may the force be with you

Microsoft today is launching its adCenter online advertising system in the U.S., and will now compete directly with Google and Yahoo! in selling ads on the Web.

The official announcement is coming this morning when Chief Executive Steve Ballmer addresses the company's Strategic Account Summit, a wide-ranging two-day event that on Wednesday included an unusual onstage interview of Chairman Bill Gates that touched on his private and professional life.

Over the past year, Microsoft has been slowly weaning itself from Yahoo!, a rival that it had hired to serve advertising alongside the Redmond company's Web search results. Now, Microsoft will be working directly with advertisers.

AdCenter will give advertisers sophisticated information about consumers, including their location, age, gender and sometimes, their level of wealth. That's more than what Google and Yahoo! offer, said Joe Doran, senior director for monetization in Microsoft's MSN ad-planning group.

The service will also allow advertisers to choose specific times of the day or week in which their ads would be displayed.

"It's a clear differentiation for us," he said. AdCenter will not give any information that can allow advertisers to personally identify a person, he added.

Microsoft earlier launched adCenter in Singapore and France, and for the past nine months it has run a pilot program in the U.S. with 6,000 customers.

The company will begin a similar pilot in the U.K. next month, Doran said.

Search isn't the only place where adCenter will place advertising. In the future, Microsoft said, it expects to launch ads in e-mail, the Spaces blogging program, on mobile applications, in Office and on the Xbox.com Web site.

Gates took the stage at the summit Wednesday for an interview with television talk-show host Donny Deutsch, and answered questions such as what keeps him up at night and what makes him angry.

Being the world's richest man isn't as great as you'd think, he said.

"There's nothing good that comes out of that," Gates said in the interview, which was taped for a future show. When Deutsch suggested that he really wouldn't want to be No. 2 on the list, Gates disagreed.

"No," he said. "You get more visibility as a result of that."

When asked what keeps him up at night, Gates said it's thinking about where Microsoft should be investing.

"What are the breakthroughs we ought to be doing now that will put us in the lead in the future?" he said. "That's the main thing to worry about."

Gates and Deutsch wore lavender shirts, and Deutsch joked that the audience obviously didn't receive the lavender-shirt memo.

One of the toughest questions for Gates to answer was about feeling angry.

"What pisses you off?" Deutsch asked Gates. "I know with $50 billion it's hard to be pissed off, but what does piss you off?"

Gates started to talk about things he gets concerned about, but when pressed for a stronger answer, he paused for several seconds and eventually said: "Not much."

And as in many interviews Gates does these days, the conversation eventually turned to Google. Gates said that the company has done a great job on search and advertising, and that the rivalry is a rare case where Microsoft is actually being underestimated.

"We will keep them honest in the sense of being able to do better on those things, bring a new angle to it," he said. "The intense competition in this business is what makes it fun."

source:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002970721_microsoft04.html

A simple airline stub, picked out of a bin near Heathrow, led Steve Boggan to investigate a shocking breach of security

This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing gum wrappers and baggage tags, cast off by some weary traveller, when I first laid eyes on it just over a month ago.

The traveller's name was Mark Broer. I know this because the paper - actually a flimsy piece of card - was a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub, the small section of the pass displaying your name and seat number. The stub you probably throw away as soon as you leave your flight.

source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1766266,00.html

LONDON (Reuters) - One-quarter of consumers abandoned a news source over the past year because they lost trust in its reporting, according to a new survey that also found the BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera the most trusted brands in their respective home regions.

Results of a poll of more than 10,000 adults in 10 countries by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Reuters Group Plc and The Media Center were released on Wednesday, with an additional finding that media worldwide were trusted by an average of 61 percent of respondents compared with 52 percent who said they trusted their governments.

"National TV is still the most trusted news source by a wide margin, although the Internet is gaining ground among the young," said Doug Miller, president of London-based research firm GlobeScan, which conducted the polling.

"The jury is still out on blogs," he added. "Just as many people distrust them as trust them."

The survey confirmed that media consumption is shifting online for younger generations, as 19 percent of those aged 18 to 24 named the Internet as their most important source of news compared with 9 percent overall.

Seventy-two percent of all respondents said they followed the news closely, including 67 percent of those 18 to 24 years old.

Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.

The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..

Three Internet portals -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN -- received the next highest trust ratings across the 10 countries, when respondents were prompted with 16 different brand names.

Although trust in media has grown in most countries over the past four years, the survey found, 28 percent of people across the 10 countries either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement: "In the past year I have stopped using a specific media source because it lost my trust."

Germans were unique in the survey for naming newspapers more than TV as their most important news source, by a margin of 45 percent to 30 percent.

Among South Koreans, who have a comparatively low trust of media in general, 34 percent said the Internet was their most important source of news compared with 9 percent worldwide.

More than 1,000 people were surveyed in March and April in each of the United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Russia and

source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060503/tv_nm/media_survey_dc

It's been the curse of the USS Enterprise and the Klingons' favoured weapon. But back on Earth, mathematicians claim to have worked out how to make a cloaking device to render objects invisible.

An outline for the device is described in a scientific paper published today in which the authors reveal how objects placed close to a material called a superlens appear to vanish.

Even in the world of science fiction, the technology is not perfect, and nor is the device proposed by Graeme Milton at Utah University and Nicolae-Alexandru Nicorovici at Sydney University of Technology. According to their calculations, the device would only work at certain frequencies of light, and only if the object is within close range of the superlens.

The cloaking device relies on recently discovered materials used to make superlenses that make light behave in a highly unusual way. Instead of having a positive refractive index - the property which makes light bend as it passes through a prism or water - the materials have a negative refractive index, which effectively makes light travel backwards. It's light, but not as we know it.

Prof Milton's team calculated that when certain objects are placed next to superlenses, the light bouncing off them is essentially erased by light reflecting off the superlens, making the object invisible.

The calculations show that while the device could be used to obscure almost any shape of object, it only works over a short range of wavelengths, so if used to hide objects from human vision, they might only partially disappear.

Sir John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who invented superlenses, said: "Effectively, they are making a piece of space seem to disappear, at least as far as light is concerned."

The research appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society today.

Prof Pendry said the technology has great potential for hiding objects from radar or cloaking electronic instruments so they can be used in strong electromagnetic fields, such as those produced by hospital MRI brain scanners. "The secret is having the cloak itself be invisible and if you can do that cheaply and efficiently and it doesn't need to be metres thick, it would be extremely valuable for stealth. Even if you could cloak a single frequency, it would be very useful. The military is extremely interested in this."

So far the researchers have only worked through the mathematics to prove that the device is plausible. The practicalities of making one have yet to be solved.

source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1766219,00.html