At a time when publishers are suing to prevent Google from putting excerpts of copyrighted books online, HarperCollins has started an advertiser-supported program that will offer a free look at the full text of selected works.

The Harper program, announced Monday, is being launched with Bruce Judson’s “Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own.” The book was published in hardcover at the end of 2004, and recently came out as a paperback. Anyone who wants to read the whole text can visit the author’s Web site, http://www.BruceJudson.com .

“We hope this pilot will demonstrate a win-win for publishers, authors and search engines. The new era does not need to be a zero sum game,” HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman said Monday in a statement.

Judson’s Web site includes, ironically, “Ads by Google,” a column on the left hand side of the book’s text with links to publishing and business-oriented sites. The Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers each have filed lawsuits against Google, alleging that the Internet giant’s “Google Print Library Project” is illegally scanning and indexing copyrighted works for the Internet.

Source: AP

Blogger Chris Beasley says Amazon.com plans to test a program similar to Google Inc.’s Adsense, which is a network of Web sites that display links to Google advertisers.

Amazon.com is reportedly looking for beta testers for a possible contextual advertising network that would place third-party links to products on the online retailer’s partner Web sites.

Chris Beasley, founder of Website Publisher, said in his blog that he was invited to join the online retailer’s test as a member of the Seattle company’s associates program. Amazon.com associates display links to the retailer’s products on their Web sites.

Beasley said Amazon.com planned to test a program similar to Google Inc.’s Adsense, which is a network of Web sites that display links to Google advertisers. The links are for products and services related to the Web site’s content. Google shares revenue from the advertisers with site operators.

Source: Informationweek

According to the new Official Playstation Magazine the next firmware update will include a system to send and receive email from your PSP. You can also expect to see a GPS system for Sony’s handheld.

Source: arstechnica

The US software giant Microsoft announced in an communique that it has reached a licensing agreement with mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson, which will enable the Stockholm-based company’s “smart” phones to connect to computers via Microsoft’s Exchange software.

Source: AFP

Scientists at Philips Research have created a fully functional 13.56-MHz radio frequency identification (RFID) tag based entirely on plastic electronics. In contrast to conventional silicon-chip-based RFID tags, a plastic electronics RFID chip can be printed directly onto a plastic substrate along with an antenna without involving complex assembly steps, Philips Research said in a statement.

The development of plastic RFID tags could replace barcodes, which require optical reading by line-of-sight systems with package-specific and item-level identification codes that can be read wirelessly.

Source: EE Times

The French police force plans to ditch Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as its preferred browser software and replace it with Firefox by the end of the year. Up to 70,000 desktops will be switched over to a Firefox and Thunderbird email client set-up because of the combo’s “reliability, security and inter-interoperability with other state services”,” General Christian Brachet, IT director of the French police force said.

Brachet said the gendarmerie had settled on Firefox because it is based on the W3C standard and can used on Windows, Mac and Linux boxes. Basing its systems on open net standards will make it easier for French citizens to report crimes online in future, once such facilities are introduced. The move over to an open source browser follows the French police’s switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice, a change implemented last year that’s expected to save the force €2m ($2.4m) a year

Source: theregister

Opera Software on Tuesday plans to release a second preview version of Opera 9, the next version of its namesake Web browser.

For the first time, the new version will include support for so-called widgets, Opera representative Thomas Ford said. Widgets are essentially small browser windows that display information taken from the Internet on a user’s desktop. The notion is similar in concept to the widget idea that Apple Computer uses in the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X.

“It is really a big jump for us into Web applications,” Ford said. “They give people the information they want right on the desktop. Even if it is a Web page, people don’t have to go to the browser to see it.”

Additionally, Opera’s latest preview will include support for BitTorrent downloads, Ford said. BitTorrent is a file-download technology that connects the computers of numerous people who want the same file, instead of drawing files solely from one source. Typically, people who wanted to get downloads using BitTorrent have had to download dedicated software.

Source: News.com

Even after the recent scrutiny of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance project approved by President Bush, an intriguing question remains unanswered: Which corporations cooperated with the spy agency?

Some reports have identified executives at “major telecommunications companies” who chose to open their networks to the NSA. Because it may be illegal to divulge customer communications, though, not one has chosen to make its cooperation public.

A survey by CNET News.com has identified 15 large telecommunications and Internet companies that are willing to say that they have not participated in the NSA program, which intercepts e-mail and telephone calls without a judge’s approval.

Twelve other companies that were contacted and asked identical questions chose not to reply, in some cases citing “national security” as the reason.

Source: News.com