Silverlight change.

Developers say Microsoft has "betrayed" them by changing strategy on the Silverlight web technology. When first announced Silverlight was portrayed as a rival to Flash and key to getting Microsoft software running on many different devices. Now Microsoft is slowing Silverlight development and turning its attention to web standards such as HTML5. Silverlight will remain as a way to get apps running on Windows phone 7. The strategy shift emerged as a result of an interview that Bob Muglia, Microsoft's head of servers and tools division, gave at the company's Professional Developers Conference. In that interview, he said Silverlight was still "core" to Microsoft but the company was looking to other technologies such as HTML to get its software running on devices people use to get at online sites and services.

Mr Muglia clarified his comments in a blog post saying that exploding use of e-readers, tablets and different sorts of smartphones now made it "practically impossible" to get something like Silverlight running on all those devices. Like Adobe's Flash, Silverlight acted as a wrapper that, once installed on a machine, allowed that device to run code written for it. Many sites used it as a way to present rich video and multimedia to visitors. Silverlight also made it easier for developers to hook into the many back office systems Microsoft produces to help enrich the services that could be put online. Mr Muglia said the shift on strategy was not a "negative statement" but a recognition that the industry had changed. The furore kicked off by Mr Muglia's comments also led Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer to underscore the software giant's commitment to Silverlight technology in a statement of his own.

Despite this, many of the comments on Mr Muglia's blogpost took the software giant to task for the change. Developers described themselves as "betrayed", "disappointed" and "demoralised" by the decision. Others said they felt they had wasted the time they had invested in learning to use Silverlight and others said they would now consider changing to rival technologies. Many pushed for more clarification on the future of Silverlight and when the next version of the software will be available. Microsoft has only said it would talk about a release date for Silverlight 5 "in the coming months".

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Oracle to buy e-commerce software maker for $1B.

Oracle has agreed to buy e-commerce company Art Technology Group for about 1 billion dollars in a move designed to expand the range of services the business software giant can offer its customers. According to an announcement Tuesday, Oracle said it will pay 6 dollars a share for the company, which counts among its clients Best Buy, AT&T and Continental Airlines. The price represents a 46-per-cent premium to Art Technology's share price prior to the announcement of the deal.

The deal came as Oracle and its rivals like HP and IBM have intensified their acquisitions as they seek to offer a complete range of technology services to their customers. Oracle is currently involved in a fractious court battle with SAP over the illegal use of Oracle software by an SAP subsidiary. The case, which began Monday in Oakland, California, also threatens to worsen relations between Oracle and HP, whose current CEO Leo Apotheker, is the former boss of SAP and could be called to testify.

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Google sues the U.S. government.

Intensifying efforts to build its e-mail and cloud computing business, Google Inc. has taken the federal government to court to change a bidding procedure that it says favors rival Microsoft Corp. Google, which has been battling Microsoft across the country to gain a foothold in the $20-billion office software market, sued the U.S. Department of the Interior, alleging that it excluded Google’s bid to offer the e-mail system to the 88,000 employees throughout the agency. According to the lawsuit, filed Friday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the department specified that in replacing its older e-mail system, it would  consider software from Microsoft only.

For several years, Google has been battling to win territory in the global market for office and e-mail software, a sector Microsoft has long dominated with its Outlook and Office products.  The division of Microsoft that sells Office software, its largest unit, recorded nearly $19 billion in revenue this year. To distinguish its offerings, Google has long touted its Internet cloud, an approach that stores customers' e-mail and documents in Google’s remote data centers rather than on servers operated by businesses themselves. The cloud approach allows major customers to save money by outsourcing their own in-house e-mail systems. But Google has run into difficulties in its attempts to loosen the tight grip that Redmond, Wash., software giant Microsoft has on the e-mail market, which includes decades of relationships with some of the world’s largest businesses and government agencies.

Earlier this year, Google was frustrated in its efforts to offer its Google Apps e-mail product to the state of California, which ultimately chose Microsoft to serve e-mail to the state’s 200,000 employees. Google, which had been engaged in a long discussions with the state over the contract’s security and usability requirements, ultimately opted not to submit a bid and complained about what it saw as a pro-Microsoft bias in the bidding process. The state expressed regret that Google did not submit a bid.

In the case of the Interior Department, Google alleged that it was in effect prohibited from making a bid in the first place and that department officials had quietly been opening the door to Microsoft before the bidding process even began. The suit cites an April meeting between Google executives and William Corrington, the department’s chief of technology. The company contended that Corrington “informed Google that ‘a path forward had already been chosen’… and there would be no opportunity for Google to compete because its product was not compliant with DOI’s security requirements.”

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Google Android becomes No. 2 mobile OS.

In the smart-phone market, BlackBerrys got squeezed last quarter. Google Inc.'s Android overtook Research in Motion's BlackBerry as an operating system in the third quarter, and Apple Inc.'s iPhone surpassed the corporate stalwart as a handset, according to a report on U.S. sales by market research company NPD Group.

The Android operating system, which runs on nearly 100 separate devices, was in 44% of the phones bought during the quarter, NPD said. Apple’s iPhone was well behind, at 26.2%, while RIM's BlackBerry phones fell to 22% in the third quarter from 28% of units sold in the second quarter. In last year's third quarter, Android’s operating system was in only 3% of phones, while RIM's system held sway in 46% of the market, according to NPD. Apple also is taking a bite out of BlackBerry by selling 14 million phones in the third quarter, compared with 12 million by RIM. Of the nation's five best-selling handsets, the iPhone unseated the BlackBerry Curve 8500 as No. 1 during the third quarter, with LG Cosmos coming in third. Two popular Android phones, the Motorola Droid X and the HTC EVO 04, ranked fourth and fifth, respectively.

Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, a global capital markets research company, said that Apple's and Android’s successes come down to more phone applications and greater support from AT&T and Verizon. When the iPhone 4 becomes available for Verizon users in the first quarter of 2011, it could dent Android’s popularity, he said. I think when it becomes more accessible, quite a few consumers will switch to the iPhone and potentially slow down the growth of Android phones, Walkley said.

Nokia's Symbian continued to lead the market with a 37 per cent share, while Android had 17 per cent of the market. It has surpassed Research In Motion, Apple and Microsoft this year. Growing popularity of Android phones -- made by companies including Motorola Inc, HTC Corp and Samsung Electronics -- puts Google in a good position as handsets look set to surpass computers for browsing the Web.

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Data Broker compromising Facebook Security.

Facebook Inc. said that a data broker has been paying application developers for identifying user information, and that it had placed some developers on a six-month suspension from its site because of the practice. Some "apps," the small programs that let users play games or share information with each other on the social-networking site, were sending users' Facebook ID numbers to third-party marketing or data firms, in violation of Facebook's privacy policies. An ID can be used to look up a user's name and other publicly available information on the social network and link it to their use of the app. Such information can be used by companies that build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities. Facebook didn't identify the data broker that was buying user IDs. But it said it had reached an agreement with RapLeaf Inc., which it described as "the data broker who came forward to work with us on this situation." It's unclear whether Facebook is implicating RapLeaf and neither company responded to questions.

Under the agreement, Rap Leaf agreed to delete all Facebook user IDs in its possession, and also agreed "not to conduct any activities on the Facebook Platform" in the future, according to Facebook. In its post, Facebook said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for data brokers "because they undermine the value that users have come to expect from Facebook." While the apps weren't selling or granting data brokers access to data that users had set to be private, "this violation of our policy is something we take seriously," Facebook said. Facebook didn't specify which app developers it had suspended, but said it affects fewer than a dozen, mostly small ones. Facebook also said it was adding a mechanism so app developers that need to share a unique identifier with outside parties, such as content partners, can do so in an anonymous fashion. This new function will be released next week, and will be required of all apps by Jan. 1, 2011. The Journal investigation also found that MySpace and some of its popular apps were transmitting identifying information to outside advertising companies. Asked whether MySpace had found any app developers were selling user IDs, a MySpace spokesman said the company was "taking appropriate action" against developers that break its privacy rules.

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Blekko slashes the Search Engine.

Google Inc.'s dominant position in Web search isn't deterring other entrants. The latest, Blekko Inc., hopes to attract users by narrowing search results. The start-up, which formally is starting its service Monday, hopes to limit the number of spam or low-quality websites that show up for searches in categories such as health, cars and personal finance. Gaining a significant share in search—a market that generates more than $10 billion in advertising revenue annually in the U.S.—is a long shot. But some Internet analysts have voiced praise for Blekko.com, which has raised $24 million from venture-capital firms and well-known angel investors Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen.

The problem with Google, according to Blekko and some industry analysts, is a proliferation of search results of dubious quality. Sites listed often are filled with content whose source is unclear. Blekko, while using a Google-style search algorithm, relies on users to select which websites should appear in results for certain queries. That way, users can narrow searches to a slice of the Web—for example, a collection of hand-picked sites that are politically liberal, or those devoted exclusively to baseball. Queries that Blekko identifies as being health-related, for example, are limited to 76 authoritative information sources.

On the other hand, while Google might return some less-reliable sources, its results attempt to offer direct advice that a cold sufferer can use. Blekko's sources, while more authoritative, also feel more academic, addressing studies on zinc's effectiveness or why vitamin C may not be effective. Over the past few months, users in a private test of Blekko have created more than 3,000 collections of sites that people can search through by typing a so-called slash-tag and topic next to their search query. For example, typing "bottles/wine" limits searches only to wine sites such as WineSpectator.com. Blekko automatically triggers such limited searches for queries it identifies as being related to health, colleges, lyrics and several other popular topics. Mr. Skrenta said Blekko's initial goal is to identify the 50 best sites on the Web for the top 100,000 search categories. Its use of volunteers to identify those sites is modeled after Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.

Google in 2008 tried to give users more control over which sites turned up in their search results, with a feature called SearchWiki that allowed users to rerank, delete or add results for their own searches. The feature was abandoned this year in favor of allowing users with a Google account to mark search results they like with a star. There have been many attempts to directly challenge Google, with Microsoft Corp.'s Bing gaining some traction in recent years. Google powers nearly 70% of U.S. searches, while Bing handles nearly 20% and IAC/InterActiveCorp.'s Ask.com accounts for nearly 4% of the market, according to comScore Inc. Some start-ups have found the going tough. Cuil, a search company started by former Google engineers, was shut down in September after a two-year run and $33 million in funding. But others are pressing ahead, including start-ups that rely on users to create content and organize information on the Web. Entrants in that category include Quora.com, which began service publicly in June, and Mahalo.com, which opened in 2007.

In the 1990s, Blekko's Mr. Skrenta cofounded NewHoo, a human-edited directory of the Web that was later sold to Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project. Today Google occasionally uses the site to fill information gaps in some of Google's search results. Blekko—which takes the name Mr. Skrenta gave to his personal computer in college—employs 22 people, including former Google and Yahoo Inc. search engineers. He says his goal for the company is to become the No. 3 search engine.

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Discovery space shuttle launch with a new passenger.

When space shuttle Discovery blasts into space next week, there will be an unusual passenger onboard. A 300-pound humanoid robot named Robonaut 2, or R2, will hitch a ride along with the six astronauts who are making their way to the International Space Station. With its gold helmet and shiny metallic visor, R2 looks a little like a toned-down Metroid from the popular Nintendo video game, but it’s solely made up of a torso, two arms and two five-fingered hands. The idea is that R2 will be an astronaut’s assistant, helping out with routine tasks such as holding tools and vacuuming air filters.

Initially, R2 will be deployed on a fixed pedestal inside the space station, NASA said. Next steps include a leg for climbing through the corridors of the space station. Once fully built, NASA envisions R2 assisting astronauts during space walks, lending a hand with mechanical fixes to the outside of the space station. This might enable us to eliminate the astronaut’s space walks altogether, said Brandi K. Dean, a NASA spokeswoman. Space walks are very dangerous and it would be beneficial to have a robot do that sort of work. R2 was jointly developed and built by NASA and General Motors engineers at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. But some of engineering know-how and robotic innards came out of California locations, such as Malibu’s HRL Laboratories, Woodland’s JR3 Inc. and Santa Clara’s Cirexx International Inc.

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