Bidding stalled on Tuesday in the closely watched auction of a piece of wireless airwaves that the U.S. government is selling, according to data released by the Federal Communications Commission. There were no new offers for the nationwide "C" block slice of wireless spectrum to top previous high bids totaling $4.74 billion. Tuesday's pause prompted speculation that bidding for the C block spectrum may have run its course, and that the most likely possible winner could be either Verizon Wireless or Internet search leader Google. Bidders' identities are kept secret until the entire auction ends, under FCC rules. The end won't come until bidding has stopped on all five blocks of spectrum up for sale in the auction, which will probably take at least another week or two. The $4.74 billion in bids for eight regional pieces of the C block on Monday surpassed a $4.71 billion offer made last Thursday for a nationwide package of the spectrum. Stifel Nicolaus analyst Rebecca Arbogast said there were several possible scenarios as to which companies had bid on the C block airwaves. The most likely of those, she said, is that Verizon Wireless pushed the C block bids up to $4.74 billion on Monday in order to top an earlier bid by Google. It was also possible that the earlier, $4.71 billion offer was made by Verizon Wireless, and that another competitor is aiming to force Verizon to up its bid, Arbogast said. Bidding on the C block had temporarily stalled on Friday after Thursday's $4.71 billion offer. That bid exceeded a $4.64 billion minimum price set by the FCC and triggered a condition sought by Google that would require the winner to make the spectrum accessible to any device or software application. Analysts have said Google may drop out of the bidding after hitting the minimum price, content to let Verizon acquire the C block spectrum as long as the open-access conditions are guaranteed. The C block is one of five groups of 700-megahertz spectrum being offered. The top bids on Tuesday totaled almost $18.94 billion for all five blocks, raising more money than any previous FCC auction. The 700-megahertz signals are valuable because they can go long distances and penetrate thick walls. The airwaves are being returned by television broadcasters as they move to digital from analog signals in early 2009. Other potential bidders in the auction that began January 24 range from entrenched carriers AT%26T and Verizon Wireless, to possible new competitors like Google, EchoStar Communications and Cablevision Systems. Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group.

Cisco told investors on Wednesday exactly what they didn't want to hear: that growth slowed dramatically in January and may not rebound for several months. The assessment from CEO John Chambers on the company's conference call sent Cisco's shares skidding by 7% in after-hours trading to a new 52-week low. Cisco's sales for the quarter that ended in January rose 16.5% to $9.83 billion, just ahead of Wall Street estimates, while pro forma earnings of 38 cents a share, or $2.4 billion, met the Thomson Financial consensus estimate. But Chambers said sales growth slowed to less than 10% last month, and while he said that may be an "aberration," he said it was prudent to assume that the "extremely challenging" environment "may continue for the next several months," so the company lowered its sales growth forecast to 10%. Wall Street analysts were looking for 15% growth in the current quarter. "We are seeing our U.S. and European customers being increasingly cautious," said Chambers, but he added that the company remains well positioned to meet its long-term growth target of 12-17%. The news followed other weak recent economic indicators %26#151; including an unexpected slump in the service sector last month that sent U.S. stocks plunging on Tuesday. Stocks lost ground again on Wednesday, as a Federal Reserve official's warning about inflation added to slowdown fears. JDS Uniphase was a bright spot, soaring 26% after beating estimates and raising guidance, and Multi-Fineline was up 37% on its results. Micron fell 10.8% on inventory concerns. FormFactor, CNET, Riverbed, Travelzoo, CommVault, Double-Take and Radisys fell on their results. The Nasdaq lost 30 to 2278, the S%26P fell 10 to 1326, and the Dow lost 65 to 12,200. Volume declined to 3.98 billion shares on the NYSE, and 2.47 billion on the Nasdaq. Decliners led by a 20-12 margin on the NYSE, and 19-10 on the Nasdaq. Downside volume was 69% on the NYSE, and 74% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 15-80 on the NYSE, and 41-129 on the Nasdaq.

NEW YORK -- With the $5 billion acquisition of business intelligence provider Cognos formally concluded last Thursday, IBM wasted no time unveiling a slew of new products and its plan for integrating the company into its information-on-demand (IOD) strategy. Addressing analysts and press in the rooftop suite of the St. Regis Hotel here in Midtown Manhattan, Steve Mills, IBM's software group executive, heralded Cognos as the culmination of two years of acquisitions and initiatives to improve how companies store, organize, retrieve and visualize data. "The Cognos acquisition completes %26#91;an%26#93; end-to-end set of capabilities IBM can offer," Mills said, adding quickly that IBM would continue its aggressive pursuit of the business-optimization market. "It's not just the roadmap we've been on -- it's the roadmap going forward." Ottowa-based Cognos's visualization and reporting applications will put a face on IBM's IOD initiative, begun almost exactly two years ago. Through purchases of companies like FileNet, Princeton and Solid Information Technologies, IBM amassed the core information-management and in-memory database infrastructure to build a suite of dynamic business-data storage solutions scalable to companies of all sizes. But Big Blue still lacked one element. Cognos delivers the visualization and reporting that allow companies to peer into their data to make better business decisions -- "the top of the iceberg that carries the whole thing forward," Mills said. Because IBM and Cognos both use open standards and architectures, businesses can tap their tools to aggregate "any data, anywhere, %26#91;using%26#93; any application," he said. That's fortunate, since according to IBM, enterprises face a lack of advanced BI and IOD tools. While every business that IBM consults with has a clear idea of what products they want to put in place to improve operational inefficiencies, they rarely have a vision for their "information agenda," said Ambuj Goyal, IBM's general manager of information management software. For IBM, that is the difference between business automation and business optimization. Slippery terms, to be sure, but Goyal summed it up in brief: "Information on demand is about unlocking the business value of information." The goal is to level the barriers created when an organization's data is siloed, said Rob Ashe, who previously served as Cognos's CEO before assuming the position of vice president of IBM's newly created Business Intelligence and Performance Management division. Ashe said a unified BI application produces "coordinated decision making." For instance, it can ensures a company's marketing and customer service departments are able to access the same information packaged in a customizable, user-friendly dashboard. He will have 35,000 employees across IBM's three major units of software, hardware and services supporting the BI efforts that he is to lead. Cognos' operations will remain in Ottawa. When BI companies like Cognos burst on the scene, they offered "whiz-bang reporting," Marc Andrews, IBM's director of IOD and Cognos integration marketing, told InternetNews.com. Yet, two reports could produce wildly differing data, he said. As a result, the problem of flashy but faulty data representations highlighted the precariousness of the standalone BI industry. That's where IBM came in. Cognos will become the face of IBM's underlying IOD campaign, advancing its business-optimization services for companies of all sizes. Business optimization -- what Ashe called the "marrying of future data with historic data to get a complete picture" -- is the fastest-growing segment of IBM's industry, the executives said. IBM wasn't the first enterprise computing powerhouse to recognize the need to add BI capabilities. The acquisition followed SAP's $6.7 billion bid for Business Objects in October, and Oracle's $3.3 billion purchase of Hyperion last March. Fortunately for IBM, a 15-year relationship between it and Cognos, and the open standards and architecture that each uses, has helped it move quickly to integrate the smaller company into its operating structure. "They fit hand and glove," Ashe said, noting that the buyout received approval of 99 percent of Cognos' shareholders. The integration seems to be proceeding briskly also given the laundry list of products announced today, less than two months after IBM announced the acquisition. IBM showed off 10 Cognos-enabled industry-specific applications that (according to IBM's promotional literature) "turn information into a strategic asset." These include shelf-space management and store planning for retailers, financial risk-planning for banks and crime-management insight for government agencies. Company executives also introduced a Compliance Warehouse -- a unified software, hardware and services environment to support a business's legal compliance efforts with Cognos reporting. The Compliance Warehouse includes a content repository, records management services, e-mail archiving and Tivoli and Lotus software, among other features. The other new products IBM announced today included a Cognos 8 BI "starter pack" for IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, pre-integration of Cognos 8 with IBM's information server platform and bundling of IBM's Dashboard Accelerator with Cognos 8 BI. Given Big Blue's long business history with Cognos, Mills said he had often been asked why IBM opted to purchase the company, rather than continue operating as independent partners. "The world around us is changing," he said. "The phenomenal escalation of data volume demanded tightened integration" of the two companies' applications. Citing projections of a 100-fold increase in the number of bytes over the next four years, Mills said consolidation of the two companies was a natural move. He also said IBM would continue to invest further in Cognos technology, research and development. "We acquired Cognos for leverage," Mills said. "We buy companies for lift, for growth, for strategic advantage -- not just for mass." After all, he said, "anytime you invest $5 billion to acquire a business, there must be some important reasons."

Microsoft announced this week it has released both Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing %26#150; the final stage before a product actually gets into users' hands. In the case of SP1, at least, there is one catch. If you're waiting on the edge of your seat, you still have a while to sit on your hands -- until mid-March. Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 %26#150; Vista's server counterpart -- has also been released to manufacturing (RTM) and will be available for purchase to new customers starting March 1, the company said in a statement. Volume licensing customers with Software Assurance or Enterprise Agreements can download the server near the end of February. "Vista SP1 is something all of our customers on the business side have been waiting for %26#91;so%26#93; we can now ring the SP1 bell," CEO Steve Ballmer said during a meeting with financial analysts Monday morning that was Web cast. Ballmer was referring to enterprise customers' penchant for waiting for the first service pack of a major Microsoft operating system upgrade before beginning wide-scale deployment. Officially, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 will be launched at Microsoft's planned "Heroes Happen Here" event in Lost Angeles on February 27. Visual Studio 2008 became generally available last week. At the same time, delivery of SQL Server 2008, the third product being launched at the end of this month, has been postponed until the third quarter, the company disclosed late last month. Meanwhile, after more than four months of testing, and repeated test releases, it's a little hard for some analysts to get excited about the final release of Vista SP1, but it's important nonetheless, not least because Vista and Windows Server 2008 have been positioned by Microsoft as complementary operating systems offerings. Gaining synergy "It's a good sign that they're done, and done at the same time, particularly for those people who want to gain any synergies from running the two products together," Michael Cherry, lead analyst for operating systems at researcher Directions on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com. Both Vista and Windows Server 2008 share the same software core, as well as having some key interlocking features such as Network Address Protection or NAP, which quarantines new devices on the network until they have met specified security requirements. Microsoft has seemingly taken its time getting Windows Server 2008 done. The first "release candidate" or RC of the server software was released to testers simultaneously last fall with the first beta test copies of Vista SP1. The delay in providing Vista SP1 to customers has to do with coordinating availability across various distribution channels, according to a posting on the Windows Vista Team Blog Monday by Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management. That includes PC OEMs, retail packaged product, and download sites. "In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1," Nash's post read. "In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically," he added. However, a small set of specific device drivers known to not follow Microsoft's guidelines for driver installation can cause problems for some users, and thus the delay. "We will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers," Nash said. Besides its connection with Vista, the release of Windows Server 2008 is important for another key strategic reason. "This starts the countdown clock for Hyper-V," Microsoft's hypervisor-based virtualization technology, Directions on Microsoft's Cherry said. Hyper-V, Microsoft's challenge to VMware and Citrix's XenSource virtualization hypervisors, is due out 180 days after availability of Windows Server 2008. "Now, you can start to calculate availability of Hyper-V," Cherry added.

Google today reduced pricing significantly for its line of on-demand security software as it continues to fine-tune the software applications it acquired last year when it bought Postini. "What was once a convoluted and complex product line is now three nice chunks of applications at an aggressive price," Scott Petry, founder of Postini and product management director at Google, told InternetNews.com. "Before we would try and get more dollars for every feature," he explained, "but now that we're part of Google there's a great democratization of the product line that lets us reach a huge market." The three areas Google offers are in security and compliance services: Google Message Filtering, Message Security and Message Discovery. Filtering, which covers incoming spam, malware and other e-mail threats, is available for $3 per user per year. According to Petry, the volume of spam doubled last year. "If you're an administrator, do you want to double what you spend on security appliances?" Alternatively, Google's approach of offering software as a service (SaaS) (define) and storage online lets IT better maintain its infrastructure costs, he said. Messaging Security includes filtering and adds "enhanced virus detection," outbound processing and content policy management at $12 per user, per year. Administrators can use the service to enforce policy rules -- for example, prevent Social Security numbers and credit card information from being transmitted via e-mail. Message Discovery includes Security and adds one year of message data archiving, retention and discovery. The service is designed for companies looking to improve their readiness for legal discovery and compliance issues. Cost is $25 per user for one year of archived data. "This shows Google is making a more coordinated effort to go beyond the Google Apps Premier brand and get into other areas like archiving and compliance," Michael Osterman, principal at Osterman Research, told InternetNews.com. "The pricing is very significant. When you start at $3 per user annually, compared with what some other companies charge, that's almost nothing. Also, the fact you can mix and match only what you need gives companies a lot of flexibility," he said. According to Osterman, Google faces a near-term challenge of letting potential customers know they don't need to be running Google Apps to use the security and compliance software. "The market of Apps is growing, but Microsoft Office is what most people use, and I don't think companies realize Google's messaging and security services are completely independent services that can be purchased separately to use with the software they already use," Osterman said. Petry said his group is working on tighter integration to Google Apps but will continue to offer the security products as an add-on that can be used with competitors' software. "When we were independent as Postini, we sold a service layer that works with any customer's infrastructure and we will continue to do that with security and archiving that works with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SunMail and others."

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
6 February 2008 It might never be able to compete with those dirt-cheap auto paint jobs, but a new laser technique could revolutionize the way metals are colored for varied applications such as jewelry, home appliances, military camouflage, and even optical filters in telescopes. It could also eliminate the need for environmentally unfriendly paints and other coatings.

Among the seemingly miraculous properties of lasers is the ability to alter the optical characteristics of materials. The intense beam of laser light can change a material's color without coating it with paint or pigment. But there's a problem: Lasers powerful enough to tint materials also tend to damage them with heat.

So researchers at the University of Rochester in New York sought to develop a laser coloring technique that could avoid the destructive heat effect. Optical physicists Chunlei Guo and A. Y. Vorobyev used laser pulses lasting only a femtosecond, or a quadrillionth (a billionth of a millionth) of a second. The technique works by melting extremely small areas of the metals, which then congeal in ways that reflect different wavelengths of light. The duo reported online 31 January in Applied Physics Letters that by fine-tuning their ultrafast laser light output and by modifying the strength of the beam, the number of treatment pulses, and the processing duration, they were able to change the hues of a number of metal samples. They could give small sheets of aluminum a gold cast, for instance, and turn gold black.

The process directly transforms the colors of metals, meaning no paints are necessary. And Guo notes that laser-treated surfaces tend to resist wear and tear, especially at high temperatures, making them more durable than painted surfaces. Because the technique is still new, relatively slow, and energy-intensive, Guo says that it's at least several years from commercial applications. Next up will be to improve its speed and efficiency. But as the technique matures, he says, "I think we should be able to apply it to things in our everyday life."

Maybe, but it will likely take a while, says physicist Joseph Shinar of the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University in Ames. The results are "very interesting and appealing, and the physics appear solid," he says, but there are already many ways to color metals and materials using proven coatings. The laser technique appears to affect only the topmost layers of the metal, so scratches or abrasions might change or remove the coloring--just as with coatings. Therefore, "it may be some time before we find out what sort of application needs this fulfills," Shinar says.

It may be the right move on paper, but making it work isn't going to be easy. That was the general consensus among several analysts following Friday's blockbuster announcement of Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo. "If Microsoft and Yahoo join forces it will be the most important event in the Internet industry this year, without a doubt," said Ken Cassar, vice president for industry solutions analytics at Nielsen Online. According to Cassar, the combined entity would be visited by 86 percent of U.S. Internet users, account for 15 percent of all time spent online, and represent 59 percent of online display ad impressions sold which he said is "really the most significant revenue generator today for most online publishers." But even if Yahoo execs and its board sign off on the deal, not a given, there are still many unanswered questions %26#150; not the least of which is whether antitrust regulators in the U.S. and Europe will approve. A Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo has been rumored for months, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed on a conference call early Friday that talks had been going on between the two companies for 18 months. In addition, there are no guarantees that such a merger would accomplish much more than move Microsoft from a far third-place in search engine usage to a still far second-place by gobbling up its nearest competitor. Web statistics tracking firm NetApplications' search engine statistics for January 2008 show Google way out in front with 77 percent of global searches, followed by Yahoo with just over 12 percent, and Microsoft trailing way behind with a total of slightly more than 6 percent divided between MSN and Live Search. A combination of Yahoo and Microsoft would control less than 20 percent of the entire market. Of course, while not directly convertible into cash, search share is a strong indicator of how many advertising dollars those searches yield for ad purveyors. Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin is bullish on the potential of a Microsoft/Yahoo combination. He notes Yahoo is actually stronger than Google on the content side and has good partnerships with DSL providers. "When you bring both company's research groups together and you can imagine a powerful set of engineering teams working on the next generation of search," Bajarin told InternetNews.com. "There's a real need for something more precise than what we have in the market today." A Google spokesperson said it would be "premature" to comment on Microsoft's proposed purchase of Yahoo. For Microsoft, the acquisition stands to help it put its online services businesses in the black. Microsoft announced last week that in the first two quarters of fiscal 2008, its online services initiatives lost $510 million. That includes $245 million in losses for the quarter ended December 31. In contrast, Yahoo brought in income of $206 million in the final calendar quarter of 2007. Which is not to say Yahoo doesn't need help. Whereas Yahoo's revenues have been declining, Microsoft overall had another record quarter in terms of revenues and earnings. Between increasing revenues and its huge cash horde, Microsoft is well set to absorb the expenses involved in buying out Yahoo. "Yahoo was in trouble %26#91;and%26#93; they were really losing direction chasing Google %26#91;because%26#93; nobody could be a better Google than Google," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told InternetNews.com.

Dell said on Wednesday it would close all of its 140 U.S. kiosks, a concept it launched in 2002 to showcase computers, as it expands sales of PCs in retail stores. Dell, the world's second-largest personal computer maker will shut the kiosks, mostly in shopping malls, today -- a decision the company said fits with its new retail strategy. Customers could test Dell PCs at the kiosks and order the products, but they could not take delivery of them there. The concept has become largely obsolete as Dell last year departed from a 23-year strategy of direct-only sales and its computers are now available in about 10,000 store outlets and online. Dell in June started selling computers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc and later announced agreements with France's Carrefour SA and China's GOME Electrical Appliances Holding Ltd, among others. Founder Michael Dell, who retook the company's helm a year ago, is changing Dell's consumer-sales strategy to better compete with rivals including Hewlett-Packard Co, which overtook Dell as the world's largest PC maker in 2006 after selling more notebook computers and printers in stores. Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman said Dell will keep about 50 kiosks outside the United States. "We recognized early on that customers really wanted to touch and see the products before they purchased them," Kaufman said. "That led us to the kiosk model. Now, customers can touch and feel our products before buying them at one of our retail partners." Shares of Dell slipped 17 cents, or 0.8 percent, to $20.39 in midday trading on Nasdaq.

Microsoft said Wednesday that it has begun shipping the first eight language editions of Dynamics CRM 4.0 on schedule. The company shipped the English edition of the product just before Christmas and said, at that time, it would begin shipping the first batch of other language versions in January. The first delivery totals eight languages %26#150; counting English %26#150; including French, Spanish, and simplified Chinese, the company said in a statement. Also included in this batch are Danish, Dutch, Finnish, and German editions. In addition, the company said it's on track to ship 17 more language versions within 90 days for a total of 25, the statement continued. Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the name of the latest version of Microsoft's customer relationship management software that it sells to partners who then provide it as a hosted-service to customers, or that customers purchase and host themselves internally. Additionally, a Microsoft-hosted version of CRM 4.0 is also currently in beta testing and will be available under the name CRM Live during the first half of the year as part of Microsoft%26#146;s "Live" branded software-plus-services strategy, the company has said. The additional 17 languages scheduled to ship in the next three months include Arabic, Brazilian, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hong Kong Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, traditional Chinese and Turkish. The most notable feature in CRM 4.0 is its so-called "multitenant" architecture, which enables a hosting partner, for instance, to run only one copy of the server but support multiple customers simultaneously and securely. "Multitenancy is the big thing," Laurie McCabe, senior analyst at researcher AMI Partners told InternetNews.com. Combined with the multilingual support, that%26#146;s an indication of Microsoft%26#146;s intent. "It%26#146;s clear that they%26#146;re serious about going after the global market," she added. Not surprisingly, Microsoft agrees. "%26#91;With CRM 4.0%26#93; you have a fully multitenancy, multicurrency, and multilanguage situation," Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, told InternetNews.com. For example, a hosting partner can provide multilingual access to CRM 4.0 running on its server and still be running a single copy of the server, he added. Among other new features, the latest version adds business process automation based on Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation. It also provides new collaboration capabilities with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, such as real-time presence indicators within the CRM application. Dynamics CRM was previously last updated to version 3.0 two years ago. That release supported 22 languages but did not feature multitenancy support. Microsoft said it is also planning a 12-week, 50-city, 20 nation tour to promote Dynamics CRM 4.0.

European Union countries can refuse to disclose names of file sharers on the Internet in civil cases, the EU's top court said on Tuesday in a blow to copyright holders trying to fight digital piracy. The European Court of Justice ruled on a dispute between Spanish music rights holders association Promusicae and Spain's top telecom operator Telefonica. Telefonica argued that under a national law based on EU rules, it only had to disclose the name of an Internet subscriber for criminal actions, not civil ones. "Community law does not require the member states, in order to ensure the effective protection of copyright, to lay down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings," the court said in a statement. Promusicae wanted names of Telefonica Internet clients who shared copyright material on the Web using the Kazaa file-exchange software, so it could start civil proceedings against them. Civil proceedings are cheaper than criminal proceedings, which typically require a higher burden of proof. "There are several community directives whose purpose is that the member states should ensure, especially in the information society, effective protection of industrial property, in particular copyright," the court said. "Such protection cannot, however, affect the requirements of the protection of personal data," the court added. "The directives on the protection of personal data also allow the member states to provide for exceptions to the obligation to guarantee the confidentiality of traffic data." EU rules do not preclude the possibility for EU countries of laying down an obligation to disclose personal data in the context of civil proceedings, it said. "However, it does not compel the member states to lay down such an obligation," the court said.

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
30 January 2008 It's not just terrorism and earthquakes that can precipitate heart attacks among the vulnerable. Soccer games do it, too. Researchers at the University of Munich, Germany, found that heart problems more than tripled in German men while their team was playing in the World Cup in the summer of 2006.

Physician Ute Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues analyzed reports of hospitalizations for heart attacks, chest pains, and arrhythmias collected by emergency medical teams on the 7 days that the German team played during the games, which were held around Germany from 9 June to 9 July. They compared the results with reports covering weeks immediately before and after the games as well as from summer months in 2003 and 2005--for a total of 4279 patients.

On the days of matches involving the German team, men in the Munich area experienced 3.26 as many cardiac events as they did during control periods. That's not too far from the fivefold increase reported after a 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles. Women were much less affected, with a cardiac event rate 1.82 times that during control periods. The games especially affected the vulnerable: 47%26#37; of the cases involved people with preexisting heart disease, compared with 29%26#37; during the control periods.

Various other studies have tried to link soccer madness with heart attacks or mortality, sometimes with conflicting results. For example, a study published in 2003 found a decrease in fatal heart attacks among Frenchmen the day France won the 1998 World Cup.

But Wilbert-Lampen and colleagues say theirs is the first study to track a precise temporal relationship between action on the field and in the chest. They found that the incidence peaked about 2 hours into a match and remained elevated for several hours afterward--indicating that the "acute trigger mechanisms" occur 1 or 2 hours before symptoms appear. Two matches in particular led to spikes in heart hospitalizations--a hard-fought victory over Argentina and an important loss to Italy--proving it's the excitement of the game and not the outcome that causes the intense stress. The team presents its findings in the 31 January issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Epidemiologist Diederick Grobbee of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands says the study strengthens the case for his earlier finding that the incidence of fatal heart attacks among Dutch males jumped significantly on the day of a tense soccer match. Grobbee notes that the patterns both of mortality and of the symptoms in the latest paper indicate that "rather than inducing new events [in people with no known heart trouble], the effect could be that an event that is bound to happen anyway is triggered earlier."

PALM DESERT, CALIF. -- Whether it's managing your voicemail from your computer desktop or accessing updating your blog through your phone, communications advancements marked the first day of DEMO, the bi-annual conference of new products and services. Among the most ambitious here at DEMO is Silicon Valley startup Ribbit, which connects mobile phone users with the Web. Once you've registered your mobile phone at the company's Web site, you can manage all your communications from the desktop. Ribbit's service also provides users with a range of added features. For example, you can view brief, transcribed previews of phone messages and search through them using keywords. For an additional fee, the offering converts phone messages entirely into text. Ribbit is currently in private beta and expects to be available to the public this Spring. The company's Amphibian developer platform has already attracted 3,000 enterprise and consumer-focused developers, who can create new features they can sell through the Ribbit store. One third-party Amphibian product offers the look and some of the features of Apple's iPhone on the PC. Another is tailored to appeal to Salesforce.com users. The company said it also supports Google's Open Social initiative for social networks. When receiving a call, for example, Ribbit can quickly pull in feeds from various social networks. letting you view publicly available profiles and other information. "It's Caller ID 2.0," Ribbit co-founder Crick Waters said. The Ribbit platform was developed using Adobe's AIR platform for rich Internet applications. Another phone-meets-Internet service at the show comes from Toktumi, which offers features of more expensive high-end office phone systems to smaller offices and home-based businesses. The company said it's defined a new product category it calls "P2PPBX" (a term merging both P2P, or peer-to-peer technology, with the venerable PBX.) The hosted solution taps the processing power of a company's existing PCs to do its call routing. Following an initial installation on a user's PC, Toktumi's product offers features like dialing by name, enabling users to place calls by typing in their contact's name. It also provides Caller ID that appears on the PC screen, allowing users to decide whether to answer, send it to voicemail or transfer the call. Toktumi's offering also supports conferences of up to 20 other people. The service doesn't require special phones -- it works with mic-equipped PC headsets, but users can connect an external phone using an adapter. The package also provides a range of management capabilities -- automatic call-forwarding or accepting incoming calls with a pre-recorded greeting. If your PC or Internet connection is down, calls are automatically stored on to Toktumi's servers as voicemail or forwarded to your cell phone. Another new service at DEMO called 800PBX brings Web and e-mail access to mobile phone users. The company's 800 Genie, now in beta, reads e-mail aloud over the phone -- allowing you to call in to receive and reply to messages from services like Gmail. You can also access other applications from your phone, and even update your blog via voice.