attendees at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, overwhelmed the network earlier this year. And there were widespread complaints about dropped calls and spotty service after the launch of the iPhone 3G a year ago.

That happens daily when I try to converse on my first-generation iPhone in my apartment and in certain other neighborhoods. I’ve come to anticipate that if I can even make a call it’s likely to be short-lived or poor quality.

“So you are actively asking folks to submit their experiences? Sorry, but you and I have a basic disagreement about why you are doing this story. What is the news here beyond what others have covered?” he wrote in an e-mail.

I wanted to know specifically why my problems haven’t been resolved nearly one-and-a-half years after getting my iPhone and why my voice reception would be impacted by data traffic on a different network. “Well, it wouldn’t,” Siegel conceded.

“We lead the industry in smart phones,” he said. “As a result, we are having to stay ahead of what is incredible and increasing demand for wireless data services.”

“Terrible in SF. Probably 1 out of 3 calls gets dropped,” wrote a 3G iPhone user.

“When i first got my iPhone (July 2007), i had fine coverage. In the past nine months or so, something changed. Now i have *horrible* reception in my neighborhood, especially in my apartment, and most especially in my bedroom. My phone virtually never rings there, and i almost never get voicemails or text messages until somewhere between 2 minutes and 2 hours after the communication went through,” wrote another first-generation Bay Area iPhone user on Facebook.

Other factors are at play, though, such as proximity to a cell tower, the thickness of walls in the building and amount of demand on the network at the time, according to Siegel.

Siegel said he would look into my particular situation. I hope he does and if so, I’ll let you know what I find out.

Siegel was not amused.

Initially, he had suggested that my problems were related to the fact that the first-generation iPhone uses the EDGE data network, which is slower than the 3G network. However, not only am I on a different data network than the 3G data bandwidth hogs, but there should be no connection between general data usage and my voice reception.

Despite listing the improvements AT&T plans to make, Siegel kept insisting that there was no story here; that my concerns and the many comments on the Apple iPhone forums about reception problems and dropped calls was not newsworthy.

After receiving hundreds of reader e-mails and comments to this article I decided to do a follow up story. You can read it here.

“I’ve come to use it as a portable computer and a phone only in emergencies. I hardly talk on the phone anymore,” another Bay Area friend who has a 3G iPhone told me.

While I do have friends who report no problems with their iPhone reception, many of my friends have complaints. I did an informal survey of friends on Facebook and learned that people suffer from dropped calls, as well as inaccessible voice mail and delayed voice messages. Also, I am not alone in being forced to cut back on talking on the phone as a result of the reception problems. Here are some examples of the responses I got:

Three weeks ago, I got a call on a friend’s iPhone while in the middle of a desert; cell phone coverage had come to Burning Man. By contrast, several calls I made last night to my parents from my San Francisco apartment were dropped and a subsequent connection became garbled.

Frustrated by the numerous interrupted calls, I decided to try to find out why my iPhone service is so poor that it’s easier to have a Web video conference over AIM with my boyfriend because neither of us can use our iPhones (his is 3G) reliably inside either of our homes.

“As soon as I move and do not have an ATT bundle, I am throwing the iphone, and ATT in the trash,” wrote a San Francisco friend using a first-generation iPhone.

“My (3G iPhone) won’t work inside my house. I’m thinking about selling my house and finding a new one. Until then, I just use the forwarding feature, but it’s a pain. And yeah, it means I tend to talk on the iPhone less. It’s definitely a problem with my line o’ work, although I’m trying to use Google Voice to solve the problem, too,” wrote a friend in Arizona.

I wondered why, a year later, the service still seemed unreliable. I called AT&T (on my reliable landline at work) to find out. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel blamed the problem on the increasing amount of data traffic iPhone users are creating, which CNET News and others wrote about earlier this month.

“We do not agree with all of the statements made by Google in their FCC letter. Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google.”

Apple has a lot of sway in several industries and makes products that people like. But customer confidence in your ability to be forthcoming is important, especially when it comes to making a successful sales pitch for, say, an iPod Touch sans camera, when there could be a new model with a camera coming soon that’s just been delayed because of manufacturing problems.

On July 28, Google announced that the calling and message service application had been rejected from Apple’s App Store. Three days later, Google, Apple, and AT&T, the iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., received inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission regarding the app’s rejection. In its answer to the FCC, Apple said that the application was not rejected, but was still “under review.” In Google’s response–the most interesting parts redacted until Friday–it told the FCC that a series of conversations took place between Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing Phil Schiller and Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Alan Eustace during the month of July, including one on July 7, where Schiller told Eustace that Google Voice was being rejected for duplicating the phone dialing function of the iPhone.

Who could forget the uproar over Jobs’ physical appearance last summer and his top spokesperson’s response that he was “suffering from a common bug”? It came out later that he was having serious medical problems that resulted in a liver transplant earlier this year.

But there’s also the reality that a lot of customers just flat out don’t care. Apple has a particularly loyal fan base, and to date the company’s bottom line hasn’t shown distaste for deception or misleading information.

The discrepancy between what Google said and what Apple said in their answers to the FCC, of course, leads to many more questions. In response, Apple released the following statement Friday:

It’s not impossible, of course, that Google misunderstood, or is itself misleading the FCC, though it’s unclear why that would be. Especially since at the point when Google initially said Google Voice was rejected by Apple, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was still sitting on Apple’s board of directors. (He has since resigned.) But this is also not the first time there’s been the perception that Apple has been less than forthcoming on important matters.

And just last week, observers of the company wondered if Jobs purposely misled The New York Times when he told them they did not put a camera in the
iPod Touch because it didn’t make sense for customers–speculation that heightened after a tear-down revealed space for a camera sensor in the updated design.

First it was Steve Jobs’ health. Then it was the layoffs earlier this year. Now the Google Voice rejection. Apple’s credibility is being questioned yet again.

Anyone who deals with Apple on a regular basis knows it is a company that gives information on its own terms. But now even the federal government is having problems getting a clear answer regarding Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice application for the
iPhone.

Perhaps “rejected” doesn’t mean the same thing to Apple as it does to everyone else. While that sounds kind of silly, quite frankly, it’s not outside the realm of possibility of how Apple is thinking. Perhaps Apple is planning to formalize such a category of App Store approval status where applications are neither approved nor rejected. Other applications have languished for months, but their developers have been unclear on what has caused the delay.

In March, when rumors swirled that some sales employees got laid off, Apple representatives denied the reports. The people who lost their jobs later came forward to confirm the reports.

So basically we have a classic he said, she said situation between two companies known to (formerly?) enjoy a close relationship: Google says it was told the application was rejected, by one of the highest-ranking people at Apple. Apple says the app wasn’t rejected. So Apple is either: a) insinuating that Eustace somehow misunderstood what Schiller said, or b) suggesting that Google is lying, or c) being picky about how it’s parsing words.