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CBS announced Monday it completed its $1.8 billion acquisition of CNET Networks, publisher of many Web sites including CNET News.com, setting the stage for expanding its CBS Interactive division into five categories.

Under the acquisition, CBS Interactive will include such categories as technology, entertainment, sports, news, and business. The division will be headed up by Quincy Smith, former CBS Interactive president, who will now serve as its CEO. Neil Ashe, former CNET Networks CEO, will become president of the business unit.

CBS Interactive’s technology category will include CNET.com, CNET Reviews, Download.com, and others. The entertainment category will include TV.com, GameSpot.com, Chow.com, CBS.com, TheInsider.com, Last.fm, and the CBS Audience Network, while the sports category will include CBSSports.com, CBSCollegeSports.com, and NCAA.com.

CBS Interactive will also incorporate the news category, serving as home to CNET News.com, for technology news, and CBSNews.com, which features global news and current events. The business division will operate BNET.com, as the anchor to its business-related content, as well as ZDNet and TechRepublic, which serve readers who use tend to use technology for large corporations.

The Phenom II “Dragon” line of desktop processors uses AMD’s new 45-nanometer technology and comprises both quad-core (X4) and triple-core (X3) parts.

Advanced Micro Devices added new Phenom II desktop models on Monday, including triple-core processors, in its continued attempt to outdo Intel desktop price-performance.

Updated on February 9 at 12:10 a.m. PST with corrected Intel pricing.

The Phenom II processors fit in either AM2+ or AM3 sockets and support DDR2 or next generation DDR3 memory technology.

Models include:

The processors are available immediately, AMD said.

The triple-core Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition processor is priced at $145, which AMD compares with Intel’s Core 2 Duo (dual-core) E8400 processor, priced at $163. The quad-core X4 810 processor (2.6GHz) is priced at $175 versus the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor (2.33GHz), priced at $163.

AMD Phenom II X4 910 - (2.6GHz)
AMD Phenom II X4 810 - (2.6GHz)
AMD Phenom II X4 805 - (2.5GHz)
AMD Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition - (2.8GHz)
AMD Phenom II X3 710 - (2.6GHz)

(Credit:
Electronic Arts)

And that seems to mean that the movie studio has been able to work out a deal with Godfather author Mario Puzo’s son, Anthony Puzo, after he sued Paramount in June, alleging that he had not been paid more than $1 million he was owed, based on the first version of the game.

That is, because Paramount wasn’t able to provide the game’s producers with the original high-resolution digital assets for dozens of characters from the films, EA put several artists on the job watching the films over and over again, in order to re-create much of its look and feel.

It’s not known whether EA will employ the same methods this time around, or if it will be able to take advantage of the assets it created last time around.

EA did not announce a release date for the game.

One notable element of the first Godfather game was that EA put a significant amount of resources into reverse-engineering the art from the films.

EA on Friday announced the first real details of Godfather II, the video game, that it will be making in conjunction with Paramount Pictures.

The new game expands on the story line spelled out in that earlier game. This time around, according to a release from EA, “After being promoted by Michael Corleone to don of New York, players expand to new cities, as they build up their families through extorting businesses, monopolizing illegal-crime rings, and defeating new families in an effort to become the most powerful mob family in America.”

Update (10:52 a.m.): This story has been corrected to reflect that the suit filed in June against Paramount Pictures was filed by Anthony Puzo, Mario Puzo’s son. Mario Puzo died in 1999.

Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures have released the first details of The Godfather II, the video game.

It looks like Electronic Arts and Paramount Pictures have gotten the don’s blessing, after all.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

Kelton posed the question this way in his pre-conference writeup: “What happens when early adopters have become spoiled by single-feature technologies that take no more than a moment to grasp? The challenge faced by the next wave of innovative start-ups for technology adoption increases by an order of magnitude.”

In other words, there’s a deluge of choice. Yet at the same time, social technologies moving into Web 2.0 products lock users in. Who wants to try a new, possibly better photo-sharing site when he or she has 10,000 photos already in Flickr?

Obviously, it’s easier to build just another single-function service than it is to come up with a plausible growth strategy and a unique service back-end. So both Fried and Kelton are right: Users gravitate to simplicity and focus. But if your business itself is so simple that anyone can replicate it, you don’t have much of a business after all.

NEW YORK–After listening to Jason Fried (37 Signals) give his compelling Web 2.0 Expo talk Wednesday about building companies in the modern world–which could be summed up as “simplify, and don’t work too hard doing so”–I walked across the hall to hear Fraser Kelton (Adaptive Blue) discuss the negative ramifications of this strategy.

Kelton has two possibly workable solutions to the start-up’s dilemma: First, “make magic,” he says. But on the back end, not the interface. Build a simple interface to a complicated service that isn’t so easily replicated. He points to Google search. Simple UI. Rather complex on the server side.

Second, improve on existing products. Pointing in this example to Summize (acquired by Twitter) and Disqus (we’re waiting) as services that add important improvements to existing platforms (Twitter; blogs), Kelton says that a start-up can ride on the success of a previous wave if its founders find a smart way to embed their technology in that of the key players in the market.

The real problem, he said during his talk, is not that Web 2.0 technology is easy to use, it’s that it is too easy to build. Which means that there is “too much noise”: too many new products vying for the attention of the early adopters who can give a start-up its first taste of success. And blogs don’t help, he says: They encourage readers to skim without “chewing” on content, just as they encourage writers to post often and quickly, without writing thoughtful pieces.

Update: After this story went live, PlanetEye spokespeople contacted me to say that the version of the site reviewed here is not the site they’ll be pushing out to the public. That site, scheduled to go live on July 10, will have the new, smarter Travel Pack feature that was pitched to me in a meeting. As I say at the end of the review, I recommend you hold off on trying the site until that new version is online.

Coming up soon will be integration with more data sources, such as OpenTable, StubHub, WaySpa, and Wine Spectator. And the Travel Packs may get smarter, and start to suggest items to you based on what you have already added to them and what you say about yourself in your profile. I’d wait until these new features are added, in mid-July, to rely on this product for planning trips.

With the cost of travel and fuel continuing to rise, I don’t understand why anyone would launch or even pitch a travel site right now, unless it was designed to help people make the most of in-town bus vacations (note to self…). But that opinion hasn’t slowed the steady stream of pitches I’ve been hearing for vacation-planning sites. The latest: PlanetEye, a service relying on some technology spun out of Microsoft.

PlanetEye is a great site for viewing travel photos of the location you’re thinking of going to. It is also supposed to help you find the cool things to do once you’ve got a location for your trip narrowed down. Then you can save your finds into a “Travel Pack” that you can easily retrieve when it’s ready to embark on your voyage. You can also share your plans with the other people on your trip, so they can contribute to building your hit-list of things to do as well.

PlanetEye is good for scouting photos of a vacation destination, but less good at finding restaurants and attractions.

The site has useful, but typical, city guides.

If you want a more typical travel guide experience, though, PlanetEye does offer that. There are City Guides for popular destinations, with the usual lists of most popular tourist attractions. Many major cities also have Local Expert pages, which feature more personal guides. Items you find in either of these guides can be added to your Travel Packs.

Related stories:
TravelMuse tells you where to go (on vacation)
Offbeat Guides: Build your own travel books
TripIt aggregates your travel info

See also: Dopplr, TripAdvisor, Tripbase, TravelMuse.

The site uses Microsoft Maps, and does a nice job of displaying trip photos from other users. But I found it frustrating to use the map to look up attractions and restaurants. Each item (or collection of closely grouped items) on the map is represented by a dot, but there’s no way to know what the dots stand for without clicking on them, and even when you do, the information you want displays in a navigation bar, not on the map as you’d expect. It’s hard to correlate the navigation bar text with the map. This design sucks the fun out of exploring a destination, and, to me, defeats a primary purpose of the site.

How about you, dear readers? What would you want to see in the Android Marketplace? What do you think would make a killer app for the Android phone? Let us know in the comments below.

Arguably one of the best things to come out of the
iPhone 2.0 firmware update, as well as the launch of the iPhone 3G, is the ability for the iPhone to install third-party applications directly to the phone via the App Store. Well, Google’s new Android OS will also support such a service in the form of the Android Market.

As Google announced on Thursday, the Android Market is an online marketplace that will let you find, buy, download, and rate applications (which sounds eerily similar to the iPhone App Store). And, as you can see from the example screen shots, it appears that applications like a ringtone editor, a talking compass, and a barcode scanner, are already in the works.

This brings up the question of the kind of applications we would want for the Android phone. Access to Google apps like Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Reader is a given (we assume), so that leaves the door wide open for more innovative applications. We would personally love to see a multi-IM client, and an Android equivalent of the iPhone’s song-identification apps like Shazam would be nice, too. One thing we would really love is turn-by-turn directions, which the iPhone currently lacks.

(Credit:
Google)

These screen shots show the Android-phone interface to the Android Market. The software shows what applications can be downloaded and reviews of applications that people are browsing.

An earlier Internet-publishing foray by King, Riding the Bullet, was a case study in Internet piracy.

The Amazon event, taking place at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, is widely expected to feature the unveiling of a next-generation Kindle e-book reader. On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon also will say it has acquired a new work by King that would be exclusively for the Kindle.

This wouldn’t be King’s first tech-related effort. During the dot-com boom, the best-selling author posted chapters of a serial novel, The Plant, on the Internet in a bid to see if readers would pay voluntarily for what they were reading. He suspended the work in late 2000 after the sixth installment.

The Journal says a Kindle-like device is a factor in the story. The work by King might later be published in physical book form by Scribner, King’s current publisher. (Scribner is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS, whose CBS Interactive unit is the publisher of CNET News.)

When Amazon.com hosts its anticipated Monday morning e-book event, one of the highlights could be an exclusive deal for the Kindle with horror story master Stephen King.

Click here for more stories on Amazon’s Kindle.

Like the
iPhone and other next-gen touch-screen phones that have been appearing lately, the Reader incorporates some gesture-based commands. You can swipe your finger across the display to page forward or back (you can choose between a left or right swipe to advance pages in the settings menu). Swiping and holding your finger down at the end of the swipe allows you to advance or rewind through pages at a fast clip.

When we found out a couple of weeks ago that Sony was going have a Reader event in New York on October 2, we assumed–but weren’t entirely sure–that the company would be announcing a new electronic book reader. Well, Sony has introduced a new Reader, the PRS-700, and I got to play around with it at the event.

With the included stylus or your finger you can highlight words and add annotations via a virtual keyboard. The Amazon Kindle offers this feature via a Blackberry-style keyboard. However, the Kindle doesn’t have a touch screen.

So, after playing with the thing for a few minutes, what did I think of it? Well, the new Reader, as advertised, is visibly zippier than the PRS-505. The touch screen is also a significant improvement in terms of ease of navigation, and the interface seems simplified and improved.

Interestingly, at the event Sony also announced that it had moved its Reader operations from Japan to San Diego, Calif., and the Reader team will be run out of the U.S. We’re not exactly sure what that means, but Sony execs indicated that the company is going to be making a big push with the Reader in North America (it’s also been released in Britain and is heading into stores in France).

We look forward to testing the PRS700 and shooting a First Look video soon. In the meantime, feel free to comment on whether you think the new Reader is superior to the Amazon Kindle or whether the omission of a wireless component is a big strike against it. I was hoping Sony and Amazon.com would pair up on an electronic reader with Amazon doing the digital book delivery service and Sony doing the hardware (each playing to their strengths). But at least for this year, that doesn’t appear to be in the cards.

(Credit:
Sony)

If you can ignore the high price for a second, the PRS700 is definitely a step forward for Sony in the digital-reader arena. If ever there was device that would benefit from the switch to touch-screen navigation, it’s an e-book reader (Irex was the first with an e-ink touch-screen display, but that device was prohibitively expensive).

Sony’s also redesigning its eBook Store. “This month, a redesigned page layout with more prominent book cover art will improve the overall visual appeal of the site,” the release says. “A streamlined checkout process along with updated search and discovery make finding and purchasing an e-book a breeze.”

And while the swiping does give you a more tactile approach to turning a digital page (instead of just pressing a button), I did get the feeling that the screen was not as touch-sensitive as the screen on the iPhone. In some cases, turning a page required an extra swipe or two to get the e-ink to refresh. But I should note that these are not final production units, so I’ll reserve final judgment until we get a shipping unit.

As for the lighting, it’s a little funky. As I said, it’s not backlighting. Rather, it’s more like side-lighting (some call it front-lighting but the LEDs are placed on the sides of the display), and you can increase and lower the intensity between three levels of brightness. The lighting isn’t terribly uniform over the display but it will allow you to read your Reader in the dark–I just don’t know yet if the LED lighting will lead to eye strain.

It’s also worth noting that Sony is continuing with its effort to brand its Readers as “open” devices that are capable of reading multiple file formats. The press release says: “With the included eBook Library 2.5 PC software, you can easily transfer Adobe PDF documents with reflow capability, Microsoft Word documents, BBeB files and other text file formats to the Reader. The device can store and display EPUB files and work with Adobe Digital Editions software, opening it up to almost a limitless quantity of content.”

It’s zippier, too–when you turn a page, the e-ink on the screen refreshes faster (we were told the PRS-700 has a faster processor than the earlier PRS-505, but we’re waiting to confirm what the processor is). All of these upgrades add up to a higher price tag: the new Reader will retail for $400 when it comes out in November. That’s over $100 more than what you can get the PRS-505 for today.

Before I get into impressions, let’s start with the highlights: As rumored, the PRS-700 has a built-in LED “reading” light (though it’s not a backlight). There are no wireless capabilities, but Sony’s moved to a 6-inch touch-screen display. Also, the new Reader has expanded built-in memory (up to 350 books) while retaining its Memory Stick Duo slot.

The new Sony PRS-700 has a touch-screen and built-in light.

Click on the image to take a tour of an existing California data center designed for efficiency.

It’s called PUE Scalability.

(Credit:
Elsa Wenzel, CNET)

“At the 2009 Technical Forum, attendees will walk away with actionable information to help measure energy consumption and significantly improve energy cost savings,” Larry Vertal, director of the Green Grid and senior strategist at AMD, said in a statement.

For that, the group recommends measuring something it calls PUE Scalability, a formula which includes tracking a data center’s energy consumption roughly every 15 minutes to evaluate its responses to fluctuations in usage.

The paper suggests through sample scenarios and formulas that it’s not enough to look at long-term facility assessments, but that managers need to evaluate how their infrastructure deals with fluctuations in IT equipment power loads throughout a given day in order to make them more efficient.

It further recommends the use of “meters, monitors and analysis tools” that can evaluate power usage and response to loads in real-time.

The new paper is a follow-up to the Green Grid’s February 2007 proposal in which the organization introduced the idea of using the PUE and DCiE (originally called DCE) system to compare the efficiencies of data centers, as well as suggesting some efficiency-oriented best practices.

Companies like Sentilla have already begun to offer hardware and software tools for real-time data center energy consumption evaluations. But with a significant group like the Green Grid behind the practice, data center managers may now take more interest in those types of products.

“However, to better assess how well a facility’s infrastructure handles the dynamic changes in IT power loads, a data center needs to understand how well its total energy consumption scales with changes in IT power load,” said the white paper, whose contributors include employees from HP, Dell, and Emerson Network Power.

This latest suggestion from the Green Grid is not revolutionary.

The Green Grid’s white paper released Wednesday adds a new metric for IT folks to think about.

The Green Grid, a group of IT industry leaders including heavyweights like AMD and Hewlett-Packard, unveiled a new standard for measuring data center efficiency at the second annual Green Grid Technical Forum in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday.

The white papers released by the consortium have been advising companies on how to properly measure, quantify, analyze and report on PUE (power usage effectiveness) and DCiE (data center infrastructure efficiency) since 2007.

“While computer users and OEMs are already free to run any Web browsing software on Windows, the commission is considering ordering Microsoft and OEMs to obligate users to choose a particular browser when setting up a new PC,” Microsoft said in the SEC filing. “Such a remedy might include a requirement that OEMs distribute multiple browsers on new Windows-based PCs. We may also be required to disable certain unspecified Internet Explorer software code if a user chooses a competing browser.”

And that’s not the only area where Microsoft faces further EU action. Microsoft confirmed that an investigation into Office may still be ongoing.

“In January 2008, the commission opened an additional competition law investigation that relates primarily to interoperability with respect to our
Microsoft Office family of products,” Microsoft said. “This investigation resulted from complaints filed with the commission by a trade association of Microsoft’s competitors.”

Microsoft said that the EU is considering forcing computer makers, known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, to offer multiple browsers with new Windows PCs.

Microsoft also noted that the EU is also seeking to “impose a significant fine based on sales of Windows operating systems in the European Union.”

The European Union is considering forcing Microsoft to distribute rival browsers as part of Windows, the software maker disclosed in a regulatory filing this week.

The company reiterated that it will have the opportunity to respond in writing in the next two months and, after that, could also request a hearing.

As part of its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission filed on Thursday, the software maker offered more details on the EU’s statement last week that it believes Microsoft’s inclusion of a browser in Windows violates antitrust law.