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Apple juggernaut sends ripples through tech world

NEW YORK -- Consumer technology companies reporting financial results this week are looking like rowboats bobbing in the wake of Apple's (AAPL) supertanker.
Close to oblivion in 1997, Apple is now the world's second-most-valuable company, after Exxon Mobil. On April 20, it reported net income of $5.99 billion for the January-to-March period, nearly double that of a year ago. It shipped a record 18.6 million iPhones during the quarter. Its iPad tablet computers are so popular, the company couldn't make enough.
Apple's ascendancy has produced many losers and a few winners, as underscored over the past two weeks:
Microsoft, loser: Apple dethroned Microsoft as the world's most valuable technology company a year ago. In its mid-fall report, it surpassed Microsoft in quarterly revenue. In the January-March period this year, it surpassed Microsoft in net income, too.
On Thursday, Microsoft reported that revenue from the Windows operating system declined for the second straight quarter because people are buying fewer Windows computers.
Some prospective buyers are going to Macs instead -- Apple reported that it sold 28 percent more units. Others are going to iPads. Goldman Sachs now believes that more than 30 percent of iPads sold may be replacing PC sales.

In the 1990s, the trend

was the opposite, as Windows PCs were crowding out Macs.
Nokia, loser: Nokia said this week that it will slash 7,000 jobs through layoffs and outsourcing. It still sells more phones than anyone else, but it is losing share to Apple, especially when it comes to smartphones.
Research firm Strategy Analytics also said revenue from Apple's iPhone sales surpassed that of Nokia's phones in the January-to-March period, as iPhones are much more expensive than the average Nokia phone. That makes Apple the world's largest phone maker by revenue.
To better compete with the iPhone, Nokia is ditching its old Symbian software and adopting Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. But the transition will take time; the first Windows-powered Nokia phones aren't expected until late 2011 or early 2012.
Research In Motion, loser: The maker of the BlackBerry is in a predicament that's similar to Nokia's. RIM warned Thursday that net income, revenue and unit sales for the quarter ending in May will come in below its previous forecast.
The company's high-end phones are looking old compared with the iPhone and ones running Google's (GOOG) Android software. They aren't selling as well as the company expected.
RIM promised investors that new phones with revamped software will bring sales roaring back in the latter half of the year, but investors are skeptical, sending RIM's stock down Friday.
HTC, Samsung Electronics and Motorola Mobility, winners, indirectly. Although all three companies compete with Apple's iPhone, they are doing well. Unlike Nokia and RIM, the three are betting on Google's Android system, which comes the closest to mimicking the look, feel and functions of the iPhone.
Motorola Mobility is a shadow of the old Motorola, once the world's second-largest maker of phones. But its focus on Android-powered smartphones is showing signs of success. It reported Thursday a near-doubling of smartphone sales in the first quarter.
HTC of Taiwan has been making smartphones for a decade, and sales are really taking off with the help of Android. On Friday, it reported selling 9.7 million in the first quarter.
For South Korea's Samsung, smartphone sales were a bright spot in the first quarter as overall phone sales declined and other electronics were weak. The company is embroiled in patent litigation with Apple.
Verizon Wireless, winner: The No. 1 U.S. cellphone carrier posted a jump in new contract-signing customers -- the more profitable kind -- after it introduced its version of the iPhone on Feb. 10, which ended AT&T's exclusive grip on the device in the U.S.
(Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications of New York and Britain's Vodafone.)
AT&T and Sprint Nextel, mixed: Verizon's new subscribers came at the expense of AT&T and Sprint Nextel. But neither carrier saw signs of current customers moving to Verizon for the sake of the iPhone. Rather, it seems customers weighing between carriers were more likely to go to Verizon because of the iPhone.
AT&T appeared to be splitting new iPhone customers evenly with Verizon Wireless.
Sprint lost lucrative contract customers in the quarter, but continued its long turnaround by signing up a record number of people on cheaper, contract-free plans.

Lost In The iPhone Location FUD

Last week, I was on vacation and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do any work. I was still lightly browsing tech news just because I really enjoy reading tech news — yes, even on vacations. I came across the Apple location story and started to read some of the commentary about the situation. Most of it was idiotic. Pure FUD. It was really hard not to open my laptop and start typing — so I tweeted some snark instead. But now I’m back. And now Apple has officially weighed in. It’s time to start typing.

The situation is a joke.

That’s not to say the actual issue at hand is a joke, but rather the coverage of the issue is. In that regard, it reminds me a lot of “Antennagate” last year. It was the biggest deal ever. It was the death of the iPhone. It was the end of Apple. …in the press. The reality of the situation was the vast majority of actual consumers didn’t give a shit — and rightly so. Apple sold more iPhones than ever last year — by a wide margin. The device is now the source of the majority of revenues for the company.

But it’s a broken device, remember?

As I maintained throughout the fiasco, the issue with the antenna was real, but it really wasn’t a big deal. The same is true here.

Reading the press coverage this past week, you’d think Apple was watching your every move. You might think they were plotting to rob your home. Or at the very least, they were going to make it easy for criminals to use your iPhone against you to rob your home. If you carried an iPhone, you were going to be attacked by shadowy villains tracking you. That was the basic gist across dozens of publications.

This fear mongering quickly spread to other companies in the mobile space. Google. Microsoft. They’re all out to get you. They’re all tracking your information to give to criminals. The motives weren’t entirely clear. But the intent was. Evil.

And now that Apple has formally weighed in with a lengthy explanation (which Robin translated into slightly easier to understand and humorous terms) of the issues, the FUD has slowed, but doesn’t appear to be stopping. “Okay, so Apple isn’t tracking you, but they’re tracking the cell towers you’re close to — which is the same thing.” That’s this week’s more convoluted variation of “Apple is tracking you.” The underlying FUD is the same. They’re out to get you. And they will!

Let’s take a step back for a moment.

What Apple is actually doing is collecting data points to build up their own location database, as Erick explained last week. Why? Because as we first reported last year, in April 2010, Apple made the move to ditch former partners Skyhook Wireless and Google, who were previously supplying them with such a database — information necessary for all location services on the phone.

And guess how those guys built-up and updated those databases? The same way (though as Apple briefly mentioned today, each company that collects such information has different methods for doing so). Previously, the iPhone was sending this same type of information to Skyhook. Now they’ve taken full control of that information. Apple likes to be in control of its own products. This should be absolutely no surprise.

Building an all-encompassing location database is hard. Really hard. By far the best way to do it is to crowdsource the creation. And the best way to do that is to use the mobile devices that people have on them. Otherwise it would be back to using cars to drive around constantly getting this information (which I believe both Skyhook and Google have done) and the data is less consistent, less up-to-date, and harder to get.

The alternative is to use GPS data. But that can take several minutes to get at times. Or if you’re indoors, it might not work at all. This means that location services, including many of the location-based apps that are now popular, would not work.

So instead your mobile device is used to anonymously record, encrypt and send this cell tower and WiFi hotspot data to Apple. The keywords “anonymously” and “encrypt” are paramount here, yet both have been downplayed in nearly every story on the issue. Apple has no clue who you are based on this data. They have no way to know that. And they have no reason to want to know that. And anyone trying to snatch this data out of the sky would not be able to read it.

The problem — that is, the actual problem — is the way each iPhone has been keeping these logs. That leads to three sub-issues, none of which are as big as the FUD would have you believe. But they do need to be addressed. And they are.

The first issue is that the location log is really big. In fact, it could span years, showing your general movements throughout that time. That’s how the nifty research behind this ordeal came about.

Theoretically, someone could steal your phone, hack it, and get access to this data. This could potentially show them where you were up until the point they stole your phone. (Of course, given that they stole/found your phone, they would probably already know that.)

But wait. If they stole/found your phone, couldn’t they also have access to information like your address, the addresses of friends/family, all your phone numbers, perhaps some passwords, maybe monetary information? Yes, but that’s not as sexy of a story.

Oh, and if your phone had any app like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc, they could just open those apps and get all your actual location information without hacking the device? Yep, but again, Apple has nefarious intent here, remember?

Let’s face it, our phones have a lot of potentially personal information about us on them beyond just location. That’s why it really sucks when we lose them or they’re stolen. And just imagine when these devices all have NFC chips in them for easy payments. That’s really going to suck. I’m sure the FUD stories will start about that in the next year or so.

But back to the issue at hand. Apple SVP Scott Forstall explains the log length mistake (and that’s exactly what Apple is claiming it is — and there doesn’t appear to be a reason to believe otherwise) pretty well in an interview with Mobilized’s Ina Fried:

We picked a size, around 2MB, which is less than half a song. It turns out it was fairly large and could hold items for a long time.

Two megabytes does sound very small. But this data is very small, so the iPhone is holding a lot of it. Apple will be correcting this to make sure only roughly seven days worth of data is cached on the device going forward with a software update.

Why cache at all? As Forstall explains and Apple hits on a bit in their statement, if they didn’t do this, they’d have to do location calculations on the server. Though not explicitly said, that would be both slower and potentially less secure. Also only briefly mentioned is that this anonymous data can help third-party developers debug when an app crashes.

Another — again, real, but minor — issue is that when you backed up your iPhone, this location data log was transfered over to your computer. If you select to encrypt your backups as an option, it was encrypted. If you don’t, it was not (but still protected). Because of that, someone could technically steal or access the computer you sync your iPhone with and get access to this file(s).

Of course, if they stole or accessed your computer… hopefully you know where I’m going here.

Regardless, Apple has determined that they should no longer backup this location cache, and with the upcoming software update, they no longer will.

The final — and actually most important — issue is that when you turned off sharing your location, Apple was still generating the anonymous logs for their location database. They shouldn’t have been, and they acknowledge that saying it too was a “bug”. Bug or oversight, they’re also going to correct this shortly.

So that’s it. Three issues, each of which is being corrected with a simple software update. Were these mistakes? Yes. But they could each be easily chalked up to rookie mistakes in Apple’s first foray into location database building. What they cannot be chalked up to is evil intent.

Further, the fear-mongering going on about these issues is just insane. These issues have persisted in iOS for a long time now. How many incidents have they lead to? Even if Apple didn’t fix them, what’s the likelihood that they would lead to any sort of incident? It would take a separate criminal act (stealing or illegally accessing/hacking your phone/computer) to even get to the point where a perpetrator could potentially do something with the data. And even then they would only know approximately where you’ve been in the past.

Okay, well what about the police or government using this data to track you? If they really wanted/needed to, they would go to the phone companies and do it that way. They would not look at your WiFi triangulation logs.

I’ve been sitting on panels about location issues for a few years now. The discussion always falls to the same place: privacy and security. But the funny thing is that increasingly, it’s not the “regular” users who take the discussion there, it’s those of us in the media who know this is the sexy thing to talk about because it sounds scary.

This also extends to the recent stories in the Wall Street Journal and other publications that range from oddly out of touch to wildly misinformed about technology, privacy, and security in general. (As a sidenote, isn’t it great when a company that makes money by dishing out subscriber data to marketers complains about privacy and security?)

F U D

Are there real issues to think about and debate? Of course. But there’s a way to do that without knowingly being an asshat in an attempt to drive fear.

Guess what? The phone that you bought at least partially because it offers you access to cool new location services, needs location data for those services to work. How dare they! Let’s sue! Oh, you’re a Senator? Let’s attempt to make a name for ourselves in the press by leveraging this overblown controversy in the guise of protecting the people.

Let’s be honest: no one is going to be talking about this issue in a few weeks. Why? Because it’s not actually a huge security issue and never was. It’s one that the press really badly wanted to be one. It generated hundreds if not thousands of widely read stories this past week. And it will generate more such stories for the next few weeks or so, depending on if and when Apple is actually called to Washington to testify about this.

Forget about balancing the budget, Apple’s phones with location capabilities that need to collect locations to work are collecting locations! I just read about it in all the major papers! It’s a big deal. We’ll figure out why later.

Then all of a sudden, everyone will stop talking about this issue. It will be completely forgotten. On to the next FUD.


Via - www.techcrunch.com

Jobs and Apple Execs on Tracking Down the Facts About iPhones and Location

Although Apple was silent for several days after researchers raised issues about location information being stored on the iPhone, that wasn’t because it was ignoring the issue.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Mobilized that the company wanted to figure out exactly what was and wasn’t happening, and then figure out the best way to explain a complex set of issues to its customers.

“We’re an engineering-driven company,” Jobs said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.”
During the phone interview, Jobs and senior vice presidents Phil Schiller and Scott Forstall talked about what information the iPhone is and isn’t collecting, some lessons learned and the need for the industry to do a better job of explaining things to customers.
Jobs declined to say whether he thought Google or others needed to do a better job on privacy issues, but did note that Apple’s approach is different.
“Some of them don’t do what we do,” Jobs said. “That’s for sure.”
Jobs said that the company is leading the way when it comes to privacy and said Apple looks forward to testifying before any congressional inquiries on such issues. During the talk, the execs also touched briefly on the release of the long-delayed white iPhone. Also, Jobs declined to comment on when he might return full time to Apple.
Here is an edited transcript of the interview:
One of the challenges here is that, by their nature, location-based services require location information, but that information is highly sensitive and can be used in a lot of ways. How does Apple approach this balance?
Jobs: I think we do two things. Number one is we get consent from users if we are going to use location, or we never use location. That’s what we do. It’s very straightforward.
We haven’t been tracking anybody’s location and the files they found on these phones, as we explained, it turned out were basically files we have built through anonymous, crowdsourced information that we collect from the tens of millions of iPhones out there.
We build a crowdsourced database of Wi-Fi and cell tower hot spots, but those can be over 100 miles away from where you are. Those are not telling you anything abut your location. That’s what people saw on the phone and mistook it for location.
Is there anything that you guys have learned over the last week or so and take away from this?
Forstall: One thing I think we have learned is that the cache we had on the system–the point of that cache, is we do all the location calculations on the phone itself so no location calculations are done separately. You can imagine in an ideal world the entire crowdsourced database is on the phone and it just never has to talk to a server to do these calculations (or) to even get the cache.
What we do is we cache a subset of that. We picked a size, around 2MB, which is less than half a song. It turns out it was fairly large and could hold items for a long time.
We had that protected on the system. It had root protection and was sandboxed from any other application. But if someone hacks their phone and jailbreaks it, they can get to this and misunderstand the point of that.
It’s all anonymous and cannot be traced back to any individual phone or person. But we need to be even more careful about what files are on the phone, even if they are protected.
Jobs: As new technology comes into the society there is a period of adjustment and education. We haven’t, as an industry, done a very good job educating people, I think, as to some of the more subtle things going on here. As such, (people) jumped to a lot of wrong conclusions in the last week. I think the right time to educate people is when there is no problem. I think we will probably ask ourselves how we can do some of that, as an industry.
A bunch of folks on the regulatory side, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, said they are going to look into this. Do you guys plan on testifying before Congress? How active do you personally and does Apple want to be?
Jobs: I think Apple will be testifying. They have asked us to come and we will honor their request, of course. I think it is great that they are investigating this and I think it will be interesting to see how agressive or lazy the press is on this in terms of investigating the rest of the participants in the industry and finding out what they do. Some of them don’t do what we do. That’s for sure.
It seems like one of the issues is on the app level. You have apps that do as little, on the Android side, as providing battery information and want access to the dialer and location information. Do you think consumers ought to be paying attention to the individual apps they are using and what sorts of permissions those apps (require)?
Jobs: We think so, and that’s why we were the first to institute a procedure that cannot be worked around by applications where if any application wants access to location data, it has to ask the user first. It has to get the user’s permission on a per-application basis.
You mentioned in the statement today that Apple is using the collective location data to build a collective traffic database. At our D8 Conference last year you talked about the importance of full disclosure by the industry. Do you think Apple and other companies need to let people know specifically what you guys are doing with the information and choose whether to participate in these commercial projects, or do you think Apple and others should have fairly broad use of anonymized data?
Jobs: If people don’t want to participate in things, they will be able to turn location services off. Once we get a bug that we found fixed, their phone will not be collecting or contributing any crowdsourced information. But nor will it be calculating location.
Schiller: Sometimes it helps people to understand an analogy that describes what these things are like because they are so new. I would think an analogy of a crowdsourced database is every time you walk into a retail store, many retailers have a clicker that counts how many people come in and out of the store. Nobody really cares about that because it is completely anonymous. It is not personal data. It is not anything to worry about. It’s not something that people feel is private because it is really not about them. It’s a coagulated total of all traffic. These crowdsourced databases are sort of like that.
Things like that aren’t so scary when you think about them in everyday terms.
Is traffic the only thing you are using that collective data for, or do you have other plans?
Jobs: We mention the traffic service and I think that is all we are going to mention at this point in time before we have something to announce.
But you are not saying that is the only thing you might use it for?
Jobs: We are building a crowdsourced database based on traffic and that is what we are saying.
Is there a need for any finer level of control, or is the on-off switch the right way to go?
Forstall: We are really vigilant about privacy and location and we have worked really hard to make the experience as transparent as possible and give the user full control. As you say, whenever any user wants any application to access their location, the user has to approve that on a per-application basis. That’s even true for Apple’s built-in applications.
In addition, whenever any application uses location, an indicator appears in the status bar. In settings, you can see a list of every single application on the phone that a user has approved for location and the ones that they have not approved for location. They can actually go and turn it off temporarily for an app, if they like. In addition, any application which has used location within the last 24 hours is shown, with an indicator in settings. So a user can know which applications that a user has approved for location have actually used location recently. We think this is incredibly fine grain and the best out there.
Steve, how active have you been in examining this issue over the past couple of weeks?
Jobs: It hasn’t been a couple of weeks. This all started last Wednesday and we put out our response this morning. It took us slightly less than a week. Scott and Phil and I have worked together over this last week, first to investigate the problem.
We’re an engineering-driven company. When people accuse us of things, the first thing we want to do is find out the truth. That took a certain amount of time to track all of these things down. And the accusations were coming day by day. By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days. Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.

Apple Risks Following Google as Europe Leads Privacy Probes

Apple Inc. (AAPL) may face greater scrutiny in the European Union than the U.S. as regulators investigate possible data-privacy lapses betraying the location of iPhone and iPad users.
The Apple probes in Europe echo similar inquiries that have dogged Google Inc. (GOOG) over wireless Internet data collected by its Street View service, said Nick Graham, head of the London Internet and data protection group of law firm SNR Denton.
“Issues that may not look terribly serious in the U.S. can have much greater significance and seriousness here in Europe, as Google has found out in connection with the WiFi,” said Graham. “There is this tension between the U.S. rules which are much narrower and the EU rules which are much broader.”
Regulators in Germany, France and Italy said last week they are checking whether Apple’s iPhone and iPad products violate privacy rules by tracking, storing and sharing data about the locations of users. U.S. lawmakers this week sent letters to six companies, including Apple and Google to determine how location data is stored on mobile device systems and how it’s transmitted.
The investigations followed a report by O’Reilly Radar, a website owned by Sebastopol, California-based publisher O’Reilly Media. It said Apple devices log latitude-longitude coordinates along with the time of visits to locations across the globe.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, said yesterday it isn’t tracking the users’ location and plans to reduce the amount of data the iPhone stores.

‘Never’

“Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone,” the company said in a statement. “Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.”
It said the iPhone saves information on WiFi hotspots and cellular towers near a handset’s current location, which helps the phone determine its location when needed by the user.
Data protection has been a thorn in the side of U.S. technology companies in Europe. While Google has been targeted by regulators across the EU for its Street View program, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission dropped a probe last October after the world’s biggest Internet search company said it would improve privacy safeguards.
“Sometimes the regulators in Europe will go for big brands like Google, and Apple is a big brand,” said Graham. “It will be perceived as a brand that should be demonstrating greater privacy compliance because of its market position.”
Google was fined 100,000 euros ($147,000) in France last month for violating the country’s privacy rules. Dutch watchdogs on April 19 gave the company three months to inform users about private data collected via WiFi by its Street View cars.

‘Scrutinized’

Apple has “seen what happened with Street View, they’re not just going to go ahead and ask afterwards whether it was OK,” said Carsten Casper, research director at Gartner Research in Berlin. The more Apple and Google “mature and the bigger and commercially successful they become, the more they’re getting scrutinized.”
Any tracking technology has to be “proportionate” and allow “users to give consent,” said Matthew Newman, a spokesman for EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. The issue will be tackled in proposals for an overhaul of the EU’s 16- year-old data-protection rules later this year, he said.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, said all location-sharing on phones based on its Android software requires an opt-in from the user.
“We provide users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide a better mobile experience on Android devices,” said Google spokesman Ollie Rickman in an e-mail.
Even where a U.S. company says data is anonymous, it may still breach EU rules, depending how the scope of personal data is defined, Graham said.

‘Sent Anonymously’

“The most important thing may be to prove that the data is being sent anonymously,” said Jeff Fidacaro, an analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group in New York. “It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out.”Separately, the U.K. and Irish information watchdogs said they will investigate the hacking of Sony Corp. (6758)’s PlayStation Network after the company warned 77 million customers may have had their personal data stolen.

The Irish Office of the Data Protection Commissioner said it asked Sony for a report on the breaches. The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office will make additional enquiries before deciding whether to take further action, the regulator said yesterday.

Android overtakes iPhone in consumer desirability


Android is now the most desired smartphone operating system, reports market research company Nielsen. According to Nielsen’s figures from January to March 31 percent of consumers indicate Android as their preferred operating system. Apple’s iOS’s share was 30 percent.
Android did overtake iPhone quite quickly. Nielsen did the same study in July-September 2010. During that time, 33 percent of consumers wanted an iPhone and 26 percent wanted a device with Android operating system.
Desirability can also be seen in consumer behavior. Half of all smartphones purchased in the last six months are using Google’s Android operating system.
iPhone’s share among the recent acquirers was 25 percent, RIM’s 15 percent and Windows Phone 7 had a 7 percent share. The total installed base of smartphones is also dominated by Android — 37 percent of all smartphones in the U.S. are Android phones. Apple’s market share is 27 percent and RIM BlackBerry’s 22 percent.
One thing that could explain Android’s popularity is the variety of available Android smartphones. There are Android phones in multiple price categories and features vary from basic entry-level phones to the latest state-of-the-art smartphones.
Apple offers only high-end iPhones and that possibly explains the difference in desirability and new phone sales in Nielsen’s data. The iPhone is desired by many, but there are an overwhelming amount Android phones that are more affordable, as well as some that offer more features.

Possible iPhone 5 photos leaked

Possible iPhone 5 picture

Blurry images of what could be Apple’s next version of the iPhone have been posted online that reveal subtle design changes to the device like a wider screen, curved back and thinner body.

If the pictures do prove to be genuine, it would be the world’s first glimpse of the iPhone 5.

The design shown in the leaked photo is consistent with earlier rumors about what to expect from the next iPhone, with the exception of the size of the home button. As previously stated, it does have a wider screen, possibly a curved back and a slimmer body, but those details aren’t nearly as pronounced as seen in the iPhone 5 mock-up that recently made it way around the net. The image also features the new proximity sensor shown in the soon-to-be-released white iPhone 4.

But, some remain skeptical that the alleged iPhone images are real, including M.I.C. Gadget, which posted them. The quality of the photos are admittedly not very good, and it wouldn’t take much effort for a graphic designer to manipulate.

But if it isn’t a photo-manipulation, then what is shown in the image is likely a prototype device and not an iPhone off of a production line. We reported earlier in the month that Apple has yet to send touchscreen panel makers a production roadmap, which suggests that iPhone 5 production won’t start until at least September.

Source - www.venturebeat.com

Greenpeace Ranks Data Centers, Names Yahoo Cleanest And Apple The Dirtiest

Greenpeace just released its latest snapshot of major corporation’s impact on the planet with IT data centers the main target. The 35 page report [PDF link] details just how much energy is required to run the massive centers powering the so-called cloud. It’s huge according to Greenpeace, consuming 1.5%-2% of the world’s total power consumption and growing at a rate of 12% a year. Somewhat surprisingly Greenpeace sort of applauds the virtues of living in a massive data cloud, pointing to the advent of the smart grid and increased amount telecommuting. Even digital streaming music gets props for having a smaller carbon footprint than physical media.

But this is Greenpeace and so there has to be some finger pointing and letter grading. The main purpose of this report is to reveal top company’s impact on the environment by mainly examining their dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels rather than using renewable sources. However, even Greenpeace notes that these numbers might not be exact since they were calculated without all the facts. Simply put, these ten companies didn’t divulge this info; Greenpeace pieced together their data. It’s a bit dirty itself, actually.

The main chart in the report lists ten major data hosting services. Yahoo, Google, and Amazon score top marks on the Clean Energy Index for their investment in renewable energy services such as geothermal power and wind farms. (higher number wins) The Coal Intensity column indicates the company’s dependency of coal. (low number wins)

Greenpeace applauds Yahoo’s practice of situating data centers near sources of clean energy. The report also notes that Yahoo no longer purchases carbon offsets and is striving towards energy efficiency with a self-set goal of reducing data center’s carbon intensity by at least 40% by 2014.

Apple scores at the bottom of both scales partly because of its massive new data center that will draw its power off of North Carolina’s coal-powered grid. Facebook and Google also have large data centers located in the same NC area, an area dubbed the dirty triangle by Greenpeace. Facebook is right there with Apple in the rankings, but Google’s commitment to clean energy, including a $100 million wind farm investment, helps offset the coal in Greenpeace’s eyes.

Still, it’s important to remember that Greenpeace admits it does not have all the facts here. The Transparency column grades these companies on their willingness to share energy data publicly. Understandably, most don’t want to share their energy and accompanying financial data.

source - www.crunchgear.com

Amazon Hints at Android Strategy With Latest App Promotion

Amazon is rolling out a new promotion on Monday that reveals how it could package together its various efforts in the wireless industry.

The first promotion kicking off at midnight will give customers who buy an Android device from Verizon Wireless $25 to spend on applications from the Amazon Appstore.

The offer ties together Amazon’s wireless store, which sells a variety of phones for all the major wireless carriers, and its brand new Appstore, which is an independent catalog of apps for Google’s Android operating system.

It also leans on tight relationships Amazon has formed with carriers, said David Camp of Amazon Wireless.

The promotion will continue for a week, and is only valid on Android phones purchased by Verizon, including the new HTC Thunderbolt, which runs on its speedy 4G network.

The promotion is designed to give Amazon’s Appstore, which just launched last month a boost. But it also hints at the company’s interest in Android and a broader strategy it could be pursuing.

So far, it’s unclear how well the storefront, which is accessible on the computer and the handset, has been received — and Amazon is not sharing download figures. But it has almost doubled the number of apps available for sale from to 7,500 from 3,800 over the past few weeks.

That’s despite the fact that the International Game Developers Association cautioned game-makers about Amazon’s strict pricing conditions. Downloads could also be soft due to the fact that AT&T has blocked users from being able to download third-party apps, including Amazon’s Appstore, to Android devices. The U.S. storefront is available by users from T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint.

So far, Amazon’s various interest in the wireless industry has seemed a little scattered. However, this promotion, starts to bring it into focus, and hints at how Amazon could weave together its strategies to drive sales to its own properties.

It also shows how important the retailer could be to Google.

Today, Camp says that Android devices are the best-sellers on its storefront (the big caveat is that it doesn’t sell the iPhone).

Beyond its cellphone store at AmazonWireless.com and the digital Appstore, Amazon has also released a bevvy of applications, including shopping portals, barcode scanners, Kindle apps for virtually every device and an MP3 store. More recently, it rolled out a Cloud Player, which allows people to store their music and other digital content in the cloud, making it accessible from both Android devices and an Internet-connected computer.

Monday’s promotion is just the start. “We will continue to do things like this in the future,” Camp adde
source - www.emoney.com
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