eBay's PayPal Scoops Up Fraud Sciences

On Monday, eBay announced that its PayPal payment-services unit would acquire Fraud Services, a privately held Israeli company, for $169 million. Based in Tel Aviv, Fraud Sciences is a venture-capital-backed startup formed in April 2006, specializing in online risk assessment. Fraud Sciences' technology is designed to ferret out fraudulent credit card purchases by verifying that the person making the transaction is in fact the cardholder. The company's technique, known as "identity proofing," builds on existing behavioral and pattern-matching tactics that many online retailers and payments processors already use to detect fraud. "At PayPal we use the same type of tools, and we feel that Fraud Sciences technology is going to be very complementary," PayPal spokeswoman Sarah Gorman told InternetNews.com. Gorman said that Fraud Sciences' technology will build on what PayPal calls its neural detection technique, which approaches identity verification from the buyer and seller side. "It literally gets smarter with every transaction," Gorman said. Fraud Sciences has claimed that its system is 99.9 percent accurate, significantly reducing acceptance rates of fraudulent transactions, as well as the false negatives that reject legitimate purchases. The technology works by evaluating a composite of the purchaser's digital history to ensure that he is both a real person and the authorized cardholder. Beyond that, Gorman won't say what's in the secret sauce. The acquisition makes good on the promise that President and CEO-in-waiting John Donahoe made on last week's earnings call. Donahoe said that he would move aggressively to improve the safety and reliability of the shopping experience at the e-commerce giant. Risk tools relating to identity verification will improve the security of online transactions executed through PayPal, but eBay's payment-services division has run into other types of fraud over the years, particularly phishing. Gorman said that the acquisition of Fraud Sciences is just the first of many security-related enhancements that eBay will make this year. Tuesday morning, eBay is expected to make a series of announcements at the annual e-Commerce Forum in Washington, D.C. Some could involve other security aspects, such as phishing and counterfeit protection, Gorman said. eBay is also expected to announce pricing changes to its listing fees, fulfilling another promise made by executives last week. eBay said that it expects the acquisition of Fraud Sciences to close within the next 30 days, and that it should not significantly alter its 2008 financial guidance. Fraud Sciences will continue to operate out of Tel Aviv, and most of the company's employees will be offered jobs with PayPal, Gorman said. Fraud Sciences' executive team will work closely with PayPal during the transition.

Stocks Fall Despite Strong Earnings

Better than expected results from a number of top technology names boosted stocks in the early going Friday, but sellers soon took over to send the market sharply lower. Despite extreme volatility, Wall Street managed to finish the week with small gains in the Dow and S%26amp;P and just a 0.6% loss in the Nasdaq, as the Federal Reserve's biggest emergency rate cut since 1982 saved stocks from much steeper losses. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Broadcom were among the names posting better than expected results late Thursday. All opened sharply higher Friday morning but ended the day mixed, with Microsoft and Juniper lower and Sun and Broadcom posting small gains. The selling started as the S%26amp;P 500 neared the 1370 level, the bottom of a 15-month trading range the index broke down out of last week, as traders began lowering their expectations for more rate cuts when the Federal Reserve meets next week. Expectations are for a one-quarter to one-half point rate cut, less than this week's three-quarter point emergency rate cut. E*Trade was a big gainer, up 8% on a restructuring plan, and Microchip Technology and Compuware were higher on their results. InsWeb jumped 29% after finishing its first year of profitability. Motorola rallied 6% despite an S%26amp;P credit rating cut, as the company rebounded from an 18% drubbing earlier this week. Synaptics, PMC-Sierra and Integrated Devices fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 34 to 2336, the S%26amp;P fell 21 to 1330, and the Dow tumbled 171 to 12,207. Volume declined to 4.92 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.65 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-14 margin on the NYSE, and 16-14 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 73% on the NYSE, and 72% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 21-84 on the NYSE, and 42-114 on the Nasdaq.

Microsoft Gives Tech Stocks Reason to Rally

After leading the tech sector higher during the day, Microsoft kept the rally going after hours Thursday with another quarter of better than expected results and guidance. Microsoft shares rose 4% in late trading on top of a 4% rise during the day after the company posted a 30% sales increase to $16.37 billion, beating out the $15.95 billion that analysts expected, according to Thomson Financial. Microsoft's earnings of 50 cents a share were four cents better than expected, and the company's current quarter and full-year guidance were also as good or better than Wall Street analysts anticipated. Microsoft cited strong sales of Windows Vista for the results. The report was welcome news for a tech sector reeling from disappointing results from bellwethers like Intel and Apple, and added to a dramatic two-day rally on hopes for an economic turnaround. Juniper Networks was another big gainer in late trading, rising 8% on a 73% jump in earnings, and that coming on top of a 7% rise ahead of the report. The latest good news for the economy was a quick agreement by congressional leaders on a $145 billion economic stimulus package, the latest government effort to rescue the market and economy from the subprime mortgage market meltdown. eBay was left out of Thursday's market rally, falling 6% after lowering its current quarter outlook and announcing the retirement of CEO Meg Whitman. Qualcomm and Symantec were big winners after beating estimates, up 10% each, and Nokia soared 12% on its results, a sharp contrast to Motorola's 18% drop a day earlier. F5 and LSI rose more than 20% each on their earnings news, while Mercury Computing fell 32% on its results. AT%26T shed 3% after the company met estimates. Internet stocks were strong, with Yahoo, Google and Amazon up 5% or more, and HP, Dell and Cisco gained 4% each. The Nasdaq rose 44 to 2360, the S%26P gained 13 to 1352, and the Dow rose 108 to 12,378. Volume declined to 5.7 billion shares on the NYSE, and 3.05 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 21-12 margin on the NYSE, and 17-13 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 64% on the NYSE, and 73% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 16-79 on the NYSE, and 43-130 on the Nasdaq.

HP-UX Version 12? Don't Hold Your Breath

Some pieces of software seem to jump version numbers with every minor revision, while others seem to never change. In the case of HP's flagship Unix offering HP-UX 11i, HP is in no rush to move to version 12. That doesn't mean that the company isn't continuing to improve its Unix offering, however. Yet while the product receives updates, it won't get a new number in the near future because HP wants to communicate that applications will continue to run smoothly on any 11-series release, even on the newest versions. "If we move to a version 12, that would be a flag that something has changed and that users and developers need to recode or re-compile," Brian Cox, worldwide director of BCS software marketing, HP told InternetNews.com. "As it is, you can take any application from the very first HP-UX version 11 up to the recent HP-UX 11i Update 3 and it will run." "Our customers and partners hold compatibility of their applications to be at such regard that we don't want to violate that trust," Cox said. Though HP has shied away from moving its major version numbers forward, it hasn't stopped from putting out major releases. The most recent major update of HP-UX 11i was Update 3, which was released nearly a year ago in February 2007. HP's updates also have lengthy supported lifespans, with Update 3 set to be supported by HP until 2017. Cox explained that with HP-UX 11i version 1 and Update 2, the emphasis was on scalability. With Update 3, HP started building out the foundation for virtualization. In Update 4, which isn't expected until at least 2010, the plan is to provide better manageability of virtualized environments and even higher uptime levels than currently possible, Cox said. HP has also been busily producing interim enhancement releases between major updates. The interim releases, which come out every six months, provide bug fixes and other small tweaks. Following the Update 3 release in February 2007, HP issued a interim update in fall, codenamed "Vitality," Cox said. "Then, coming out this spring, we have another enhancement codenamed 'Versatility,' and then six months after that, the update is codenamed 'Vibrancy,'" Cox said. "We'll continue to march that forward until version 4, which will be a major new release." HP's release schedule has entailed some massive changes for the operating system. With the HP-UX 11i release, for instance, HP embraced the new Unix03 standard which aims to provide application portability across Unix03-certified operating systems. To date, IBM's AIX 5L V5.3, Sun Solaris 10 as well as Apple's OS X version 10.5 (AKA "Leopard") have been certified to be Unix03-compliant. HP's joining the ranks marked a significant development not just for HP-UX -- for which Unix03 was just the latest in a long wave of Unix certification efforts over the years -- but for the industry. "Standardization for the API's makes it easier for software developers to write and port code and it lowers their cost of maintenance," Cox said. "It's in classic contrast with the mainframes of the past where portability didn't exist."

Thank Warner Bros For Blu-ray Sales Spike?

There was much celebrating and gloating from the Blu-ray community across the Internet this week as weekly numbers from market researcher NPD Group seemed to indicate the near-even split in sales between Blu-ray and HD DVD had become completely one-sided. However, NPD cautions not to start dancing on HD DVD's grave. First off, HD doesn't have a grave yet, secondly, one week of numbers do not a trend make. Blu-ray and HD DVD are two competing formats battling it out for the chance to replace your DVD player as the next generation home media playback format. Both are fairly similar, with the only real difference being capacity. A single layer HD DVD disc holds 15GB of data while a single layer Blu-ray disc holds 25GB. HD DVD was developed by Toshiba while Blu-ray is a Sony creation. The two have been battling for the market for almost a year now, with the slight edge going to Blu-ray but not enough to put away HD DVD. Then it all seemed over in a flash when on the eve of CES, Warner Bros announced it would go exclusively Blu-ray. The HD DVD Consortium cancelled its CES events while the Blu-ray camp spent the entire conference gloating. The figures were not officially disclosed by NPD, a subscriber with access to the numbers let them out. NPD doesn't disclose weekly numbers because it says such short term data can give an inaccurate picture. "Weekly data can be very volatile and is designed to be used tactically," Stephen Baker, vice president of NPD, explained to InternetNews.com. "Because of that, brands and retailers can do all sorts of things in one week to change the direction of a category for a week. That's typically not a hard thing to do." However, Baker admitted he'd never seen a change this bad. For the week ending January 5, 2008, Blu-ray Disc player sales were at 15,257 units, while HD DVD player sales were at 14,558 units, for a near 50-50 split. One week later, after the Warner decision to stop supporting both Blu-ray and HD DVD and support Blu-ray only, the numbers went totally lopsided. Blu-ray sales were 21,770 units, a 42 percent gain, to HD's 1,758, an 88 percent plunge. On top of that Nielsen VideoScan reported the top selling high definition DVDs for the week of January 13, and it was entirely Blu-ray titles, with the critically-praised film "3:10 To Yuma" topping the list and three from the "Harry Potter" series making up the listing. Those "Harry Potter" titles are also available on HD DVD, as they are Warner titles and Warner does not go exclusive until the summer, but it reflects the difference in unit sales between the formats. "It was obviously a big shift, and I'm not saying %26#91;the Warner decision%26#93; didn't have anything to do with it," said Baker. "It likely did but there were other things to do with it as well." The following week, Toshiba made drastic cuts to its HD DVD players, slashing the prices by half, and that data is not in yet. Baker said NPD doesn't plan on releasing it, but added with a laugh "who knows what ends up out there again," in reference to DVD fan sites. Van Baker, research director with Gartner, said he was inclined to think the Warner deal did cause the huge shift. "It all depends on what films have been released recently and what promotions took place," he said. "That said, the Warner announcement and Microsoft comment, when they came out and said they could shift to a Blu-ray based Xbox easily, kinda pulled the rug out from under HD DVD." Microsoft's Xbox 360 console has an add-on HD DVD drive for $149. The company was asked at CES if a similar Blu-ray drive would be possible and company officials said it was easy enough to do. It just didn't say it would make a drive any time soon. Van Baker doesn't think HD DVD owners are abandoning their players, but it might be making people get off the fence. "What could be giving rise to this is some people who have been reticent, maybe they have a PS3 in the house, are now saying 'oh it's over now, I can buy movies.' So people who may have been on the fence are feeling justified in buying movies now." He said his bet is that the Blu-ray/HD format war "will be over by this Christmas. But we'll have to wait and see."

Zend Expands PHP Development and Deployment

For Zend Technologies, PHP is a lot more than just an open source programming language. Zend, the lead commercial backer behind PHP, is pushing its vision of PHP as a prominent platform for development and deployment of mission-critical applications with a pair of new products. Zend Studio for Eclipse is Zend's new PHP IDE(define), and Zend Platform 3.6 is the latest release of the company's enterprise-deployment platform for PHP. The new releases are part of the PHP vendor's strategy to move from point products to a complete suite for the application life cycle, as PHP continues to makes inroads against both Java and .NET. "When our customers build mission applications they take the whole Zend solution, since we deal with the whole life cycle from development to staging to production," Andi Gutmans, Zend's CTO, told InternetNews.com. "So they use Zend Core for their certified PHP, they use Zend Platform for getting performance, scalability and reliability for their production servers and then they use Zend Framework across the board to get the right methodology and best practices," Gutmans added. The Zend Platform got under way in 2005 with the last major release version 3.0 in February 2007. In the new version, 3.6, Zend has focused on further improving the performance of PHP deployments. "Performance management starts when a user clicks on a URL and until they get what they're looking for," Gutmans noted. "So we mapped that whole process and looked at where we could improve." One of the key improvements in Platform 3.6 is the ability to cache model view controller%26#150;based applications, which are increasingly popular in framework deployments. Gutmans explained that with the new MVC caching capabilities, instead of caching on a file basis Zend Platform can now cache on a URL basis. Additionally, Zend Platform allowed for high-performance sites to cache in shared memory, which further improves PHP delivery performance. While Zend Platform is available for both Linux and Windows Servers, Gutmans commented that the 3.6 release is geared toward Linux. "We're now working with Microsoft toward Windows Server 2008 and working on a road map for how to work with it," Gutmans said. Zend and Microsoft have a working partnership to make PHP run well on Windows platforms. On the development side, Zend's IDE version of Zend Studio has long been primarily used on Windows, and that's not expected to change with the new release of Zend Studio for Eclipse. The new Zend Studio for Eclipse is the first official release from Zend of its IDE based on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PHT) project. Gutmans noted that Zend had more than 15,000 beta testers for Zend Studio for Eclipse, and the feedback received helped to make the final release a more stable product. Because the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, developers can now leverage the full Eclipse ecosystem of plug-ins to further expand the capabilities of the IDE. While Zend is pushing its new Eclipse-based IDE, it's not abandoning its non-Eclipse Zend Studio 5.5 customers. Zend has not officially set an end-of-life date yet for the non-Eclipse Zend Studio and has pledged to keep it current for minor fixes in a maintenance mode. "I think right now we have a very solid story for business-critical applications," Gutmans said. "What we're seeing today at Zend is that it's changing the way we work with customers," he added. According to Gutmans, the company set out on this path two years when it began working with Eclipse and Framework. "It's a strategy we've been seeing the benefit of," Gutmans noted. That's not to say there still isn't work for Zend to do to further improve PHP development and deployment. "I'm the CTO, so I always think there should be more that we should be doing," Gutmans said. "I want to do more around RIA (Rich internet applications), methodologies and more around business critical deployments. There is always a lot of work for Zend."

Yahoo, T-Mobile Team on Wireless Advertising in U.K.

As Yahoo continues to position a greater share of its business in the mobile space, it has formed another partnership with a major wireless carrier. On Thursday Yahoo announced that it has signed an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile to provide display advertising on the carrier's Web 'n' Walk Internet service in the United Kingdom. "We are focused on extending our leadership in both display advertising and in mobile services, and this new partnership demonstrates our continued momentum," a Yahoo spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. Under the agreement, Yahoo will become the exclusive provider of graphical ads on the T-Mobile Internet service in the U.K. The two companies expect the ads to go live in the first half of this year. In November 2006, Yahoo brokered a similar ad partnership in the U.K. with Vodafone. Together, the deals give Yahoo exclusive advertising rights to two of Britain's top five wireless carriers. The advertising deal is the first major news from Yahoo on the mobile front since the first week of January, when the company outlined several initiatives for enhancing Web content on wireless devices. The announcement included a mobile-widget program aimed at bringing in more content and Web applications from third parties. "We're committed to creating the best and richest mobile experience for all consumers, making it extremely personalized to their individual style and needs while opening up the Yahoo mobile platform to allow anyone to participate," Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang said in his keynote address at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Last March Yahoo signaled its commitment to the wireless market with the launch of the Mobile Publisher Services platform, a suite of services aimed at brokering deals between publishers and advertisers looking to cash in on the fast-growing mobile sector. Mobile deals don't end with advertising, however. Yahoo, long hailed as the portal king, has signed numerous agreements with wireless carriers in Europe, Latin America and Asia to make its OneSearch the default home page for subscribers who surf the Web on their handset. Yahoo does not currently have exclusive advertising or content partnerships with any wireless carrier in the United States, but the company has been working actively with all major providers to stake a claim in the U.S. market.

Mandriva and Turbolinux Join Forces to Unite Linux

Mandriva Linux and Turbolinux are collaborating to create a common base for their respective Linux distributions. The joint effort will be called Manbo-Labs and involves developers from France, Japan and Brazil. While the Manbo-Labs effort is new, tying together multiple Linux distributions with a common base is not. In fact, Turbolinux and Conectiva Linux were part of the 2002 UnitedLinux effort to build a common Linux base. Conectiva has since merged with Mandrakesoft to form Mandriva. Novell and SCO (with its Caldera Linux product) were also part of the effort. UnitedLinux completely fell apart by 2004 for a number reasons, including the fact that SCO turned against Linux. According to Mandriva at least, the Manbo-Labs partnership is not a United Linux rehash. "The point of Manbo-Labs is not to create a common distribution but a common set of very low-level components like kernel, gcc, glibc and Xorg," Ann Nicolas, director of engineering at Mandriva, told InternetNews.com. "Putting together efforts, resources and experience is our common objective to make both distributions more competitive and efficient, as maintaining a complete base system needs quite a big amount of resources," she added. GCCand glibc are key infrastructure elements of an operational Linux system providing code compilation and code libraries. Xorg is a key foundation element for providing a GUI in Linux distributions. The Manbo effort will not be jointly working on the GNOME or KDE desktop layer that sits on top of Xorg. "Manbo-Labs work will benefit both on the desktop and the server side, as hardware support and management can be as tricky in server and desktop oriented distributions," Nicolas explained. Nicolas noted that the Manbo partnership is not about shared revenues; it's about shared development. She explained that Manbo is a joint financial effort to fund engineering dedicated to base system development. As part of the effort, Turbolinux and Mandriva are sharing developers in labs working on development, quality assurance and independent hardware vendor partnerships to certify the base system. "The main goal is to get concrete result as a set of common components that will improve quality and efficiency in Turbolinux and Mandriva," Nicholas said. "These components would have to be recognized by hardware manufacturers to help global certification and support." Although Turbolinux and Mandriva will share a common base, the Linux vendors have different views when it comes to Microsoft. In October 2007 Turbolinux and Microsoft signed a deal for interoperability and patent protection; Mandriva has no such agreement with Microsoft. In fact, Mandriva CEO Fran%26#231;ois Bancilhon is no friend of the company, recently issuing a public tirade against Microsoft and its competitive practices in Nigeria. Bancilhon has also written a blog post coming out strongly against Microsoft's patent protection. Nicolas commented that the Turbolinux partnership will not change anything in Mandriva's position regarding patents and proprietary software. The first Manbo-Labs release is expected this April, and it will be the base for the Mandriva Linux 2008 spring version.

Innovation on Macworld Expo Show Floor

SAN FRANCISCO %26#150; Maybe Macworld Expo should borrow a page from Apple and change its name. Last year, Apple changed its name from Apple Computer to simply Apple, Inc., reflecting its broader-than-Mac product portfolio. While there were plenty of Mac-related exhibitors at the annual show here this week, the exhibit floor was peppered with iPod, iPhone and iTouch-related products as well. Several products shown are designed to better integrate or help user's exchange data between Apple's different products. Eqinux previewed its TubeStick Hybrid, due out in February. The pocket-sized USB device is designed to bring digital and analog TV to Macs and PCs. The TubeStick includes two built-in receivers for watching free over the air digital HDTV as well as standard analog NTSC programs. It's priced at $129 with initial availability at the company's Web site. While there are plenty of TV receiver options for computer users, TubeStick adds community features. You can, for example, see what other users are watching and share comments while the shows are being broadcast. You can also schedule downloads using the system's electronic program guide and view them later on your iPhone or iPod. Nova media released FoneLink 1.5, a cell phone "companion" designed to facilitate the transfer of contact info from a non-Apple cell phone to a Mac and then onto an iPhone. The new release ($50, or free demo version includes a synchronization manager to sync contacts, dates, notes and bookmarks between a Mac and the cell phone. After the Fone2Phone has finished copying, iTunes can be used to sync and transfer the new data to an iPhone. "From one screen, everything is automatically copied," said Nova media spokesman Jan Fullemann. Ovolab showed off a new version of its unique Geophoto software for the Mac. Instead of organizing photos by name or other means, Geophoto lets you organize them by location by simply dragging images onto a world map or typing in the city, state or landmark name. The $19.99 software also has a social networking aspect, as it works with Yahoo's Flickr photo-sharing service, letting you see what other users are posting by clicking on specific geographical locations on the map. "You don't have to be connected to the Internet," Matteo da Pont, a software engineer with Ovolab, told InternetNews.com. But if you are connected, you can zoom into deeper levels down to street level." The Macworld Expo runs through January 18 and show organizers predict it will be the biggest in several years with over 400 exhibitors and over 50,000 people expected to attend.

Google's iGoogle Home Page Has New Themes

Google's come a long way from its famously sparse search page. Oh sure, the spartan look is still the default on Google's default search page, but the company's iGoogle personalized home page keeps getting more visual. Today, for example, Google announced further graphical extensions with the release of the iGoogle Themes API (define). With the API, developers can now create their own theme or background art for an iGoogle page. When it was launched last March, Google limited themes to a few it offered at the site. Now, borrowing a page from its Google Gadgets directory, Google is offering a Themes directory for users to post their work and share with others. As part of today's launch Google posted four very different custom themes from four designers. "Creating a theme is very simple; an XML file points to the image and there's support for dynamic themes that relate to the current time and geographic location," Jessica Ewing, senior product manager at Google, told InternetNews.com. "This is all about helping iGoogle users better connect with their page. There's a certain amount we can do, but by no means can we cover the unique artistic desires of all users." Ewing said iGoogle now has tens of millions of users worldwide. Certain elements of a Theme can't be changed, such as inclusion of the iGoogle logo. Ewing said Google takes fair use issues into account, but otherwise doesn't "editorialize" when approving Themes for the directory. Also, as with Gadgets, the Themes directory will soon include profile pages for developers available for users to see.

Mmmm ? Bacteria

By Elsa Youngsteadt
ScienceNOW Daily News
15 January 2008

When you eat a cup of yogurt, billions of bacteria make their way to your gut. Some researchers believe that these "probiotics" can be good for you, alleviating everything from bowel disease to allergies. Now, a team of researchers has shown that, at least in mice, supplementing food with a helping of "good" bacteria can cause profound metabolic changes, including some that may be linked to weight loss.

The human gut hosts 1000 species of microorganisms--more than a kilogram of cells in all. Recent studies indicate that this thriving ecosystem plays an important role in human health and may even contribute to obesity (ScienceNOW, 20 December 2006). Last year, Jeremy Nicholson, a biochemist at Imperial College London, and a team of researchers from Imperial College and the Nestl%26eacute; Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, showed that replacing mouse gut microbes with human microbes caused widespread metabolic changes in the mice (ScienceNOW, 23 May 2007). Nevertheless, scientists remained skeptical that probiotics could have a similar effect, because probiotic foods add only a few billion foreign microbes to a native population of tens of trillions.

In the new study, Nicholson's group returned to the mice harboring human gut microbes. The researchers supplemented the animals' diets with a solution containing one of two species of Lactobacillus bacteria, which are present in yogurt and baby formula. Control mice were given saline solution as a supplement.

After 2 weeks, the team measured the metabolic profiles of the mice, analyzing feces, urine, plasma, intestinal contents, and liver tissue. The results, published in the 15 January issue of Molecular Systems Biology, show that although the composition of gut microbes changed only slightly in the three groups of mice, the animals' metabolic profiles--including various markers for blood cholesterol and amino acid levels in the liver--were profoundly different.

Of particular note, says Nicholson, was the effect of probiotics on bile acids, which help the small intestine absorb fat. Probiotics diminished the function of the acids, Nicholson notes, which may make it harder for the animals to absorb fat--and thus should keep them slim. As for how a relatively small number of foreign microbes could have such a dramatic effect, Nicholson believes it results from communication with the native bugs. "Gut bacteria talk to each other," he says, so despite their relatively modest numbers, "probiotics have a huge effect on what those other bugs do."

Although he cautions that the gut is simpler in the experimental mice than in humans, Glenn Gibson, a microbiologist at Reading University in the U.K., calls the work "very thorough" and says that it foretells an exciting and potentially revolutionary future in which microbial interventions can correct metabolic abnormalities. "We can't change human genetics," he notes, "but if we can alter metabolism with minor changes in gut bacteria, that's very exciting."

Related sites

Science article on guts of chocolate lovers

Harvard University on health benefits of probiotics

Top Ten Intranets Dare To Differ

The virtual envelopes have been opened and the top ten winners announced this week for Nielsen Norman Group's annual Ten Best Designed Intranets competition. NNG, a well-known usability consulting firm, said the eighth annual competition attracted about a hundred entries worldwide. The ten winners included five organizations from the U.S., with the remainder from outside the country. With few notable exceptions, the ten winners are mostly large companies. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Bank of America, U.S.
• Bankinter, Spain
• Barnes %26 Noble, U.S.
• British Airways, U.K.
• Campbell Soup, U.S.
• Coldwell Banker Real Estate, U.S.
• IKEA North America Service, U.S.
• Ministry of Transport, New Zealand
• New South Wales Department of Primary Industries, Australia
• SAP, Germany

NNG's director of research, Kara Pernice, said corporate intranets have improved significantly since it held the first contest. "CIOs and the rest of management have come to realize how important intranets are, which is really smart and long overdue," Pernice told InternetNews.com. "A bad intranet wastes employees' time and is a missed opportunity to help with knowledge transfer and getting people up to speed with what they need to know at the company." Pernice said it's also clear from the entries that companies, at least the ones with good intranets, are investing more resources in them. For instance, in the early years, she said, it was very common for just a single person to be in charge of intranet design. This year, the smallest intranet design team among the winners had two members, while twenty different people across different departments were involved in the design for British Airways' site. While Pernice conceded that there was a measure of subjectivity in picking winners, such as a basic impression of whether the intranet's look is appealing, NNG used a wide range of specific criteria based on its usability reports and client studies. The bar is also raised each year, as companies get more sophisticated in their intranet design, she said. Three winners came from the financial sector -- two banks and one real estate company. NNG speculates financial institutions have traditionally fared well in the competition because they typically invest a lot more in IT than other companies.
Click on the graphic for a view of Bank of America's intranet One reason for the investment is that because financial firms deal in complex transactions, training costs for internal applications can skyrocket if the right user-centered design isn't in place for local and remote branches. Another company with a few dollars in the bank and a heavy investment in IT is SAP, the enterprise software firm that represented the only technology company among this year's winners. Most of the winners are big firms, with an average of 50,000 employees. A notable exception is New Zealand's Ministry of Transport, with only 200 intranet users. Several of the winners make use of advanced personalization in their intranets. Pernice said personalization hasn't emerged more broadly on intranets because it's expensive, and if done wrong, ends up being counterproductive. Examples of effective personalization included Coldwell Banker. When salespeople log in to the realtor's intranet, they are shown personalized data like their individual sales targets, their current progress and leads that are being tracked. The realtor's employee directory also goes beyond the norm: A special feature, for example, helps agents find colleagues for referral. "Gone are the days when you're lucky to just get a welcome note from the CEO," Pernice said. "Companies are realizing intranets are a tool to help make money and make the right decisions." Sometimes a focus on a clear design can be more important than adding a bunch of features not everyone knows how to use. Pernice lauds the intranet by the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries in Australia for its simple, clear design. "They just did a very good job with colors and borders," she said. "You can tell what's a link and what to click on to go somewhere."
As clear as mud Most companies that enter an intranet design contest might be expected to have, at least, some visually appealing aspects. Pernice said while there was nothing "Frankensteinian" among the entries, a few made plenty of mistakes. Those gaffes include links that "drop a user off a cliff" and go nowhere. Another no-no, by NNG's reckoning, is overly branded sites. When you're already in Acme Inc.'s intranet, it's not necessary to brand the Acme search box, Acme's news of the day, Acme's Tips For Productivity, and so on, she said, adding that one company had its logo a clutter-filled five times on one page.
Tools of the trade Pernice said the rise in consumer social networks and multimedia content is also emerging as a driver of intranet innovation. "If you have YouTube on your Dell desktop at home, you start to wonder why you can't see video of the big company event at another office or the politician meeting the CEO," she said. "I have empathy for the poor IT guys who have to make sure the pipes work and implement all this." SAP is making it work. The big enterprise software maker dedicates a section of its intranet homepage to "SAP TV" -- with videos on various topics from SAP Cup soccer finals to doing business in Russia. NNG's report on the finalists points out that some 41 different products were used among the ten winners for their intranet platforms. "As with every year, we again conclude that intranet technology is an unsettled field with no clear winner," it found. Still, a handful of frequently used products stood out. Among most-used products this year were Microsoft's SharePoint and the Google Search Appliance. Others frequently used in intranets were Red Hat Linux, Lotus Notes and Domino and the Oracle database.

Technical Analysis: Bears Take Charge

Not much new to add from last Friday: the bears are still in charge, the Fed remains out of touch, and the last chance for the bulls remains 1360-1370 on the S%26amp;P, about 2% lower from here (see first chart below). All isn't lost quite yet, however. The NYSE advance-decline line (second chart) remains above its November and August lows, a sign that downside momentum could be waning, and the CBOE equity put-call index showed quite a spike today, a sign of fear by investors. But time is clearly running out for the bulls %26#151; and the economy. It would take a move above 1430-1440 on the S%26amp;P for the bullish case to begin to reassert itself. The Dow (third chart) is also running out of room here, with 12,500 a critical level, and the Nasdaq (fourth chart) needs to hold 2386-2400. To the upside, 12,724-12,748 and 2540-2554 would be a good start. Paul Shread is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and member of the Market Technicians Association.

Online Data Depositories Go Beyond Mere Storage

Online storage solutions are popping up everywhere on the Web, offering small home office and business users a variety of options. Most, if not all, provide easy-to-use upload and download functionality and file sharing capabilities%26#151;putting the data storage approach more than a few steps ahead of the granddaddy of online storage: FTP sites. The key elements setting services apart, at least at this point, are reliability, availability and extra-rich features. That%26#146;s what DigitalBucket is banking on in terms of market strategy. In public beta until early February, the San Jose-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider is built on Amazon%26#146;s Simple Storage Service%26#151;the e-commerce vendor%26#146;s own data infrastructure%26#151;an aspect that CEO Greg Hacobian claims provides high reliability and scalability few market competitors offer at this point. %26#147;Our focus is as a software provider that offers a reliable storage service that can expand with a business or user%26#146;s needs. People want to access stored data everywhere and anywhere they are, so providing a central location provides that kind of access as well as the ability to share,%26#148; explained Hacobian in an interview with . With a clean and simple site design, DigitalBucket makes account setup so simple it%26#146;s nearly silly. It%26#146;s just name, e-mail, password and the account (including clicking through an e-mail login link) is open in just minutes. Once logged in, hit the "manage your files" link and you%26#146;re able to load, download, share, e-mail and delete files in whatever folder set-up created. Moving files between folders is just drag and drop and users can even change document views in the file manager from icons to thumbnails to details. Want to know the last time you modified a stored doc? The file manager profile gives that info as part of the file detail data. But it%26#146;s really what lies behind the basic features that will cement the user experience given the varied files in play and online data interaction users have come to expect. With a quick login and a few clicks, users can post a file to a blog tethered to LiveJournal, TypePad, Blogger or WordPress. Want to edit that business strategy presentation you stored last week? You don%26#146;t have to download it, edit it and then upload it back into storage. Thanks to DigitalBucket%26#146;s use of Zoho applications, users can edit Word, text, HTML, Excel and even graphical presentation files right where they%26#146;re housed. If you%26#146;re not content with the Zoho apps, you can edit with other online tools including Snipshot or Picnik. For the business enterprise, the tools and features provide more than decent collaboration abilities for sharing data with partners, clients and internal staff. It%26#146;s a snap to create sub accounts that then provide customized access privileges to clients/partners. And external users don%26#146;t need to be registered users%26#151;a nice ease of use feature as well. DigitalBucket.net is just one of dozens of online storage providers in play. To get a glimpse of the increasing list of competitors check out Backup Review, a good starting place for those shopping for such a service. But for a storage tool that%26#146;s clearly within economic reach of both individual users and SMBs, it%26#146;s clearly gone a few steps farther than many others offering data housing in the cloud. Innovative data storage providers are not only going the mile to provide reliable storage depositories, they%26#146;re re-crafting what was once considered just a locked data vault environment into a dynamic user environment.

Ma Bell Crushes Stocks

Rumors of a Countrywide Financial bankruptcy and comments from AT%26amp;T that raised slowdown fears sent stocks plunging on Tuesday. AT%26amp;T CEO Randall Stephenson told Bloomberg that the company is experiencing "softness" in its phone and broadband businesses and is disconnecting more customers for failing to pay their bills. AT%26amp;T shares cut their losses in half but still ended the day 5% lower, but the rest of the market ended the day at its lows, with the major indexes back in 10% "correction" territory. Countrywide once again denied bankruptcy rumors that have swirled around the nation's top mortgage lender, but its shares still fell 28% to a new 52-week low. E*Trade shares also hit a new yearly low, down 20% on the day. The Nasdaq fell for the eighth straight day, its longest losing streak since a similar decline in June 2006. Federal Reserve officials have yet to step up their campaign of interest rate cuts despite the growing chance of recession, and comments from Fed officials on the issue have been mixed this week, with some concern about inflation remaining. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke could settle the issue when he speaks on Thursday. Leap Wireless gained 6% on strong subscriber growth. VMware and Nvidia bounced back from recent declines with 2% gains, with Nvidia unveiling a new high-end graphics offering. Seagate fell 4% on a downgrade, and Microsoft was off more than 3% on the acquisition of enterprise search company FAST. Oracle was down 5% after CEO Larry Ellison sold shares under a prearranged trading plan. Credence Systems fell 20% after missing sales estimates and announcing plans for 30% layoffs. Citigroup reiterated its "sell" rating and $1 price target. The stock closed at $1.79. The Nasdaq fell 59 to 2440, the S%26amp;P tumbled 26 to 1390, and the Dow plunged 238 to 12,589. Volume rose to 4.7 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.65 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 21-11 margin on the NYSE, and 21-9 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 80% on the NYSE, and 80% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 58-518 on the NYSE, and 66-444 on the Nasdaq.

Sprint: WiMax on Track For April

Sprint Nextel is on track to launch commercial services for its next-generation WiMax high-speed wireless network at the end of April, Chief Technology Officer Barry West said on Tuesday. Speaking on a WiMax panel at the Consumer Electronics Show, West said Sprint would sell the service at reasonable rates with options including per day, week or month, as well as longer term contracts. But unlike typical phone services, Sprint does not plan to subsidize WiMax devices for customers. "People will be excited about our rates," West said. "They won't be ecstatic about them because we're not going to give it away." WiMax service fees could also be included in the purchase price of devices, such as WiMax-enabled cameras. Asked about the risks of introducing services based on a commercially untested technology during an economic downturn, West said he was not concerned and had not seen any signs of a pullback in electronics spending so far. "I really don't see it," West said in an interview with Reuters. "The fourth quarter for the consumer electronics industry ... was different, but it wasn't bad." Sprint hopes WiMax will help the No. 3 U.S. mobile service stand out from the competitors it has been losing ground to, including AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, owned by Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group. West said he is talking to operators developing WiMax services around the world to set up roaming agreements that make it easier for customers to use their devices abroad. "Roaming will be much more like the Wi-Fi world than it will be in the world of cellular phones," he said. Wi-Fi, a shorter-range predecessor of WiMax, is mostly used in laptops today and is commonly available in coffee shops and other public places around the world. Sprint plans to offer only a data card for laptops and a modem for desktop computers when it kicks off the service, and has no immediate plans to sell phones that include the technology, West said. Other devices will be sold through electronics retailers rather than Sprint, he said. West said he expects up to 10 WiMax devices to be available at the time Sprint launches its service. One of them is a Web browsing device that Nokia plans to sell. Fred Wright, a senior vice president for Motorola's wireless network equipment unit, said his company would have a multimedia wireless device ready for the market at the end of the third quarter or start of the fourth quarter. The device would support voice but calling would not be its main feature, Wright said. West also said a Korean company that he declined to name would start to sell a dedicated gaming device for WiMax in the first quarter of 2009. Sprint plans to kick off commercial services in the three markets, which have been testing the technology since December: Baltimore, Washington, DC and Chicago. He would not comment beyond the initial strategy as new Sprint Chief Executive Dan Hesse is reviewing future efforts amid criticism over the previously announced plan to spend $5 billion on the WiMax network by 2010. Sprint's initial technology suppliers for the service include Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Motorola and Nokia Siemens, a joint venture of Nokia and German network equipment maker Siemens AG. Chipmaker Intel is also a big promoter of WiMax.

Mozilla Public License to be Updated?

One of the key reasons that Mozilla and its technologies are open source is the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Now, the closely watched MPL may be seeing an update after remaining unchanged for years. The MPL is one of the defining features of the Mozilla Foundation, its related entities and products -- providing users with a license that is open for inspection and participation as well as commercial integration. It's also a license that has remained the same since 1999. But that may change after this week, now that Mozilla Corp.'s John Lilly is succeeding longtime CEO Mitchell Baker, who was one of the primary authors of the MPL. Baker, who will continue at the organization, is now shifting roles. Accordingly, she said she may now have time to devote to issues that haven't been considered in some time -- like the MPL. "The Mozilla license hasn't been revised in years," Baker said in response to a question from InternetNews.com during a recent public Webcast. "It has been in the back of my mind that it's time to look at it and see if a revision makes sense." Baker said her duties as leader of Mozilla Corp. and the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (for both of which she will continue as chairman) had until now demanded the bulk of her attention. "I have looked at it a few times and taken a few steps but never had time or focus to make my way through it and come up with a recommendation," Baker said. "I think I will probably try and do that." "I feel my biggest set of unique talents right now is the ability to talk to large sets of people about the role of Mozilla and its technology," she added. "So if I had to pick one thing to focus on, that would be it." It's not immediately clear what changes would be in store for the MPL. Patents represented a major, divisive issue in the recently revised GPL version 3 open source license. The GPL hadn't been updated in fifteen years and the process of rewriting it became rife with disagreement at times, with Linux creator Linux Torvalds opposing the changes. For Mozilla, patents may not necessarily be as large an issue. Baker said that the MPL was among the first licenses to have a patent-defense clause. She also conceded that, in her view, the MPL is "draconian" in its patent-defense clause -- and it may or not be right. Still, "I wouldn't expect anything dramatic," she said of plans for a revised MPL. "But it's like a piece of code that hasn't been changed in five or six years -- so there is undoubtedly stuff in there that seemed important at the time that isn't important now." Baker likely won't be alone in looking at revisions to the MPL. For one thing, Mozilla is hiring a general counsel -- in fact, she said Mozilla plans to hire the same person who wrote the Patent Defense clauses found in the current MPL version. Neither Baker nor Lilly, who was also on the Webcast, elaborated on those plans.

Apple Seen Set to Resolve EU iTunes Case

Apple will soon announce steps to resolve European Commission charges that its iTunes stores broke EU rules by setting prices country-by-country in Europe, people familiar with the situation said on Tuesday. The announcement may come later on Tuesday or at the latest by Thursday, the sources said. After that, the European Union competition regulator is expected to announce that it is closing the long-running case involving the pricing of online sales of music and video used in the popular iPod personal audiovisual player. A Commission spokesman had no comment, and a spokesman for Apple also had no immediate comment. In April 2007, the Commission said Apple had breached EU rules by agreeing with Vivendi's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group and Warner Music Group to curtail cross-border access to iTunes. The case dates back to 2005, when the British consumer association Which? complained that iTunes stores in France and Germany charged 99 euro cents ($1.45), while Britons must pay 79 pence ($1.56), instead of letting all Europeans buy at one store. Representatives for the four music groups were either unavailable or declined to comment immediately.

Microsoft to Acquire Norway's FAST for $1.2 Billion

Microsoft announced today that it would acquire Fast Search %26 Transfer, a Norwegian enterprise search company, for about $1.2 billion in cash. The purchase price is based on a $3.5 per-share valuation of FAST's stock, 42 percent higher than its closing price of Jan. 4th. The purchase could add more muscle to Microsoft's maneuvering against Google in the enterprise search market, such as its recent offer of its Search Server 2008 product as a free download. Both companies are jockeying for position in the race to provide businesses with the tools to organize and retrieve information within their organizations and throughout the Web. Microsoft sees in FAST a high-end complement to its existing SharePoint enterprise application, according to Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division. "Enterprise search is becoming an indispensable tool to businesses of all sizes, helping people find, use and share critical business information quickly," Raikes said in a statement. "Until now, organizations have been forced to choose between powerful, high-end search technologies or more mainstream, infrastructure solutions. The combination of Microsoft and FAST gives customers a new choise: a single vendor with solutions that span the full range of customer needs." While the free offering of Search Server Express was an effort to commoditize Microsoft's enterprise search applications in an attempt to reach out to smaller businesses, the acquisition of FAST is meant to round out its premium offerings. For Microsoft, the enterprise-search market is a crucial area in its multi-front war with Google. Long the enterprise standard-bearer, Microsoft is facing a substantial threat from Google as it seeks to extend the reach of its search services in the business environment. Both companies have been working to create broad-ranging enterprise-search portfolios catering to companies of all sizes. In October, InternetNews.com first learned of Google's plans for its Search Appliance version 5.0, the universal enterprise search application designed to access other content-management systems, including Microsoft's. Meanwhile, IBM has been fleshing out its own suite of enterprise search services by courting the lower-end market. In November, IBM released a new version of the free OmniFind Yahoo Edition enterprise search software, an application with open source search support that was touted for its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. As a sign of the consolidated competition among the major players in enterprise search, FAST announced a partnership with Cognos in May 2006, touting the combined expertise of the companies in enterprise search and business intelligence, respectively. Then, last November, IBM announced its intention to buy Cognos for $5 billion. The Microsoft buyout is expected to encounter scant opposition among FAST shareholders, as the board of directors has unanimously recommended approval of the acquisition. Shareholders owning 37 percent of the company's outstanding stock, including the company's two largest institutional investors, have already expressed support of the transaction. Despite being widely recognized as one of Norway's fastest-growing technology firms, FAST has struggled to turn a profit. FAST CEO John Lervik is looking for the Microsoft acquisition to give the company a life and expand its reach. "By joining Microsoft, we can benefit from the momentum behind the SharePoint business productivity platform to really empower a broader set of users through Microsoft's strong sales and marketing network,'' Lervik said in a statement. Microsoft said that it expects the acquisition to be finalized in the second quarter of this year.

CES: Gates to Deliver His Final Vision

It's all over after Sunday night. That's when Bill Gates, Microsoft's legendary chairman and chief visionary, gives his final keynote speech at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in glitzy Las Vegas. However, don't expect Gates to provide a lot of previously undisclosed information. Instead, since it's his last appearance at the show, Gates is expected to highlight themes from past CES speeches and to prognosticate about the future. Although declining to provide details due to non-disclosure agreements, several industry observers who have been pre-briefed said Gates' audience shouldn't plan on seeing many surprises during his final CES performance. "For a number of years, Bill has been moving toward 'emeritus' status, so this is his valedictory speech %26#91;about%26#93; where %26#91;consumer technology%26#93; has been and where it's going," said one analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There%26#146;s not going to be any big news from Microsoft at the show," said another analyst who had been pre-briefed about Gates' speech. "Lots of momentum and some very minor feature additions to existing products, but no product or major partnership announcements as far as I know." Gates, they said, is expected to emphasize technologies such as Windows Home Server, which debuted at last year's CES, and Windows Vista, which is set to receive its first major service pack update later this quarter. He'll likely also describe the continued momentum behind the Xbox 360 gaming console and the company's Zune music players. Familiar themes will include his evolving vision of the so-called "connected home," which embraces those products and how they can be networked into a cohesive domestic information and entertainment experience. Gates is also expected to talk up the company's efforts to move its technologies and products into the automotive world, including momentum behind moves such as its Sync technology, which was introduced at last year's CES and is currently shipping in several Ford Motor Company vehicles. Sync provides voice-controlled access to Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones and Zune music players, among other features. "You want the same kind of entertainment in the car, and the same things you have everywhere else," Gates said in last year's CES keynote. "But the car is special. If you want to deliver %26#91;functionality%26#93; to the driver, you have to think of incredibly simple commands." Gates will also likely talk up Microsoft's burgeoning Windows Live services initiative %26#150; Microsoft's version of software-as-services, which the company refers to as "software-plus-services." Toward the end of last year, Microsoft rolled out several new "Live" services and announced the pending arrival of several more. Those services include free e-mail, photo editing and sharing, events planning, calendaring functions and other consumer-oriented services, along with online storage "in the cloud." Not to be forgotten, Microsoft's Silverlight cross-platform, cross-browser streaming media plug-in technology is also likely to receive a plug from Gates. The company is hoping that Silverlight eventually displaces Adobe's Flash. Microsoft first showed off Silverlight in April and began shipping a 1.0 version in summer. Human interface technologies, another hot topic with Gates, are also probably on the menu. For instance, Microsoft may show further evolutions of its "Surface" computer -- a multi-touch computing display built into a tabletop. Microsoft first debuted the offering in May. Although aimed initially at commercial applications such as restaurants, hotels, and retail stores, the primary users of the Microsoft Surface are intended to be consumers. Among rumored surprises that may or may not surface during the speech, the blogosphere has been rampant this week with talk of a new Xbox console -- perhaps sporting a built-in HD-DVD drive -- or new add-ons for existing models. The event will also be the point at which Gates passes the CES baton to Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division. Bach will share the stage with Gates during the keynote, Microsoft has said. In July, Gates is scheduled to retire from full-time work for the company he co-founded 32 years ago to focus on the charity that he and his wife oversee -- the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While Gates hasn't sworn off future speaking engagements, he is not expected to continue his long-term role as technological figurehead for the tech giant either. That means no CES keynote from him in 2009. Of course, the company does plan a few surprises to spice up Gates' final CES appearance. According to Microsoft's Web site, that will include special guests and a product announcement or two. However, those are being kept under wraps for now. "They're going to try to have one big surprise," agreed a third analyst, though he wouldn't disclose what that might be. While nobody seems to have been leaked any tidbits of who might be on that list, Gates and his wife did share Time magazine's "Person of the Year" award in December 2005 with U2 lead singer, Bono. The three were celebrated for their philanthropic efforts. Those not fortunate enough to be attending Gates' final keynote in Las Vegas can access a live Webcast here.

CNET Facing Board Shakeup

NEW YORK -- Investment fund Jana Partners LLC said on Monday it is leading a group of funds seeking to take over CNET Networks' board and boost its share price. Jana and its partners own about 8 percent of CNET's voting stock and also hold an 8 percent nonvoting stake. Another investment fund that is supporting Jana, Sandell Asset Management Corp, has a 5 percent nonvoting stake. "We are pleased to support Jana in this effort to improve the performance and ultimately the valuation of CNET to the benefit of all shareholders," Tom Sandell, chief executive of Sandell Asset Management, said in a statement. CNET, which was founded in 1992 and whose brands include Gamespot, TV.com, MP3.com and BNET, was not immediately available for comment. Its shares were down 6 cents to $8.50 in morning Nasdaq trade after initially rising as high as $9.10 following the news. Jana criticized the poor performance of CNET's stock. It said the shares rose less than 1 percent last year, compared with gains of about 10 percent for the Nasdaq, and fell 19 percent in the three years through 2007, compared with a 22 percent rise for the Nasdaq. Jana said it would nominate seven members to the CNET board. It said it consulted with Spark Capital, a venture capital firm, and Alex Interactive Media's Paul Gardi, a well-known technology entrepreneur, to select the nominees. It said it would nominate Gardi and Spark's Santo Politi to replace the two CNET directors scheduled to stand for re-election at the company's next annual meeting. In addition, Jana is proposing that stockholders expand the CNET board from eight members to 13 and fill the resulting five vacancies with Jana nominees. The five are Jon Miller, the founding partner of Velocity Interactive Group; Jaynie Studenmund, a member of the board of Orbitz, eHarmony, Western Asset and Countrywide Bank; Julius Genachowski, managing director of Rock Creek Ventures; Brian Weinstein, an executive with Creative Artists Agency; and Giorgio Caputo, managing director of Jana Partners. A Jana affiliate has filed suit seeking to enjoin CNET from rejecting the nominations on the basis of its corporate bylaws.

Wikia Search Launches With Google in Its Sights

Declaring that Internet search is currently broken, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is trying to fix it. And he wants your help. After several months of development and acquisitions to assemble the infrastructure needed to build a viable search engine, Wikia Search service goes live today. Wikia Search is a product of Wikia Inc., a for-profit company wholly separate from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that was founded in 2004 and oversees Wikipedia. Following a brief period of private alpha testing, today's unveiling is billed as a "public alpha release." Wales has freely admitted that today's launch is something of a test drive, and that the application will continue to see substantial modifications and updates. With the community-driven, open-source search engine, Wales is hoping to transform Internet search, which he describes as currently dominated by a few large companies operating under a cloak of secrecy with virtually no accountability for how results are served up or pages are ranked. "The philosophical background here is that I'm a very big advocate of openness and transparency," Wales told InternetNews.com. The best parts of the Web are largely absent from the proprietary protocols of the major search engines, he said. "My view here is that there's an opportunity to change that." Starting from www.wikia.com, users can navigate to an unadorned search page that Wales compared to Google's for its deceptive spareness -- like Google, the Wikia Search launch page is just the tip of the iceberg. Wales said that Wikia Search is both a social network and a search engine. On the site, users register, create profiles and are able to perform all the typical functions of a social networking site %26#150; messaging friends, uploading photos, etc. The search engine serves up results as a series of links ranked in order of relevance, just as Google and Yahoo do (enter a query; receive a list of results), but the similarities end there. Applying the collaborative editing approach that is the essence of a wiki, registered users can contribute to a mini-article that appears at the top of the results page, Wales said. Users can click on the links and rank the relevance of the result to the search term on a scale of one to five; their evaluations are then fed back into the algorithm to improve the quality of information delivered. Building a search engine from the ground up, with results delivered and refined the using the same approach that made Wikipedia the Web's favorite general reference site, is not going to be an overnight process, Wales admitted. Just looking at the near future, "we'd be ecstatic if we grabbed 5 percent of the market," Wales said. The push toward community-driven search began in earnest in July, when Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, the open source search project that harnesses the distributed processing power of individuals' computers to crawl the Web. The Grub Web crawler is just one of many technologies cobbled together to power Wikia Search, Wales said. On the back end, Apache efforts Lucene and Nutch shoulder the brunt of the search and indexing responsibilities. The front end, which handles the user interactions, such as the comments and rankings, is written in Java. Wales said that Wikia Inc. is still exploring monetization methods for the search engine, but that, in a general sense, it would employ some form of an advertising model. No commercial partners have been announced. Delivering search results through open source algorithms that evolve through community rankings begs the same question of user abuse that has dogged Wikipedia from time to time. Search engine optimization is a microindustry in its own right these days. Asked about the concern that by turning the algorithms and rankings over to the community, Wikia Search could be a ripe target for gaming the search engine to artificially boost site rankings, Wales demurred. "My view is that sunlight is the best disinfectant," he said. "Talk with security experts and they will tell you that security through obscurity is a bad idea," adding that the policing of Wikia Search will work in a very similar manner as it does on Wikipedia. "We have a community that is in charge of the editorial content" that will be able to identify and block the bad apples who aren't playing by the rules. Ultimately, SEO will be less of an issue for Wikia Search than it is currently with Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines, Wales said. "I feel that this is going to be one of our strengths." Wales said he's taking an organic approach to the development of the editorial community and that his own involvement will be extensive. He wasn't didn't specifically answer whether there'll be censorship or banning of rogue community members for trying to game the system? "I have a general philosophy that's served me very well: Avoid excessive a priori thinking %26#150; wait and see %26#133; we'll see how it unfolds."

New Mode of Cell Communication Discovered

By Steve Mitchell
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

Like teenagers, cells in our bodies constantly chatter back and forth. But instead of zapping text messages, they relay signals with molecules. Now, researchers have discovered a surprisingly tiny new messenger in worms: protons. The find raises the possibility that the subatomic particle plays the same role in humans, the researchers say.

Research in mice has hinted that protons--hydrogen atoms stripped of their electrons--might act as messengers, but until now direct evidence has been lacking. A team led by biologist Erik Jorgensen of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, made the discovery while investigating how the worm Caenorhabditis elegans contracts certain muscles around its intestines to squeeze out waste. Previous experiments had ruled out several neurotransmitters known to aid defecation, suggesting that a novel molecule might be playing a role.

After sequencing the DNA of worms with defects in muscle contraction, the team identified mutations in a gene called PBO4. This gene encodes a protein located on the outer surface of intestinal cells, where it brings sodium ions into the cell while pumping protons out. This hinted that protons might play a role in making the muscles contract.

Next, using a protein that glows green until it contacts protons, the researchers found that protons flood from the intestinal cells and into the surrounding muscle cells just before the muscle contracts. Finally, the researchers inserted protons bound to a light-sensitive molecule into the space between the intestine and the muscle in mutant worms with a defective PBO4 gene. When a flash of light set the protons free, the muscle contracted, the researchers report in the 11 January issue of Cell. Further experiments identified a receptor on the muscle cells that triggers contraction when protons bind to it.

Jorgensen speculates that protons probably act as neurotransmitters in humans and other vertebrates, but so far there is no evidence of this. He notes that this could explain why humans have proton pumps in brain cells that are the same as the proton pumps found in their intestines.

Les Iversen, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, U.K., agrees with that notion. But Charles Stevens, a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, says that the protons may only be used as neurotransmitters in worms and other invertebrates. "Oftentimes, invertebrates have evolved special mechanisms that are not so widely used in vertebrates," Stevens says.

Related sites

More on neurotransmitters

More about C. elegans

A Parasite Shows Its Plantlike Side

By Matt Kaplan
ScienceNOW Daily News
9 January 2008

The single-celled creatures known as protozoans are primitive, exotic, and sometimes just plain weird, resembling animals, plants, or a combination of both. Researchers now report that one animal-like, parasitic protozoan relies on a biochemical pathway that is strikingly plantlike. The discovery could open up a new method of attacking protozoans that cause diseases such as malaria.

Parasitic protozoans are extremely difficult to control because their animal-like biologies are often very similar to those of their hosts. As a result, drugs that target these parasites all too often damage the cells of the patient.

Hoping to make headway, a team led by microbiologists Kisaburo Nagamune and L. David Sibley of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, took a close look at the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis. Specifically, the researchers were interested in deciphering how the parasite communicates.

First, the scientists tried comparing biochemical pathways that they identified in the parasite with those of animals to better understand their function. "When we found few similarities, we thought these animal-like protozoans might not be all that they seemed," says Sibley.

So the team compared the biochemical pathways of Toxoplasma with those of plants. It found that the two had a lot in common. Of particular interest was abscisic acid, a hormone that in plants controls stress responses and dormancy. When the researchers disrupted abscisic acid production using a commonly available herbicide, the parasites inside animal cells in culture remained inactive even after reaching numbers that would normally have led to a violent mass exodus. The reason, the team argues, is that abscisic acid is controlling the shift from dormancy to active growth in protozoans, much as it does in plants. The same herbicide saves mice infected with Toxoplasma, the researchers report tomorrow in Nature.

"This is a seminal rethinking of this class of parasites that includes Plasmodium, the protozoan that causes malaria," says microbiologist Andy Waters of the University of Glasgow in the U.K. Further investigation of abscisic acid's role may yield new approaches to badly needed malaria therapies, Waters adds.

Related site

Protozoa basics from the University of Glasgow

Gates Highlights Content in CES Sendoff

In his 11th and final keynote speech at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Association Sunday night, Bill Gates said the second "digital decade" is about natural user interfaces. For Microsoft, however, content is also very much a part of its future, as Gates pointed out. For one, NBC will use MSN to deliver NBCOlympics.com content online during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing this summer. Online viewers will have access to more than 3,000 hours of live and on-demand content, Microsoft said. The video will be powered by Microsoft's Silverlight cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in technology. Gates later made room onstage for Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division %26#150; Gates' heir apparent for future CES keynotes. Bach announced a deal with Disney-ABC Television Group that, starting later this month, will enable Xbox Live subscribers in the U.S. to access select TV shows and movies from the ABC Television Network, ABC Family, ABC News, Disney Channel and Toon Disney. He also announced a similar agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios (MGM) to deliver the studio's film library to Xbox Live customers, although he didn't give a timeframe for that service. "%26#91;With these deals%26#93;, we will have twice as much high-definition content as any satellite or cable %26#91;provider%26#93;," Bach said. In a statement, Microsoft also announced the company sold 17.7 million Xbox 360 consoles over the past holiday season. In addition, Bach said the company's Mediaroom IPTV service is now running on a million set top boxes and will add a "DVR Anywhere" capability that will enable users to view a recorded video on multiple TVs. In one demonstration, Bach showed off an upcoming version of Tellme, a voice search mobile service designed to let people use voice commands to say what they want and view answers on their phones' screen. The service uses Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities in order to provide location aware results. Microsoft acquired the technology when it purchased Tellme Networks in March 2007. One high point was a spoof video "roast," showing Gates' imagined careers after his pending retirement from Microsoft in July. In it, Gates was shown approaching a raft of celebrities who all nervously turned down his offers of partnering, including U2 singer Bono, actor George Clooney, Daily Show host Jon Stewart, and environmentalist/politician Al Gore. "Lose my number," sports personality Bob Costas quipped. Beyond the levity, however, Gates highlighted a handful of technology areas -- all of them familiar -- that he believes will be important in what he calls "the second digital decade." Gates first referred to the "digital decade" in his 2001 CES keynote. Among the most important technologies, he pointed out, are "natural" user interfaces like interactive voice response systems, such as Ford Motor Company's use of Microsoft's Sync technology in several of its vehicles it released in 2007. Ford also announced a coming update to its Sync-enabled vehicles called "911 Assist," which will automatically call 911 if it senses a major problem -- that the car's airbags have deployed, for example. Gates also predicted that high definition display devices will become ubiquitous %26#150; for instance, embedded in the wall or a worker's desk. He cited Microsoft's Surface computer and Apple's iPhone as early examples. Additionally, all intelligent devices will be "services connected," with many of the services residing "in the cloud," he said. "You'll take it for granted," Gates added, in a clear pitch for the company's emerging "software-plus-services" vision. Gates also gave some updated status on Vista, saying that the company has now sold more than 100 million licenses of the operating system at retail. He also said that Microsoft has garnered 400 million Live ID users, which is viewed as the gateway to Microsoft's free Live services. Additionally, he claimed there are now more than 10 million Windows Mobile devices in use and predicted that number would double in the next year. Near the end of the keynote, Gates demonstrated a Microsoft Research project that used a device about the size of a 1990s cell phone and tethered by a large cable that could automatically recognize faces as well as Las Vegas landmarks, and correlate that information with calendaring functions. For instance, pointing it at one of the strip's hotels, the device recognized that he had a reservation for dinner scheduled in one of the restaurants. The keynote ended with Gates and Bach in a duel of the rock and roll game Guitar Hero. In the end, Gates brought on a ringer to compete for him. The surprise guest turned out to be Velvet Revolver lead guitarist Slash.

Is the Price Right for Salesforce.com?

Salesforce.com shares endured a bit of a rollercoaster ride Monday after a pair of equity analysts issued divergent opinions on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) (define) bellwether's long-term growth and investment prospects. Goldman Sachs analyst Sasa Zorovic downgraded Salesforce.com shares from "neutral" to a "sell" recommendation Monday while UBS analyst Heather Bellini upgraded the stock to a "buy" rating and raised its 12-month price target to $70 a share. Investors initially seemed more inclined to side with Zorovic, selling off shares in early Monday trading and pushing the stock down almost 7 percent before it rebounded a bit to close off just $1.10 a share, or 2 percent, to $57.76. The analysts' conflicting views and the subsequent investor reaction illustrates just how compelling and competitive the SaaS landscape has become in the past year as more and more specialized on-demand vendors as well as long-time, on-premise competitors race to get in on this burgeoning market. In March, Gartner predicted the SaaS market would grow from $6.3 billion in 2006 to more than $19.3 billion by 2011. With on-premise goliaths such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft investing billions in their new on-demand platforms, it's safe to assume Gartner and other research firms will soon be revising their estimates higher in the near future. For Salesforce.com, which announced in December that it eclipsed the 1 million-subscriber threshold, 2007 was a banner year. In November, the company easily topped analyst estimates in its third quarter and predicted it would achieve annual sales in excess of $1 billion in 2008. The company's remarkable revenue growth and modest profits (it pocketed $6.5 million on sales of $192.8 million in its latest quarter) hasn't gone unnoticed by investors%26#151;the stock is up 44 percent from the $40-a-share price it was fetching this time last year. In his research note announcing the downgrade, Zorovic said uncertainty about enterprise software spending in the first half of 2008 combined with the fact the stock was trading 14 percent above his 12-month price target of $51 a share led him to cut the stock to a "sell" recommendation. Meanwhile, Bellini defended her upgrade, writing that "in addition to being the leader in the fast-growing software-as-a-service space, Salesforce.com has done an excellent job preparing itself for the next chapter in its life," referring to Force.com, the company's new on-demand application development platform geared toward expanding its subscriber base beyond traditional CRM and business automation applications. Despite the seemingly wide chasm between the two analysts' new ratings, both have lauded Salesforce.com's model, core financials and long-term growth potential. Simply put, Zorovic thinks it's time to cash out while Bellini is willing to let it ride. Of the 34 analysts tracking the stock, 17 rate it either a "buy" or "strong buy" while 13 analysts have issued either a "hold" or "neutral" rating. Zorovic joins three other analysts who are recommending investors sell Salesforce.com shares. Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Mark Verbeck maintains a "hold" rating on the stock and reiterated a 12-month price target of $61 a share in November. "The trouble is that game-changing, high-growth companies are often expensive," Verbeck wrote in an e-mail to InternetNews.com. "Once they become cheap, you no longer want to own them. Look at companies like Dell, Intel, Starbucks, etc." For now it appears customers%26#151;particularly small- and mid-sized companies (SMB) and some Fortune 500 firms%26#151; are enamored with the on-demand model, eschewing recurring licensing and service contracts in favor of hosted applications and application development platforms they can access for a monthly fee. Last quarter, Salesforce.com reeled in Citigroup, its largest customer win ever, to provide financial adviser desktop software to more than 30,000 financial planners. The company now boasts five 25,000-plus subscriber accounts and expects Force.com to help it fend off competition from the likes of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and NetSuite, which held its initial public offering in December. Other niche players such as Concur Technologies, which offers on-demand travel procurement and expense reporting applications, and SuccessFactors, a vendor of performance and talent management applications, are garnering their share of attention on Wall Street as investors seek out SaaS providers with less bloated valuations. "While I don't think (Salesforce.com) is severely overvalued, I do have a hold rating as I can't recommend investors put new money to work in this %26#91;stock%26#93; at this time," Michael Nemeroff, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities, said in an e-mail Monday afternoon. Nemeroff downgraded the stock from a "buy" to a "hold" rating November 1 and maintains a price target of $57 a share. "However, as we saw during the last downturn, most relative valuations are only based on what multiples investors are willing to pay at any given time," he wrote. While Saleforce.com executives continue to extol the company's performance and potential, executives%26#151;particularly Benioff, CFO Steven Cakebread and co-founder Parker Harris%26#151;continue to sell shares at a brisk pace. According to Thomson Financial, Salesforce.com insiders in the past six months have sold more than 2.9 million shares of their company's stock while purchasing only 11,000 shares. Benioff and Cakebread told analysts in November to expect earnings of between 12 cents and 13 cents a share for the current fiscal year on sales of between $737 million and $39 million, up from earlier forecasts of 10 cents a share on sales of roughly $730 million. "Bottom line, if Saleforce is changing the software business and can continue its rapid growth, it is probably not extremely overvalued," Verbeck wrote. "If not%26#133;"

Stocks Start 2008 With A Thud

Investors worried about a slowdown and inflation got a bit of both today, sending the Dow to its worst-ever point loss to start a new year. On a percentage basis, the Dow's 220-point, 1.67% decline was its worst start to a new year since 1983. News that manufacturing unexpectedly contracted last month while prices paid rose sent stocks plunging, while $100 a barrel oil and weak residential construction added to fears of "stagflation," stagnant growth combined with rising inflation. Federal Reserve meeting minutes released in the afternoon revealed that the Fed remains concerned both about the pace of economic growth and rising inflation pressures, yet the manufacturing data was weak enough for traders to begin pricing in another interest rate cut at the end of the month. Yahoo and Amazon were two tech sector standouts, rising 2% and 4%, respectively, on analyst upgrades. Citigroup touted Amazon's growth story, while ThinkEquity cited Yahoo's attractive valuation. The chip sector was particularly hard hit, off 3% as Intel and AMD plunged 5% each on Bank of America downgrades. LSI, National Semi, Analog Devices, Power Integrations and Semtech were also hit on the BofA sector downgrade, which cited margin, inventory and growth concerns. Broadcom escaped the selling in the chip sector, edging higher on a patent win against Qualcomm. The Nasdaq fell 42 to 2609, the S%26P shed 21 to 1447, and the Dow plunged 220 to 13,043. Volume rose to 3.42 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.08 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 19-13 margin on the NYSE, and 20-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 76% on the NYSE, and 77% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 59-243 on the NYSE, and 66-218 on the Nasdaq.

Asian PC Makers Turn to U.S. Consumers For Growth

Asian computer makers including Lenovo and Asustek Computer are finding growth prospects in an unlikely place: the United States, a mature, slowing market compared to other regions. By planning to offer pocket-sized, full-featured notebooks or stylish high-end machines with advanced features, the Asians will target high-growth niches, while steering clear of the broader market dominated by U.S. heavyweights Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Apple. "You can't afford not to be in the U.S.," said David Daoud, a PC industry analyst at market researcher IDC. "The best way to get into the U.S. is to have something unique, something different." Taiwanese computer makers Asustek and Acer are aggressively courting consumers in the United States through retail outlets such as Best Buy and online stores including newegg.com and TigerDirect.com. The push comes as the U.S. lags the rest of the world in PC shipment growth. While Asian companies may have a tough time competing broadly in a saturated market, the laptop segment is still growing. PC shipments increased 5.2 percent in the United States in the third quarter but were up 15.5 percent worldwide, with some of the fastest growth in the Asia-Pacific region. Lenovo, the Chinese computer maker that bought IBM's PC business in 2005 will announce its entry into the U.S. consumer PC market at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the industry's largest U.S. trade show, in Las Vegas, during the second week of January. In the U.S., Lenovo sells IBM's ThinkPad laptops to business customers but has not targeted U.S. consumers until now. Meanwhile, Japan's Toshiba, long a laptop leader in the U.S., continues to post healthy growth of nearly 17 percent, according to IDC's third-quarter report. Toshiba ranks No. 4 in the U.S. behind Dell, HP and Apple. It plans to refresh its own line of high-end multimedia, tablet and ultra-thin notebook products at CES. Asustek and Acer also plan to showcase new products at the event. Acer, the world's fourth-largest PC maker, sells through Wal-Mart and Office Depot, among various major U.S. retailers, and in October it bought Irvine, California-based Gateway to expand in the United States.
Laptops everywhere Even with advanced features and hip styling, Asian PC makers face tough competition from HP, Dell and Apple, who are marketing more innovative laptop computers. These machines include built-in gaming or video cameras as well as longer battery life and lighter-weight materials. "They have to showcase their products as being some of the best, as opposed to being entry level," IDC's Daoud said. "The best way to do it is through niche and innovation and new products. Otherwise, forget it. The mass PC market is very tough." Lenovo, Acer, and Asustek are pushing into the U.S. consumer market amid surging popularity of laptops, an area in which they have innovated more than some U.S. competitors such as Dell, which for years has focused more on selling desktop machines and business server computers to companies. Lenovo, Asustek and others have declined to give details of the products to be unveiled at the Las Vegas show. Asian companies already make most of the world's laptop computers on a contract basis, so expanding in the U.S. may be logical and cost effective, Daoud said. Taiwan's Quanta Computer, for example, makes laptops for Dell, HP and Apple. Asian PC makers also need to boost their brands in the U.S. to be considered global players. "It's still the biggest market for technology," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at market researcher Enderle Group. "While China is the fastest-growing market, there's something to be said for being in the biggest." Computer makers sold 37 percent more laptops in the third quarter, helping fuel projected 2007 worldwide PC shipment growth of 14.6 percent, according to IDC. In the U.S., desktop PC shipments fell an estimated 3 percent in 2007, while notebooks surged an estimated 21 percent.

Evolution: Read All About It!

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
4 January 2008

WASHINGTON, D.C.--Prompted by recent court battles and persistent pressures to teach intelligent design in U.S. schools, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Institute of Medicine today released an 88-page booklet?-intended for wide dissemination?-that explains why evolution is science and creationism is not.

The handsomely illustrated document, titled Science, Evolution, and Creationism and unveiled here at NAS headquarters, is an updated version of two previous publications, one released in 1984 and its successor in 1999. According to Jay Labov, the staff director for the project, NAS began revising the booklet during a highly publicized 2005 court case in Dover, Pennsylvania (ScienceNOW, 20 December 2005). The judge ruled that teaching intelligent design in the science classroom is unconstitutional, but some schools are still trying to circumvent the ruling by teaching what they call the scientific "controversy" surrounding evolution.

Work on the booklet was directed by a panel of scientists and educators headed by biologist Francisco Ayala of the University of California, Irvine. The authors say that the document is intended not just for policymakers and teachers but also for anyone interested in the subject. It "better explains evolution in ways the public can readily understand," said NAS President Ralph Cicerone. It's also twice as long as the 1999 version.

Contributing to the beefed-up page count is recent research fleshing out the evolution picture, such as the 2004 discovery in Canada of Tiktaalik, a 380-million-year-old creature that represents an intermediate form between fish and four-legged land animals (Science, 7 April 2006, p. 33). Textbooks on evolution still don't have such material because revisions take so long, said science educator and panel member Toby Horn of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, D.C. The latest iteration of the booklet also explores the role of evolution in medicine, pointing out its importance in understanding how viruses such as HIV and SARS mutate. And it features statements by clergy members explaining why evolution is not inconsistent with religion.

"This book is a small start to get scientists mobilized about how they teach science," said panel member Bruce Alberts, former NAS president and the newly appointed editor-in-chief of Science. But it's only part of the solution, noted Ayala, who chastised the press for falling down on the public education front. "You, the media, have certainly done a miserable job," he said, noting that many newspapers devote more space to astrology than to science.

Physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, welcomes the new booklet. "When candidates for president can raise their hands to say that they do not believe in evolution, it is clear that we need to do a far better job of educating people," he says. "This is precisely what the new NAS publication attempts to do."

An electronic version of the booklet is available for free on the Web (see below), and printed copies can be obtained for $12.95 from National Academies Press.

Related site

The booklet

Third Gene Copy Is a Charm

By Greg Miller
ScienceNOW Daily News
2 January 2008

Reports stretching back half a century have suggested that people with Down syndrome may have a reduced risk of breast, colon, and other cancers. The reason has been a mystery, but some researchers suspect it has to do with one or more of the genes on chromosome 21, which people with Down syndrome have three copies of instead of the normal two. A new study backs that idea, linking a gene that is triplicated in Down syndrome to a lower risk of colon cancer in mice.

Geneticists Thomas Sussan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Roger Reeves of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, both in Baltimore, Maryland, and their colleagues mated mice prone to colon cancer with mice commonly used to model Down syndrome. These mice have extra copies of 108 genes--about half as many triplicated genes as in Down syndrome. Offspring that inherited the triplicated genes and the genetic susceptibility to cancer had only half the number of intestinal tumors as their cancer-prone parents, and the tumors that did develop were smaller, the team reports in the 3 January issue of Nature.

Additional experiments with several other mouse strains suggested that a gene called Ets2--whose human counterpart is triplicated in people with Down syndrome--accounts for much of the protection. Ironically, Reeves says, Ets2 was previously identified as a cancer promoter. He can't explain why having an extra copy of the gene would produce the opposite effect. "I think this is going to be a fairly complex thing to work out," Reeves says, adding that Ets2 encodes a transcription factor that influences the activity of at least 200 other genes.

The counterintuitive finding that a gene that promotes cancer in some contexts may repress it in others could have important implications for understanding, and ultimately treating, cancer in the general population, says geneticist David Threadgill of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "I think we have to reevaluate how we look at a lot of these cancer-associated genes."

Related site

Basic information about Down syndrome from the National Institutes of Health