Lisa Evans

The mobile phone market globally turned a corner in the third quarter, with shipments by manufacturers increasing by 5.6% over the previous quarter, market research firm IDC reported. In all, 287.1 million cell phones and smartphones were shipped in the third quarter, down 6% from the 305.4 million shipped in the third quarter of 2008. Shipments do not necessarily result in sales to end user customers, but indicate that carriers and other retailers are expecting to make sales by ordering from manufacturers. The results for the third quarter were still down by 6% from the same quarter in 2008, but the quarter-to-quarter growth was taken as the first sign of improvement since the onset of the economic downturn, the analyst firm said Thursday. In the third quarter, various sales channels promoted older devices at lower prices, creating demand that pushed up shipment volumes, said Ramon Llamas, an IDC analyst.

New smartphones, such as the Droid and the Cliq from Motorola which are both based on the Android operating system, are appearing in November in the U.S., for example, IDC noted. Now that we have moved into the fourth quarter, vendors are setting the stage for further gains by launching their flagship devices to meet pent-up demand, he said. Will Stofega, another IDC analyst, said that the economy is expected to make a slower recovery than many predicted a year ago, but mobile phone manufacturers should still increase their spending on research and development to stay competitive. Western Europe showed strong signs of recovery, with increases in all devices year-over-year. IDC assessed market performance in various geographies, noting that North America posted mixed results, with the U.S. showing gains in the quarter, but with Canada declining for the third straight quarter for all mobile phones, even as smartphone shipments increased. IDC did not provide specific numbers for various geographies, however.

Mexico has experienced an increase in taxes for telecom services, personal taxes and value-added taxes, all of which have a negative impact on mobile phone sales. Latin America and Asia/Pacific performed weaker than other areas. Market leader Nokia once again led for all types of mobile phone shipments, with 108.5 million shipped, a decline of 8% over third quarter 2008. The Finnish company took 37.8% share of the market. Samsung finished second with 21% market share; LG Electronics finished third with 11%; Sony Ericsson was fourth with 4.9%; and Motorola was fifth with 4. All other manufacturers combined to account for 59 million mobile phones shipped, or 20.6% of the market.

In a contentious court battle launched by record label EMI, the brazen owner of online retailer BlueBeat has begun complying with a new court order to stop selling Beatles music online, after offering a quirky defense that he owns the copyright to the songs at issue. Risan contended that he authored the songs using "psycho-acoustic simulations." These simulations "are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance," he messaged. In a message sent from his iPhone earlier this week, BlueBeat owner Hank Risan told his attorney that he - rather than EMI or Apple Corps - is the rightful owner of the Beatles tunes for sale on his Web site, according to a report in paidContent.org. But on Wednesday, a Los Angeles judge rejected BlueBeat's assertions that it is selling only re-recorded versions of the songs.

Ruling that BlueBeat hasn't provided enough evidence to back up its claims, the judge came out with an injunction banning the company from streaming or selling tracks from the Beatles and other EMI music artists. Instead, the judge found in favor of EMI, a record label that argued in court that BlueBeat is "thumbing their noses" at EMI and Apple. As of Friday at about 9:15 a.m. Eastern time, BlueBeat has indeed stopped selling the unauthorized downloads of the Beatles tracks, previously hawked at bargain basement pricing of 25 cents a track. Clicking on "Buy" prompts a message that the tracks aren't available for purchase. The tunes are still visible on the site.

Risan's claims rest on a section of the Copyright Act - often applied to music by tribute bands - exempting recordings that "imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording," according to an account by the BBC. Yet the Beatles tracks might possibly return to BlueBeat at some point, and with court approval. Meanwhile, EMI, the owner of the original Beatles recordings, has been in longtime talks with Apple Corps - the company set up by the Beatles to look after their catalog - about arranging some kind of legitimate deal for selling the tunes online. On a date set for November 20, a court will hear arguments presented by both sides.

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. has hung a "for sale" sign on its door, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal . Brocade declined to comment on the report. Brocade is said to be valued at about $3.2 billion. Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp. have shown interest in buying Brocade, which make switches for routing data storage traffic, according to the report, which added that an agreement is not imminent. The company reported a loss of $21 million on sales of about $493.3 million in the its 2009 fiscal year's third quarter that ended Aug. 1. San Jose-based Brocade has about 2,800 employees.

If true, he added, the timing isn't surprising. Brocade late last year acquired Foundry Networks Inc. whose IP networking technology gives it a leg up in the server networking market, and puts it in a stronger competitive position rival Cisco Systems Inc. "The question is: 'do the server vendors want to increase the competitive pressure against Cisco because Cisco is now in the server business?'" said Brian Babineau, an analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass. "I think that's what makes Brocade more attractive, and you can consider Oracle in the server business as well because they plan to own Sun ." Babineau said he has heard rumors as recently as last week about Brocade putting itself on the block. Over the past seven or so years, switch maker Cisco has added a line of storage switches and routers that make it a heavy player in the storage business. Earlier this year, Cisco, EMC and others said they jointly developed a new storage blade server to be sold by Cisco. Just last month, it was reported that Cisco and EMC Corp. were in talks to create a technology services arm.

Brocade has also been making moves to attract new sales channels by signing reseller agreements with EMC rivals IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and quasi-competitor Dell Inc. Dell's acquisition of storage vendor EqualLogic two years ago likely placed a strain on its reseller relationship with EMC. Babineau said Hewlett-Packard may be the most appropriate suitor for Brocade because it has an established networking and a storage portfolio of products, and because Cisco is increasingly competitive with HP . "It's very logical. Dell has increased its presence in business-class data storage systems over the past few years, originally through reseller deals with EMC and recently with its own line of data storage products that are moving from entry-level to midrange. If you look at the timing, it's almost like a perfect storm for Brocade," Babineau said. "Exiting a Foundry integration process, potential uptick in IT spending starting shortly, and big IT companies wanting to compete against Cisco with Brocade being one of the only viable candidates in that market." "This is not about storage, but about networking," he added. Another source, who asked not to be named, said that HP executive Dave Donatelli , who had headed EMC's storage unit until earlier this year, could help HP position Brocade's storage offerings against those of his former firm. "I just think Donatelli has some real institutional knowledge after selling a good portion of Brocade's products when he was with EMC," the source said.

ICANN's approval of non-Latin character domains undoubtedly is a game-changing decision in the history of the World Wide Web. Here are a few pros and cons to consider as we move away from the traditional ASCII based-Web. With scheduled to start popping up in the middle of next year, many people are debating if this digital support for more distinctly international sites balances with potential security threats and fragmentation of the Internet.

Pro: World Wide Web Supporting World Wide Language Let's face it; millions of Internet users speak languages that aren't written using Roman characters. The transition will begin on November 16 when countries can apply for country codes in their own unique character sets. "The first countries that participate will not only be providing valuable information of the operation of IDNs in the domain name system, they are also going to help to bring the first of billions more people online - people who never use Roman characters in their daily lives," ICANN CEO and President Rod Beckstrom said in a statement. Allowing Web sites to have domains that use other characters will make Web addresses more recognizable to some and make the Web more accessible to millions of new users. Con: Country Codes are Only the Beginning Generic domains such as .com, .org and .net aren't open to international characters yet, but could be in the next couple of years. Pro: Country Codes are Only the Beginning If done properly, opening generic domains to international characters could be a good thing. If ICANN decides to open generic domains without extending rights to existing URL holders, international companies and brands might find themselves purchasing URLs in multiple languages to protect the use of their name, points out PC World Tech Inciter writer Tech Inciter David Coursey.

If International corporations were granted rights to the .com URLs they already possess it could spell an end to selecting a region before entering the site. It would also open doors for smaller Web sites that are just interested in serving a particular language group. For instance, going to intel.com could lead to the English version of the site, while using a Japanese, Russian, or Korean suffix would take you to a version of the site with that language. Con: A lesson from 1337 h4ck3r$ Expanding beyond Roman characters also increases potential for site rip-offs that use homoglyphs, characters with identical or indistinguishable shapes. Con and Pro: No Latin Base Emphasis Apparently homoglyphs are drawing some attention at ICANN. Languages that use accented Latin characters aren't being supported at this time, The CBC Reports.

This already occurs to some degree (for instance pointing your browser to google.com takes you to a different site than go0gle.com) but different languages might have characters that are identical to characters in other languages. They attribute the lack of support to security concerns that accented characters could lead to phishing scams because, "internet users might not at first see the difference between, for example, 'google.com' and 'goógle.com.'" This is bad news for French, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese speakers - all four languages use accented characters. As fellow PC World writer Jacqueline Emigh pointed out, it would be next to impossible to produce a keyboard that could support characters from every language under the sun. But, if ICANN is aware of security concerns that would arise from including these languages, maybe they have some sort of anti-homoglyph trick up their sleeve for other languages, (here's looking at you, Cyrillic.) Con: Keyboards and Restrictive Access Adding support for 100,000 international characters would make traditional keyboards insufficient input devices for accessing the entire Internet. Virtual keyboards and language packs could possibly help alleviate the problem for some people, but there wouldn't be an easy fix. ICANN released this video with its announcement, hoping to encapsulate the potential for opening up international character domains.

Today Google released Picasa 3.5, an updated version of its free photo editing software. The most notable addition in this release is an enhanced version of Picasa's people-tagging feature, previously only available in Picasa Web Albums. With Picasa you can edit and organize your images, and sync and share them with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo-sharing site. Other improvements include Google Maps integration for faster and easier geotagging, a smarter keyword-tagging interface, and more importing options.

You can then go through and add name tags one at a time or in bulk. When you first launch Picasa 3.5, it scans all of the images on your computer and groups similar faces. If you already use name tags in your Picasa Web Albums, you can log into your Google account and download that information to the Picasa application (Tools-> Download Name Tags from Picasa Web Albums). Logging in also means you can use your Google contacts list when tagging people. Geotagging is much easier in 3.5. In the Places panel, a Google map displays the locations of your geotagged photos. Picasa will automatically create an album for each person you tag.

To add location information to a photos, you can search directly in the panel and add a pin, or drag and drop an image or images onto the map from your library. It's now possible to upload images directly to Picasa Web Albums from your camera, iPhone, or memory card. Picasa's import features have also been greatly improved. Before importing you can choose which images to include or exclude. This update is for both Mac and PCs, and is the first Mac version of Picasa to drop the beta label.

For example, you could opt to upload all of the images to your hard drive, but only starred images to the Web.