Compliantly

It took Apple about four months to reach 10,000 mobile developer applications after its Apple App store opened in July 2008. The Apple App store is still going strong.

Google’s has gotten off to a much slower start. Its competing Android Market launched in October 2008, but developers could only upload free applications because the Android store didn’t have a payment system. Google announced on Feb. 13 that mobile developers can now offer paid apps for Android, which will use Google Checkout for its payment and billing system. 

Several cellphone makers like Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and HTC are expected to release new Android-powered phones this year.

Electric car maker Tesla Motors announced that it will receive a $450 million loan from the Department of Energy to build a factory for its Model S, a four-door electric sedan, and also to support its battery supply business. Tesla CEO Elon Musk assured customers in a monthly newsletter that the money from the DOE would come in "four to five months." 

That’s great news, except the DOE has a reputation for being slow-moving and full of bureacratic delays. Obama’s new Energy Secretary Steven Chu will get roughly $35 billion to $40 billion under the stimulus bill to loan to green tech companies. Chu said he wants checks sent to these companies in 4 weeks. But some DOE skeptics don’t expect to see any loans given to clean tech businesses for another 12 months. 

Tesla is supposedly one of a handful that is on the fast track to receive its loans this year.

The judge in the Google bullying video case Tuesday rejected a defense argument that lawyers acting for the principal plaintiff did not have a valid mandate. Milan judge Oscar Magi took almost two hours to consider the argument put forward by Google lawyers Giuseppe Vaciago and Giuliano Pisapia before ruling that a lawyer representing the Vivi Down association had been legitimately appointed.

Vivi Down first drew attention to the existence of a three-minute mobile-phone video showing four youths harassing a classmate with Down syndrome that was posted on Google Video in 2006. Four Google executives -- chief legal officer David Drummond, former chief financial officer George Reyes, global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer and former head of Google Video Europe Arvind Desikan -- are charged with defamation and violating Italy's privacy law.

Vivi Down continues to act as a plaintiff in the case, though the teenage bullying victim, who lives in Turin, withdrew last month. The Google lawyers had argued that Vivi Down's complaint was not valid because it had been presented by the association's president, without the explicit consent of its board of directors. The judge threw out the argument, saying the president's powers had been correctly exercised.

"The judge ruled on the validity of the mandate at the basis of Vivi Down's complaint. At the next hearing, on March 25, he will tackle the issue of whether or not the court has jurisdiction," Raffaele Zallone, a lawyer representing another plaintiff in the case, said in a telephone interview.

Zallone represents a woman who complains that Google searches for her name turn up reports of her involvement in a corruption case but fail to register the fact that she was ultimately acquitted. Judge Magi is considering both the corruption-report complaint and bullying video case in the same trial. In the complaint about the corruption report, Google is accused of providing false information to Italy's Communications Authority because one of the Google defendants allegedly appointed a lawyer to represent him before the Authority without having the power to do so, Zallone said.

In its ruling on the dispute, the Authority accepted that Google was not responsible for the content appearing on its search engine but ruled that the creation of cache copies was equivalent to data handling and had to be done in accordance with Italian law. "The Authority established an important principle," Zallone said. "If you create an autonomous copy you become responsible for the content of that page from the point of view of data handling under the privacy law."

Zallone acknowledged there was no easy solution for his client, and for other people in her situation, since newspapers inevitably gave greater space to reports of accusations than they did to acquittals. A possible solution would be to allow newspapers to retain full coverage of criminal cases in their online archives provided they make the early, accusatory reports inaccessible to external search engines, he said.

The Communications Authority has recently ruled on two cases similar to his client's and is now ordering newspapers to remove the defamatory reports from their online archives, Zallone said. "It's not easy to find the right balance on this issue," Zallone admitted. On Tuesday a Google search revealed that the online archives of the Corriere della Sera and Repubblica newspapers both carried two reports of Zallone's client's past judicial woes.

Lenovo has decided to unveil photos of its Pocket Yoga concept PC, an ultra-compact portable that's slim enough to slide in a back pocket. The leather-bound device, which resembles an oversized wallet, features a QWERTY keyboard and a touch screen.

Pocket Yoga does double duty as a conventional netbook-albeit one with a screen that's awfully tiny for conventional, office-style apps-or as a handheld device. A 360-degree hinge allows the display to fold all the way around to the base, thereby allowing the Pocket Yoga to function as a tablet notebook. One particularly clever innovation is the "belt" that wraps around the device. When removed, the belt become a mouse.

Lenovo isn't providing specs or other details at this time, and it's unclear when or if the Pocket Yoga as seen in these photos will ever ship. Pictures of another Lenovo semi-secret project, an Android handset, have recently appeared online as well. Perhaps the Pocket Yoga will evolve into a wireless smart phone?

If you've got only one piece of anti-malware software on your system, you're not protected well enough. Most anti-spyware programs can't detect and kill all spyware, so it's a good idea to run two on occasion, and sometimes more. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware (free demo, US$25 to unlock all features) is a worthwhile addition to anyone's anti-spyware arsenal, because unlike some overly complex programs, it's easy to configure and use.

Using Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware is simplicity itself. After you run it, click Scan, and it checks your system for infections, and you can either do a quick scan, or a more comprehensive scan. For an initial scan, a comprehensive scan is a good idea.

After the program reports what it finds, it will clean the infections for you, and can also place them in quarantine before killing them, a feature common to most pieces of anti-spyware. There's also an Ignore List, so that if Anti-Malware incorrectly identifies software as malware, you can put it on the list, and the next time around, it won't be identified as malware.

Note that you can Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware program for free to scan and disinfect your system. But if you want to enable real-time protection to stop your PC from being infected in the first place, and to schedule scans, you'll have to register it.

More than 4.4 million Americans have lost their jobs since the recession started in December 2007 and more than 12.5 million are currently out of work. The Labor Department reported that 651,000 people lost their jobs in February, an 8.1% increase from the prior month.

This is the third straight month where 650,000 or more jobs have been lost. Monthly U.S. job losses have more than doubled since the fall of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15, 2009. 

Here are the staggering numbers:

Month                        Total job losses                      Unemployment rate

September 2008             321,000                                   6.2%

October 2008                  380,000                                  6.6%

November 2008               597,000                                  6.8%

December 2008               681,000                                  7.2%  

January 2009                  655,000                                  7.6%

February 2009                 651,000                                  8.1%

Hearst Corporation announced that it will close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot find a buyer. The 144-year-old Chronicle, with a daily circulation of 339,000, loses an average of $1 million a week. Should the Chronicle disappear, San Francisco would become the largest city to lose its dominant newspaper. 

Hearst said there would be drastic cuts to the SF paper, which has rougly 275 newsroom employees, as a last-ditch effort to save the paper. 

Hearst had already confirmed that it will fold the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in March if it cannot sell the money-losing newspaper.

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