shurazero.com

But a troubling and unpredictable economic climate means that SAP, like many other companies inside and outside of high tech, will continue tightening its belt. SAP said Wednesday that it plans to trim its worldwide workforce by about 3,000 positions by the end of 2009–from 51,500 down to 48,500 jobs.

For the full year, SAP’s net income was 1.89 billion euros, down 2 percent from 2007, while revenue was 11.57 billion euros, up 13 percent.

Revenue in software and software-related services at the Walldorf, Germany-based company was 2.7 billion euros, up 8 percent year over year.

The Company expects the 2009 operating environment to remain challenging. In addition, 2009 will no longer include the positive effects from the acquisition of Business Objects, and the 2009 first-half results will be a difficult comparison to the strong results reported in the first half of 2008, which was prior to the economic crisis that disrupted the global markets in the third quarter of 2008.

SAP said Wednesday that for the fourth quarter, it had net income of 850 million euros ($1.1 billion) on revenue of 3.5 billion euros. Those figures represent a gain of 13 percent in net income and 8 percent in revenue year over year.

Here’s how SAP sees the business environment for the coming year:

For those reasons, SAP did not provide a specific outlook for software and software-related service revenue for full-year 2009.

Even coming off a healthy quarter, business software titan SAP says it needs to cut costs for the coming year–and as elsewhere in the tech sector, that means job cuts.

SAP said that the job cuts, at least some of which it expects to come through attrition, will lead to annual savings of 300 million euros to 350 million euros starting in 2010.

So I’m not sure that MySpace Music will be a game-changer. Fans of big bands already know where to buy merchandise–the band’s Web site, or Amazon’s CD section, or iTunes, or their local retail store. Sure, big fans who count major-label acts among their “friends” might now stay within MySpace to buy new songs from these bands, and some MySpace users might discover (and buy music from) new acts via friends of friends. But a lot of fans don’t know (or care much about) the difference between major and independent artists, and might wonder why only some acts make their wares available for purchase. The inconsistency will be confusing, and drive users back to the traditional music-buying sites (or free file-trading services, which aren’t going away).

(Credit:
MySpace)

A truly killer MySpace music service would let users buy downloads and merchandise from any act on the site.

But major label acts are a small part of the MySpace experience. The only reason you ask The Police or Death Cab to be your “friend” is to show off your impeccable taste to your real friends, the individuals and small-time artists who you’re actually connected with. These are the folks who leave individualized comments on your page and send you instant messages, and their gigs appear right alongside Radiohead’s on your home page. MySpace is the ultimate long tail site for musicians, where bar bands and small-town heroes can appear in the same context as the biggest bands in the world.

The real game-changer comes when MySpace offers a full e-commerce store–downloads, CD sales, the works–to every artist with a musician’s page on the site. That way, users would never have to leave the site to buy any music they heard on the site. The challenge would be building the infrastructure, but once things like billing and provisioning downloads are in place for the majors, it might not be much harder to set up a CDBaby-like system for everybody else.

Today, MySpace announced a deal with three of the four majors (EMI is sitting out for now) to offer DRM-free MP3 downloads, ringtones, and merchandise through the artist pages on MySpace. This is long overdue: the music industry needs to go where their fans already are, and with 30 million people regularly listening to music on the site, it’s a mystery why the labels haven’t tried to reach these folks before now.

MySpace is essential for independent artists. Every band I’ve played with in the last five years has had a MySpace page, and it completely changed how we did things compared with the pre-Internet days. Getting gigs, maintaining mailing lists, fliering–all of those formerly labor-intensive tasks could be accomplished by sitting in front of a computer. One group I played with got 90 percent of our gigs through other bands on our friends list. Another had a couple dozen teenage fans who’d come to every all-ages show when they read about it on our MySpace page. (We were all in our late 30s and 40s and had no idea that ska would appeal to that demographic.)

But there was always a major gap: if we wanted to sell downloads, CDs, or anything else, we had to guide fans to another site or service, such as our own home page with a PayPal account or CDBaby.

• Stands 7-feet-7-inches tall.
• Weighs more than 500 pounds.
• Looks part human and part ape-like.
• Is male.
• Has reddish hair and blackish-gray eyes.
• Has two arms and two legs, and five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot.
• Has flat feet that are similar to human feet.
• Has a footprint that is 16.75 inches long and 5.75 inches wide at the heel.
• Has hands that are 11.75 inches long from the palm to the tip of the middle finger and are 6.25 inches wide.
• Walks upright. (Several of them apparently were seen on the day the body was found.)
• Has teeth that are more human-like than ape-like.
• Has been undergoing DNA testing.

According to a press release, the creature:

This summer has filled quite the appetite for strange creatures in the news, fueled by photos of the “Montauk Monster,” a strange carcass that washed ashore in eastern Long Island, New York. That creature, which earned plenty of headlines on Gawker and other New York-centric blogs, has been shakily confirmed as a viral marketing stunt. Earlier this week, a Texas man claimed to have videotaped a legendary creature called the Chupacabra, but the video really just looks like a weird dog.

A couple of hunters in northern Georgia (the state, not the country) claim to have found a carcass of the legendary creature known as Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, if you prefer).

The two hunters teamed up with a fellow named Tom Biscardi, head of a group called Searching for Bigfoot; they plan to hold a press conference on Friday in Palo Alto, Calif., to show off DNA evidence and photos–but not the body itself. That’s apparently being kept under wraps. (Yeah, right.)

But here’s the real kicker: Every geek and X-phile knows Bigfoot prefers the thick forests of the Pacific Northwest. What the heck was this one doing in Georgia? Searching for decent barbecue?

(Credit:
Amblin Entertainment)

Biscardi’s Web site, searchingforbigfoot.com, proceeded to crash under bandwidth pressures.

He's reeeeeeeeeeeeal! (Or is he?)

The two amateur Bigfoot hunters who claim to have found the body in Georgia, Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer, are a cop and a former corrections officer, respectively. Biscardi, according to LiveScience, has been responsible for at least one Bigfoot hoax before, leading many to take this with an even bigger grain of salt than they normally would.

So what’s the future for NAC? Out of the ashes, NAC is slowly changing and moving in the right direction toward identity-based networking. Rather than a myopic security tool, identity-based networking initiatives:

Cisco Systems first coined this term in 2005 when introducing an initiative to ensure that only “healthy” endpoints could access the network. In the intervening years, the NAC concept gained popularity, drove tremendous VC investment, and most recently came crashing down in a micro boom-to-bust cycle.

While NAC was limited in scope, identity-based networking is boundless. Once the network gains intelligence on users and devices, it can offer a helping hand inside and outside the enterprise. NAC as a concept may be a bit long in the tooth, but identity-based networking is just beginning.

The irony in all this is that Cisco really nailed this concept with another initiative called directory enabled networking (DEN), back in the 1990s. In the end, it doesn’t matter what you call it, identity-based networking will supersede vendor-based initiatives and become mainstream over the next few years.

• Span the enterprise. NAC was primarily based upon one-off appliances while identity-based networking is built into the entire network. Wired, wireless, and remote users must walk through a security line regardless of where their network journey begins.

• Manages user and device identity. Identity-based networking marries network access controls to specific users, networks, and devices. In other words, my access privileges may change depending upon whether I’m sitting in my office or logging on from an Internet cafe in Sao Paolo. This helps cover the growing need for user “roles” and audit reports for regulatory compliance and IT governance.

Network access control (NAC) has certainly had a boisterous lifetime.

• Are anchored by policies. Aside from when and where I can gain network access, policies span security, compliance, and quality of service. Identity-based network policies are used for blocking bad stuff and accelerating good stuff.

(Credit:
NeoEdge)

Ty Levine, NeoEdge’s vice president of marketing, called the widget a “simple turnkey” for any publisher on the Web to add a casual game channel or link to the NeoEdge library.

NeoEdge has created a widget that any site can add that will link to a large library of casual game titles.

There are more than 90 million adults playing casual games today, Levine asserted.

Levine added that Web site owners are free to find ad sponsorships for the widgets they put on their sites and to keep all the revenue from any such deals. Or site owners can adopt a pay-per-download model and share revenue with NeoEdge.

The company, which previously built a system that “wraps” ads around casual games like Diner Dash, is now attempting to leverage the huge popularity of such titles by making it simple for any Web site to use its widget and become a front end to its more than 400 games.

And while NeoEdge could end up with no revenue coming directly from sites’ usage of its widget, it’s clear that it wins if sites–either large portal sites, small blogs, or social networking services like its launch customer, PerfSpot–drive traffic to its casual-games library.

NeoEdge, a casual-games-based ad network company whose chairman is Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, launched on Wednesday a system designed to make it easy for Web sites to add a widget that links to its library of games.

Note: On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I’ll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South’s most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I’m doing on Twitter.

Casual games–which can be played in a short period of time and which attract more older users than do core games–often cost $10 or so to play and can bring large revenue streams to sites that host them.

Most established acts (notably Prince) resent the new concert self-publishing pastime, but up-and-coming acts tend to embrace the opportunity for exposure.

We’re all familiar with the long, depressing list of activities that seemed easy in youth that now take effort. Fortunately, finding good music isn’t as tough as working off that middle-age gut. Since its inception, the Internet has helped us–mostly illegally–discover new music. Finally, tools for legal and efficient online music discovery are hitting their stride.

Here's the beauty of subscription music services: instead of wasting my time deciding which (if any) Kanye West album is worthy of downloading, I can just download his entire catalog and sort out the crappy songs later. Click to enlarge.

(Credit:
Donald Bell/CNET Networks)

Recommended: Hype Machine

Also see:
Mog, Pitchfork

Music discovery technique No. 4: Virtual concerts

Editors’ note: Last.fm is owned by CNET’s parent company, CBS Interactive.

Using Pandora's Music Genome Project to passively stumble onto new music is about as simple as it gets. Click to enlarge.

(Credit:
Pandora)

Then something happens: you get older; work a full-time job; get married; have a mortgage; have children; adopt a particularly demanding parrot; and so on. You wake up one day and realize your taste in music hasn’t budged since your early ’20s and the prospect of discovering good, new music now seems like an overwhelming chore, fraught with disappointment. I know, I’m living proof.

If your adult responsibilities take priority over a night spent developing acute tinnitus and a hangover, don’t fret. Legions of concertgoers will drink beer and sacrifice their hearing on your behalf and at some point in the show, many of them will raise their cameras and mobile phones in the air and snap a keepsake video to share online.

Throwing $12 to $15 a month toward a music subscription service from Rhapsody, Napster, or
Zune Pass (for Zune owners) will make you feel like a Survivor contestant dropped in the middle an all-you-can-eat buffet. Suddenly, you don’t have worry about overspending or buyer’s remorse–you can just download any random damn thing that catches your attention and decide later whether it’s worth keeping. Download 1 song or 10,000, it doesn’t matter: you pay the same flat fee per month.

When you’re young, new music is everywhere: radio, Facebook profiles, borrowed iPods, or even burned CDs. It’s not hard to find tunes you love. The music appetites of 13- to 21-year-olds are voracious and the consequences of being musically unhip can be punishing.

For those of us with shrunken social lives and stale music collections, the public vetting of our listening habits on Web sites such as iLike and Last.fm seems more embarrassing than rewarding. The payoff of participation in these music-focused social networks isn’t bragging rights, but the capability to glimpse at the music collections of friends with good taste. By automatically pulling usage data directly from users’ iTunes music libraries (or Windows Media Player), Last.fm and iLike chart your most frequently played songs and those of your friends, allowing you to compare tastes and preview tracks.

Music discovery technique No. 1: Personalized Internet radio

Music discovery technique No. 3: Subscription music

Recommended: Concert.tv
Also see: Video podcasts

Music discovery techniques No. 6 to 100…

In his book The Paradox of Choice, author Barry Schwartz lays out his theory that consumers often become paralyzed with indecision when they face an overwhelming number of choices. I feel this way every time I browse Apple’s iTunes music catalog–a problem compounded by the fact that I’m just too cheap to buy a song for $0.99 cents without scrutinizing its 30-second preview like a grocer inspecting fruit. I spend so much time cherry-picking the songs I want to buy that I don’t have time left over to casually explore. As a cautious consumer, I’m actually scared that browsing iTunes aimlessly may cause me to buy something I’ll regret later, both musically and financially. (To wit: “Why the hell did I think I needed to buy the collected B-sides of Warrant?”)

Of course, you don’t own these songs the same way you would a CD or DRM-free MP3 file. If you stop paying your monthly subscription fee, the music you’ve downloaded won’t play. The trick is to not think of subscription music as a substitute for your music collection. Just think of this as a way to unblock your music Mojo.

Recommended:
Pandora, Slacker
Also see:
AOL Radio, Live 365

(Credit:
Concert.tv)

I’ve listed this music blog technique last because I know that reading music reviews sounds tedious. However, for those of you who already religiously check your newsfeeds in the morning, adding a few music blogs to your list is a painless way to keep new artists on your radar and new music in your headphones.

Lest we forget, music recordings were invented as a substitute for live performances. There’s still nothing as musically powerful as seeing a great band perform in a room full of wild fans, and even bad performances can refine your taste in music.

There was a time your FM radio offered a steady stream of new music. Today, with the exception of public and college radio (which have their own challenges), annoying ads, and tight song rotations leave you little to learn. In short: radio sucks.

To find these clips, you can turn to Concert.tv, one of the better catchall concert video Web sites, with a wide selection of content spanning many genres. Or, you can subscribe to video podcasts such as The Interface or Blogotheque’s Take Away Shows and have new concerts automatically load onto your
iPod every few weeks.

We swear, there's no reading required to expand your musical horizons these days. Well…aside from this article, at least.

(Credit:
Last.fm)

Music discovery technique No. 5: Blogs

Many of us have at least one or two friends who pride themselves on their good taste in music–friends who would create mix tapes or burn CDs for you back in your salad days. There’s still no replacement for a good, old-fashioned mix tape, however, there are new and faster ways to co-opt your buddy’s music library.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

To help you help yourself, we’ve collected our favorite techniques to help the lazy, hurried, or unhip (or, face it, aging) connect with good, new music.

Last.fm tells me Veronica and I have ‘Low musical compatibility’–probably because she has better taste in music than I do. Click to enlarge.

I’ve listed the best five ways I know of to discover new music these days, but I know there must be others out there. I hope you’ll fill me in by sounding off in the comments section and telling me what else has worked for you and what hasn’t.

Recommended: Rhapsody; Napster
Also see:
Slacker; Zune Pass

Lucky for us, Internet radio’s infinite bandwidth offers thousands of well-groomed stations eager to prove their musical good taste. Sifting through the Web’s deep directories of Internet radio stations requires time and patience, however, so we’re going to focus on the automatic, personalized options offered by Pandora and Slacker.

Music discovery technique No. 2: Find someone with good taste

The beauty of both Pandora and Slacker is their passive approach to music discovery. All you have to do is call up their Web site and select an artist or genre as a starting point for music recommendations. Just like rating rented movies in Netflix, rating songs in Pandora or Slacker improves the quality of their recommendations and tailors your playlist to suit your taste. To help you track down the new music you’re hearing, most online radio stations display the currently playing artist, album, and song title, and links to acquire the music online.

Despite Elvis Costello’s claim that “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” online music blogs have given way to an explosion of compelling music reviews. Today’s online music writers can even embed music clips (often full songs) in their reviews to help get their point across.

In particular, Hype Machine tops our list of online music blogs because it aggregates the best work of many smaller music blogs and emphasizes hearing new music as much as reading about it.

Hype Machine scrapes the Internet's music blogs for hot new content and includes streaming audio previews.

If you’re music-savvy friends aren’t techie enough for something like Last.fm, don’t sweat it–you use these sites to find strangers with similar music tastes and listen to other songs they tend to like.

As the name implies, Concert.tv offers streaming concert videos. They're not all winners, but some of these performances will give you the shivers (in a good way). Click to enlarge.

(Credit:
Hype Machine)

Recommended: Last.fm, iLike
Also see:
iMeem, Blip.fm

NEW YORK–New York Mayor Michael P. Bloomberg wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted Gotham to be a true global technology hub, and not just because municipal broadcast station NYC TV won its very first Webby Award this year.

(Credit:
Caroline McCarthy/CNET News.com)

Referring to his experience at the helm of the finance information giant that still bears his name, he said, “My company never would have been remotely as successful if we had tried to put it in any other city.”

There is currently $2 million in the NYC Seed coffer.

Internet Week has been organized by the mayor’s Office for Film, Theater, and Broadcasting, helmed by Katherine Oliver, whose experience in pulling more TV and film companies into the city led Bloomberg to select her for Internet Week and beyond. “I challenged her to do the same thing in technology,” Bloomberg said.

New York's tech elite mingle at Gracie Mansion after a press conference by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

At a press conference Monday evening, Bloomberg–himself a veteran of tech entrepreneurship–announced the debut of NYC Seed, a venture firm for early stage technology companies in the city. The event at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, kicked off Internet Week New York, a citywide festival of conferences, parties, and other events promoting the city’s digital industries.

NYC Seed, which will provide up to $200,000 of investment into New York-based technology start-ups, is a public-private partnership between the New York City Economic Development Corp. the New York City Investment Fund, the Partnership for New York City’s economic development arm, Polytechnic University, the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation, and the Industrial and Technology Assistance Corp. It will be headquartered at the Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University’s start-up incubator.

Calling the city “an exciting place, a challenging place, and perhaps most importantly, the city most welcoming to immigrants,” Bloomberg hailed the diversity of New York and its possibilities as a hub for technology in addition to fashion, entertainment, finance, and media. “We accept each other in ways that I don’t think happens anyplace else.”

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin weren’t the only ones duking it out on Washington University’s campus last week. So were two punching robots created by engineering students at the school and appropriately marked for the occasion with photos of the VP candidates affixed to their steel heads.

(Credit:
Karren Knowlton)

Cordova said last week’s VP debate marked the first political battle for the rock-’em sock-’em robot toys, which have appeared at an annual spring festival on campus and also make their rounds at local schools as part of an engineering outreach by the creators.

Students took turns manning the red and blue robots, whose arms operate via pulleys attached to straps. Two cables connect to a control bar, which can be pointed back and forth to make the bot move right and left. A good punch to the opponent’s chest causes its spring-loaded head to fall off, which nets the aggressor a point.

The bots will not be making the trek to Nashville’s Belmont University for Tuesday’s second presidential debate (be sure to catch CBS News’ live Webcast on our site), and are instead getting some much-needed rest after last week’s melee.

Washington University engineering student Lee Cordova (left) looks on as his punching bots, posing as the vice presidential candidates, fight it out.

(Credit:
Karren Knowlton)

“Someone complained that there were no third-party candidates,” said Lee Cordova, an undergraduate in biomedical engineering who built the bots with fellow engineering undergrads Matt Watkins and Sam Wight.

The bots, which are made of machine parts, did battle on the main courtyard of the St. Louis campus for about six hours Thursday as the candidates prepped for the much-anticipated faceoff inside. Not to be left out, the presidential candidates got a swing, too, with John McCain and Barack Obama’s mugs getting swapped in and attached to the heads with magnets for matches of their own.

“Little kids love to play with them,” Cordova said. “I think we inspire new engineers.”

Cordova was quick to point out that the 1 1/2-year-old red and blue bots had recently been retrofitted to make them more equal in capability, ensuring, in essence, a non-partisan pairing. Nonetheless, “we actually kept track and the blue did a little better than the red,” (the blue, naturally, being Biden), Cordova reported.

“They’re back in the engineering school,” Cordova said. “We were pleasantly surprised nothing broke or wore down.”

New Intel processor badges with "die" accent

The new badges include a die (the chip minus the packaging) accent in the upper right hand corner, a prominent main brand (e.g., “Core”), and the modifier (e.g., “i7″).

(Credit:
Intel)

That may be a little easier said than done, however. Some consumers (but not including “tech savvy” Giampaolo, of course) will still need help from the sales person to decipher the badging. A daunting challenge in the case of consumer laptops, which are typically plastered with a hodgepodge of stickers from Intel, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, AMD’s ATI graphics chip unit, and other companies.

Intel has also instituted a star system that rates chips from five stars (best performance in class) to one star (lowest performance). “So when a consumer goes into a Best Buy store they can distinguish between Centrino, Core, Celeron, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad,” said Intel spokesman Bill Calder.

(Credit:
Intel)

The Atom processor will not get a modifier. In the future, the Nehalem server processor, currently branded only as “Xeon” with a letter and number suffix, may also get new branding to make it more readily identifiable as part of the Nehalem architecture like its desktop sibling the Core i7, Calder said.

Intel is in the process of moving to a “pretty aggressive brand simplification plan,” Calder said. “When we launched Core i7, we said we’re moving to a single primary client brand, which is Core. We’re moving in that direction,” he said.

Intel's new star rating system

Intel has revamped its processor badging and rating system. Consumers are the main target, though business systems will get new badging too.

Google.org will also invest $4 million in two separate “tranches” into Potter Drilling, which is making drilling products designed for hard-rock environments like granite. The technology can also be used for carbon capture and storage and nuclear waste storage.

Mixing water and hot rocks

The two companies Google is investing in–AltaRock Energy and Potter Drilling–focus specifically on so-called enhanced geothermal technology.

Meanwhile, Southern Methodist University’s Geothermal Lab will get a $489,521 grant to study the size and distribution of geothermal energy resources in North America.

Google is putting $6.25 million into AltaRock Energy, part of a larger $26.5 million second round of investment. First round investors included high-profile
green-tech venture capital firms Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

For a discussion about Google.org’s geothermal investment and the growing interest in clean tech, see the Daily Debrief video.

Google is also said to have been in discussions with Israeli geothermal company Ormat Technologies.

Reicher said enhanced geothermal system technology “hasn’t received the attention it merits.” Google.org is pressing for policies and commercial investment to better encourage EGS development.

The U.S. Department of Energy says that these advanced techniques can dramatically increase geothermal potential–by 40 times.

(Credit:
Google Earth)

AltaRock Energy is looking to develop a cost-effective method for pumping water underground and recuperating it. It plans to launch a pilot project and is targeting utilities in Western U.S. states that have renewable energy mandates.

While geothermal power plants are now in the Western U.S., the MIT study found that large-scale geothermal power production can be done in some parts of the Eastern U.S.

Google has invested in solar thermal companies eSolar and BrightSource Energy as well as wind company Makini Power. It has also installed a large 1.6-megawatt solar array, established a plug-in hybrid station at its headquarters, and spearheaded energy-efficient computing programs like Climate Savers.

The move is part of Google.org’s RE<C (shorthand for Renewable Energy Less than Coal), an initiative with the goal of producing one gigawatt of electricity–larger than a typical coal-fired power plant–through renewable sources.

“EGS (enhanced geothermal systems) could be the ‘killer app’ of the energy world. It has the potential to deliver vast quantities of power 24/7 and be captured nearly anywhere on the planet. And it would be a perfect complement to intermittent sources like solar and wind,” Dan Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google.org, said in a statement.

The latest investments are meant to spur development of geothermal, which a Massachusetts of Institute of Technology study last year found was underutilized. Like fossil fuel power plants, geothermal plants can supply electricity during peak times, while wind and solar have limitations in this regard.

Through its philanthropic arm Google.org, the Internet giant will invest in two geothermal technology start-up companies and give a university grant to study the potential of geothermal resources.

In an FAQ, Google.org said that development of enhanced geothermal systems means that renewable energy “could conceivably be deployed almost anywhere, and is essentially limitless in supply.”

Google is investing $10 million in “enhanced” geothermal systems–essentially technology for tapping underground heat–which it says is one of most promising forms of renewable energy.

Typically, geothermal plants, which are in the Western U.S., tap into existing wells of hot water or steam thousands of feet underground. The retrieved hot water or steam turns a steam turbine to make electricity.

Heat underfoot: a Google Earth representation of geothermal resources. Click the image for a larger view.

Enhanced geothermal technology pumps water underground to crack hot rocks. The heated water or steam is captured to turn a turbine and then pumped back down underground.