Business DayTechnology

Roslan Rahman/Agence France-Presse Netgear hopes to attract more customers by offering wireless products for Internet-ready 3-D televisions.

Netgear, the maker of a number of wireless products, has a plan to beat its competitors, which include Belkin and Cisco, and double its revenue in the coming year. It involves the television.

Among a slew of new products the company announced on Friday, Netgear had a new category of wireless router that enables customers to connect televisions to the Web wirelessly using high bandwidth technologies.

Patrick Lo, Netgear’s chairman and chief executive officer, said in an interview that his company had moved beyond just connecting computers to the Internet, but hopes to push the boundaries of the next generation of televisions coming into homes today. Read more…

Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg News Vivek Kundra, chief information officer of the United States government.

Vivek Kundra is the chief information officer of the United States. His job is to help shape the use of technology in government and build tools to help the public navigate the incredible amount of data and information available.

Mr. Kundra started his career in government in 2001 as the information technology director for Arlington County, Va., and then went on to work for Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Later, he worked for Mayor Adrian Fenty of the District of Columbia before President Obama appointed him to the White House post in 2009. The following is an edited interview with Mr. Kundra:

What does it mean to be the chief information officer for the United States?

I have four priorities. First is to make sure we effectively manage the $80 billion in information technology funding for the government. Second, we want to optimize where that money is spent, driving efficiency and effectiveness across the entire government. Third is to create an open, transparent and participatory government, creating Web sites like data.gov. Lastly we are focused on cybersecurity, creating a new real-time security posture.

Can you talk a little about cybersecurity?

We’ve been pushing really aggressively to change the culture in the government when it comes to cybersecurity. In the old model, the government employees would write reports, which doesn’t make sense anymore for the real-time threats we see today.

What do you do differently to attack new threats?

Now we’ve been moving towards creating red teams and blue teams that can respond to a threat in real time. So we’re shifting our focus away from writing reports to actually fix the problems. Read more…

Screen shot from Apple e-mail sent to developers

Developers who have created applications for Apple products,  including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, began receiving e-mail invitations on Wednesday to submit applications to the coming Mac App Store.

Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, announced the company’s next foray into software delivery through the Mac App Store, a system designed to let users download software to their Macs, during product announcements last month.

Mr. Jobs said the company had learned a lot about software, gaming and content delivery through the Apple iTunes store and the iPhone and iPad and wanted to bring these resources and simplicity to the Mac desktop. Read more…

Noah Berger for The New York Times Checking in at Monique’s Chocolates in Palo Alto, Calif.

Technology companies, venture capitalists and retailers have expressed no small amount of enthusiasm for location-based Web services, which allow users to “check into” locations in order to connect with friends or cash in on special offers from businesses.

It is not clear whether the people who would actually be checking in share that excitement.

The number of people using location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla remains small, and does not appear to be growing, according to a report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

On any given day, 1 percent of adult Americans use a service that allows them to share their location, according to the report. Four percent of adult Internet users use location-based services at all, down from 5 percent of Internet users who said they used such services in May. Only 6 percent of people who use social networking sites also used location-based services. Read more…

The new Republican majority in the House has vowed to undo vast swaths of the Obama administration’s agenda for health care reform. But analysts predict that technology projects will be mostly off limits.

“The tech spending is set to go on,” said Lynne Dunbrack, an analyst in the Health Industry Insights unit for IDC, a technology research company. “The better use of health care technology to reduce costs and improve care has bipartisan support.”

The latest evidence of the corporate enthusiasm for this market comes from AT&T, which on Thursday is announcing a new division called AT&T ForHealth.

The new business is the result of 18 months of study and hiring, said Dan Walsh, an AT&T senior vice president. The new division’s staff includes 300 sales people and 20 others with medical and computing backgrounds who will work with industry partners, doctors, hospitals and community groups to tailor health technology offerings, he said.

The AT&T move is an effort to increase sales by fine-tuning the company’s basic networking and phone service to grab more of a market that appears poised for growth. Several major technology and telecommunications companies have recently created or aggressively enlarged their health technology portfolios, including Verizon, Cisco, General Electric and I.B.M. Read more…

SAP has agreed to pay $120 million to settle part of a lawsuit brought by Oracle over copyright infringement, according to a source familiar with the matter.

But the two companies will continue their battle in Federal District Court in Oakland, Calif., over the remainder of the case, which has transfixed Silicon Valley with personal attacks and the public airing of unflattering internal documents.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest mysteries of the trial is whether Léo Apotheker, SAP’s former chief executive, will testify in person. Mr. Apotheker is now Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive. The answer, at least for now, appears to be no. Oracle’s lawyers have been unable to serve Mr. Apotheker with the necessary paperwork. Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, has accused Mr. Apotheker of dodging the trial by staying overseas.

In a statement on Wednesday, Oracle said: “Hewlett-Packard has refused to accept service of a subpoena requiring Mr. Apotheker to testify about his role in SAP’s illegal conduct. Mr. Apotheker started work for H.P. on Monday, but it now appears that the H.P. board of directors has decided to keep him away from H.P.’s headquarters and outside the court’s jurisdiction. We will continue to try to serve him.”

As part of the proposed agreement, Oracle would no longer seek punitive damages from SAP for its admitted theft of Oracle software, according to the source, who could not speak on the record because the settlement agreement is sealed. However, Oracle would still be able to seek actual damages for what it has described as SAP’s vast copyright infringement scheme. Read more…

Although the Federal Trade Commission last week dropped its investigation of personal data inadvertently collected by Google’s StreetView cars, state authorities and officials in European and other countries are still looking into privacy issues related to the service. On this week’s Tech Talk podcast, Bettina Edelstein talks to Claire Cain Miller, a New York Times technology reporter who covers Google, about the latest developments. Ms. Miller says that Google has taken new steps aimed at protecting privacy, which satisfied the F.T.C., but consumer groups and privacy advocates are dismayed about the agency’s decision. Google recently revealed that in addition to location photos, its StreetView cars gathered passwords and e-mail from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.

Skip tracers, who hunt down information about people, know a thing or two about the kinds of personal details that can be found online. J.D. Biersdorfer chats with Frank M. Ahearn, a former information detective and co-author of “How to Disappear: Erase Your Digital Footprint, Leave False Trails and Vanish Without a Trace,” about how easy it is to use the Internet to find out about people. They also discuss ways you can protect your own privacy.

Pedro Rafael Rosado checks out a new toy: the Logitech F540 wireless headset, designed for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game consoles. He ended up using it on his stereo for unshackled late-night listening. While Logitech says the headset, which retails for $150, can get 10 hours of battery life, Mr. Rosado said he got six to seven hours.

Ms. Biersdorfer’s news roundup includes Barnes & Noble’s new color Nook e-reader, with a seven-inch LCD screen; word of Apple’s getting closer to its release of the iOS 4.2 update for the iPad; a new mobile Web browser, SkyFire, that lets you play Flash videos on iOS devices; and Sprint’s 4G mobile service arriving in New York City. Her tech tip of the week explains how to keep Outlook from leaving message windows open when you reply to mail.

To find more information about the podcast and the links to the show’s topics, go to the Tech Talk page. Read more…

NudgeMail

Do you ever feel as if there are e-mails in your inbox that are just staring at you? Taunting you as you click on newer messages? If they could speak, they would probably rudely say, “Hey buddy, look at me, you haven’t responded to me yet! Don’t click on that one, I’m more important!”

A new service, NudgeMail, which came out on Wednesday, might be able help, or at least make it easier to procrastinate with these messages.

NudgeMail lets you forward messages out of your inbox to NudgeMail’s inbox, which you can ask to return the message at a later date.

For example, if you have a message that you need to respond to the next day, you simply edit the e-mail’s subject line with “Tomorrow,” pass it along to NudgeMail and the next day you will receive an updated message back in your inbox. It’s like an e-mail boomerang, and you decide when it is returned. Read more…

Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York Times

We’ve all heard that adage “be careful what you wish for,” but could this be the case with the highly anticipated Verizon iPhone?

People have been waiting for this “dream phone” since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Now it seems likely to arrive early next year.

But what if mobile customers’ dreams come true and this fabled device appears? Could an influx of AT&T refugees and new customers cripple the robust Verizon network?

Verizon might not think so. Read more…

Mathias Mikkelsen via David McCandless data

David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer, is constantly playing with data sets available online and translating heaps of code into well-designed visual stories.

Some of Mr. McCandless’s notable projects include visualizing the billions of dollars spent by people and governments around the world and visually explaining the different views of United States politicians, divided by their political predilection.

Working with Lee Byron, an information interaction designer at Facebook, Mr. McCandless recently chronicled another interesting data set: when couples break up. Read more…

Facebook may not yet have plans to release a phone, but it is clearly intent on expanding its mobile reach.

On Wednesday, the company announced new features that will allow merchants and retailers to offer coupons and specials though the Facebook mobile application.

“It starts to solve an age-old problem that local businesses have always had,” said Emily White, director of local at Facebook. “They’ve been told they need to be online. But it hasn’t always been clear what the benefit is. That’s what this deals platform allows. It’s turning those fans, those visitors, those eyeballs into real dollars, real people and real business.”

Facebook members can see which deals are available when they use Places, Facebook’s location feature, which allows users to check into particular places and broadcast their location to friends. A yellow icon will denote whether there is a redeemable deal or coupon available for a particular venue. Users will show their phone’s screen to a merchant or cashier to claim the deal. Read more…

Help me out. I’ve been watching the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 ads on TV. They are very funny.

Smartphone-obsessed people are bumping into other people. A bride reads her phone walking down the aisle, a surgeon reads his during surgery. A man in bed ignores a woman in a slinky negligee. A man drops his phone in the urinal and quickly fishes it out.

Several of the aggrieved — the woman being ignored, the man next to the man at the urinal — say “Really?” Then the narrator says, “It’s time for a phone to save us from our phones.”

I’ve watched the commercial many times. It’s engaging and funny.

And completely mystifying. What is Microsoft’s point? Is it saying that the icons on the current crop of smartphones are too small, which causes people to focus too much on the screen?

The on-screen tiles of a Windows Phone 7 are large. But that doesn’t explain the man at the urinal. So is the message that a Microsoft phone will be less engaging, and you will use it only occasionally?

It wouldn’t be the first time Microsoft created bewildering ads. Remember the ones with Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? Or the notorious one, only briefly used, in which a woman vomits and a man slips in the vomit?

Interpret it for me.

Last year, when Marc Andreessen set up shop on Sand Hill Road, the tree-lined home to Silicon Valley’s venture capital firms, he was already a big name.

The Midwestern transplant, had co-founded Netscape, which made the first popular Web browser, and Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard bought for $1.6 billion. But he wanted to prove that he could become one of the storied venture capitalists who invest in the next big thing.

In 16 months, Mr. Andreessen’s firm, Andreessen Horowitz, which he started with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Opsware, has earned a solid reputation among entrepreneurs because it helps founders run their companies. It has also managed to break into the top ranks of venture capitalist firms by investing in some of the most competitive deals, like Foursquare and Zynga.

On Wednesday, Andreessen Horowitz cemented that status when it announced that it has raised $650 million for its second fund. The size of the fund is unusual and all the more remarkable because the firm is so new to the scene.

Although it is too early to judge the firm’s financial success, Andreessen Horowitz represents a new breed of venture capitalist who is financing new kinds of start-ups. They are shaking up an industry in need of change because returns for the decade ending in June were a negative 4.2 percent. Read more…

Google informed users of its Gmail service Tuesday evening that it had settled a class action lawsuit brought against it by some users who were upset by the way the company rolled out its Buzz social networking service.

You may remember it. Last February the company announced the service to its millions of Gmail users, who then discovered that their network of Buzz “friends” was created from their list of Gmail contacts. People they corresponded with, but who were not necessarily friends, were suddenly grouped together, and in some cases the contact lists were made public. A considerable amount of consternation resulted. Google quickly retreated.

But the settlement of the lawsuit won’t result in any monetary compensation for Gmail users. Instead, Google is putting $8.5 million into an independent fund that it says will be used to support organizations promoting education about privacy on the Web. Google said: “We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.”

Anyone who wants to object to the settlement must do so with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose before Jan. 10. No word yet on how much the lawyers will get.

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The new MacBook Air doesn’t include a DVD slot.

Remember the floppy disk? I’m willing to bet Steve Jobs does. I’m also willing to bet he remembers when he killed it.

It was 1998, to be precise, and the murder weapon was the new iMac, a computer that was missing the then-standard internal floppy drive.

Last month Mr. Jobs rang the final death knell for another piece of technology: optical discs like DVDs and CDs.

For this execution, his weapon of choice is the new MacBook Air, with a little extra help from the iTunes store, of course. Read more…