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The satellite, called Radarsat2, is owned by MacDonald Dettwiler, but the Canadian government financed a good portion of the construction and launch. It is uniquely positioned over the Arctic with views of the Arctic sea passage ways that could one day be used for shipping. In exchange for its investment, the Canadian government has access to images from the satellite.

Alliant Techsystems has 30 days to appeal the government’s decision.

Opponents of the deal fear that if the company were sold, U.S. officials would be able to ask Alliant Techsystems to let them see images of ships traveling through the Arctic. Canada has long claimed sovereignty over the Arctic sea passages, but the U.S. maintains that those waters are international.

The Canadian government has put the kibosh on the $1.3 billion sale of a Canadian satellite company to a U.S. firm for fear that such a deal would give the U.S. government too much control over sensitive satellite images.

The government said Thursday that it was blocking Alliant Techsystems’ bid for MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates to protect Canada’s sovereignty. The New York Times noted this was the first time in 23 years that the Canadian government has blocked such a sale to a foreign company.

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ReadWriteWeb lists 10 of its favorite Web applications that have disappeared from the Web. In so doing, it calls out a problem with cloud-based applications that lack an open-source license: once they’re gone, they’re really gone.

Disclosure: I am an adviser to Loopfuse.

Savio Rodrigues suggests that source code access is “not all that it’s cracked up to be.” Try telling that to those that have relied on software only to find it, or its vendor, disappear.

I’ve mentioned before enterprises that have desperately tried to get their proprietary vendors to open-source their code, only to see the vendors go bankrupt and take their code with them. No, having source code access wouldn’t necessarily guarantee an easy future for such customers, but not having the source code ensures that there is no future for the product and its long-term utility for the customer.

Yes, cloud computing offers tremendous promise. It also has the chance to create significant peril for those that rely upon it. I therefore like the model, used by Loopfuse and others, that provides cloud/software-as-a-service-based software with the backup of an open-source license on that code to enable the code to outlive the vendor of it. Consider it a hedge on the longevity of the software service.

In the cloud, it’s even worse, as not only does the vendor disappear but so does all trace of its products. At least in my example above the customer had the perpetual right to the outdated code. In the case of the cloud the vendor’s death is simultaneous with the code’s demise.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Once installed you've got an easy way to tweak your mail settings in Windows to open up in Gmail instead of Outlook or other default programs.

If you’re a Windows user you know full well the tight integration among Microsoft products that has made the operating system a little less than friendly when it comes to tying in various Web apps. E-mail in particular is one of those actions that will usually pop up Outlook or Outlook Express, forcing you to either install a third-party mail app like Mozilla’s Thunderbird or go in and tweak your registry.

One thing that’s nice is that it’ll simply tack onto whatever browser you’ve got open, or simply open your default one if you don’t have it running. It’ll also suck in multiple files at a time (up to Gmail’s 20MB limit of course).

If you’re a Gmail user, and looking to get that same level of integration in Office documents and elsewhere on your system check out gAttach (download). This simple program will append all your mail extensions, getting them to open up in Gmail instead.

[via FreewareGenius via Lifehacker]

See also: Set Web e-mail as default Firefox e-mail

Yahoo mail users can also take advantage of a sister product called yAttach, which will do the same thing, although you can’t have both installed at once.

Mobile devices are a new frontier for the Internet in general and for the advertising business that Google and many others are building atop it. The mobile Web has been hobbled by tiny screens, slow and unreliable connections, and carriers’ data-access fees, but a new era is arriving.

Google is expanding its advertising business into a new domain: graphical ads that appear on mobile devices.

During last week’s conference call to discuss quarterly financial results, Google co-founder Sergey Brin was bullish about the opportunity to bring advertising to the mobile Web.

(Credit:
Google)

Google offers a variety of small display ad sizes.

Apple’s
iPhone has shown what’s possible. Increasingly widespread Wi-Fi makes it possible to bypass mobile-phone network operators. And initiatives such as Intel’s Mobile Internet Device and Google’s Android could lead to a new generation of devices.

This pay-per-click model is popular among advertisers who want to match expenses to active expressions of interest in their ads, though “click fraud” can mean some of that activity is bogus.

Google works to identify fraudulent or accidental clicks and doesn’t charge for what it deems to be invalid clicks.

“The mobile ads work very well,” Brin said. “There’s nothing to dissuade me it would be any worse than traditional desktop search.”

Google’s mobile image ads are similar to those appearing on ordinary Web sites, Google said, but are smaller and are limited to one per page. Advertisers will pay only when users click on an ad, as with the company’s text ads that appear next to search ads. Google requires only one ad per page, and the ads must link to mobile-specific Web pages.

As with the company’s text-based mobile ads, the Google image ads are displayed on the basis of keywords that appear on Web sites that people visit with their mobile phones, Google said Wednesday.

Already there are a few caveats to using the fancy new software. For one, the application is limited to Windows machines, and unlike standard network television channels, Internet users can’t access the programming without being an HBO subscriber–a system that’s likely to be checked with activation servers. The downloaded content is also given a self-expiration date of one month, regardless of whether or not it’s been watched. In many ways it’s similar to the BBC’s efforts with the iPlayer project, both in helping people catch up on old episodes, and attempting to curb piracy with easy access.

The New York Times is reporting that HBO is launching its own online distribution service for a portion of its content both past and present. Starting this week, lucky residents of Green Bay and Milwaukee, Wisconsin will be the first to get dibs on the new software application that can be set up to download and stack episodes old and new that can be watched on their PCs. Cable provider Time Warner (the same folks working on the lovely bandwidth metering down in Texas) is sending out the application on an CD to current HBO subscribers “soon.”

HBO Subscribers are getting a slightly better end of the deal than their Showtime counterparts as long as they’re willing to watch the shows on their PCs and forgo bringing the programming with them on portable devices. I’m still interested to see how much legacy programming HBO intends to offer in its first few months, as two of the key reasons for piracy are people simply not wanting to buy DVDs or missing the episode within its initial TV window. Isn’t this what they created on-demand programming for in the first place?

The Times notes competitor Showtime’s foray into digital distribution that started with iTunes back in 2006. Showtime currently has just over a dozen shows on iTunes and Amazon’s Unbox service at $2 a pop, although unlike HBO’s standalone downloading media player, both services are on a purchase model that allow users to repeatedly watch episodes on their computers, TVs, and in the case of iTunes–iPods and iPhones.

Here are some of the more incredible/interesting aspects of the design:

Apple has put the “Wow” in computing, today announcing its MacBook Air. What had been rumored to be a MacBook with wireless broadband built in turned out to be nothing so pedestrian. Apple, the Arsenal of computing, surprised many with an insanely thin new MacBook Air

Dimensions: 0.16″ to 0.76″. 13.3″ screen. As demonstrated, it fits within an envelope. It is dramatically thinner than anything else on the market.
The option of flash-based memory.
Multi-touch trackpad that allows users to work with on-screen windows in similar ways to the
iPhone’s touch screen.
1.6 GHz Standard, but also available in 1.8 GHz (Intel Core 2 Duo).
Not much hard-drive space: 80 GB standard, 64 GB SSD as an option (see above).
No optical CD/DVD drive. Jobs pitched this as a plus (i.e., you can get any movies/etc. from iTunes), but I think that’s a cop-out.

Is it drool-worthy? Of course. Will I be buying one? Nope. I’ve never understood the interest in micro-portables, and this is no different. I want my laptop to replace my desktop and not simply be a nice adjunct to a real laptop. The MacBook Air’s hard drive is too small (for me) and its processor is slow. I might get one for my kids, but not for me.

Still, it’s clearly a thing of absolute beauty.

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(Credit:
Apple)

Intel and Apple started collaborating on the project a year ago and the result is nothing short of spectacular. Whether it’s something that you’ll actually want to buy is an entirely different question, however. At $1,799.00, it’s not cheap, but no one buys excellence for pennies.

“We have talked with Apple,” he said. “We are very interested in being able to run on the iPhone.”

However, he said that Apple ultimately controls what types of software run on the iPhone and right now they are not looking to enable browser plug-ins of any flavor.
“They might in the future,” he said. “Right now that isn’t an option for any vendor”

Disclosure: CBS College Sports is a unit of CBS, as is CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News.

Microsoft on Monday announced, as expected, that it is ready with a final version of its Silverlight 2 media player.

Google’s G1 Android phone is another story, Guthrie said. “That is an open platform,” he said. “That is something we are going to look at.”

Existing users of both Silverlight as well as the Silverlight 2 beta will be automatically be upgraded to Silverlight 2 over the coming weeks, he said.

“We launched Silverlight just over a year ago, and already one in four consumers worldwide has access to a computer with Silverlight already installed,” Microsoft developer unit VP Scott Guthrie said in a statement.

Updated 9:20 a.m. PDT, with comments from conference call and at 10:20 with additional comments regarding Silverlight and the
iPhone.

“Certainly coming out with a new browser plug-in is an ambitious project,” Guthrie said. “We knew it was going to take a couple of years to get where we need to be.”

As for compatibility with Google’s Chrome browser, Guthrie said the initial release had a couple of issues with Silverlight, but he said that in the latest developer release of Chrome, Silverlight 2 works “fantastically well.”

Later in the call, Guthrie reiterated Microsoft’s interest in trying to see Silverlight running on the iPhone.

On a conference call, Guthrie said that in some countries, Silverlight already has 50 percent penetration. He said he expected deployments would “accelerate quite nicely” as some of the sites that require Silverlight 2 get up and running. In all, he said he expects hundreds of millions of PCs to be running Silverlight 2 “very quickly.”

Silverlight 2 will be available for download starting Tuesday, Microsoft said. Among the new features are support for digital rights management technology, improved cross-platform support and deep zoom technology. Microsoft also announced a range of new partners including AOL, Blockbuster, CBS College Sports, Toyota, and Yahoo Japan.

Still, that means Silverlight continues to have a very long way to go to compete with Flash, which is installed on nearly all Windows PCs.

Guthrie said he feels pretty good that Silverlight is already at the one in four number and said that the company will continue to do deals to boost penetration, as it has with HP which includes Silverlight on its PCs.

Microsoft also disclosed some numbers for the Olympics work it did with NBC. Over a 17-day period, Microsoft said NBCOlympics.com had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams, and 600 million minutes of video watched.

Overall, Microsoft said the Olympics helped boost Silverlight’s U.S. penetration by 30 percent, the software maker said.

Although partners will get a 12% cut of the first year’s subscription, and 6% thereafter, they will now be competing head-to-head against Microsoft for delivering value-added services. This marks a dramatic departure from the way Microsoft has worked with partners in the past. Mr. Softy formerly provided direct support and services only to the largest enterprise clients, while channel partners handled the rest.

Tech watchers will see lots of familiar concepts in software behemoth Microsoft’s revamped go-to-market strategy….[Microsoft] proclaimed its newfound focus on delivering software and services to customers via “the cloud,” using a subscription-based model popularized by companies like Red Hat, Websense and Salesforce.com.

After all, Microsoft’s new partner initiatives rely heavily on concepts devised and delivered by these companies:

By tangling with its partners in accounts of all sizes, Microsoft may have finally proved to be too big for its own good. Since it got into the applications business, it has had a competitive relationship with its software partners. But now it will also be competing with its channel delivery partners.

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But this may be one area in which Microsoft needs to think a bit more. As The Motley Fool notes,

Microsoft is a smart company, and has obviously thought about these issues. I still wonder if the company will find that its partners don’t like having to compete with their old friend.

Microsoft is smart: Why reinvent the business model wheel when others have pioneered successful ways to deliver software value? Of course, Microsoft has never been the most innovative of companies - it has become the market behemoth that it is by out-executing its competitors, not by out-thinking them.

If you attended Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, you can be excused for thinking you showed up at the partner event for Red Hat, Google, or Salesforce.

Yahoo kept the top spot with 140 million page views. Next were Google, with 138 million page views; Microsoft, with 121 million; AOL, with 111 million; and Fox Interactive, with 88 million.

The biggest players, however, were unruffled by these blips, with the top 10 unchanged in their relative rankings.

ESPN jumped from 46th place with 17.8 million page views from U.S. visitors in February to 34th place with 22.4 million page views in March, the month of the March Madness college basketball tournament and the Major League Baseball season opening, ComScore said.

Sports fans boosted ESPN’s status in ComScore’s latest measurements of Web site traffic, but the top sites kept their rankings unchanged during March.

The methodology, though, hasn’t sat well with Web site operators such as MySpace who say traffic is much higher and with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which last year asked ComScore and its rival, Nielsen/NetRatings, to submit their data to audits. (CNET Networks, which is News.com’s parent company, is among the IAB board members that approved the audit request.)

Sports-related online gambling sites also saw a surge, with Sportingbet’s visitor tally jumping 35 percent to 975,000, ComScore said. Upickem.net and SportsBetting.com, while smaller, also saw major gains.

ComScore makes its estimates of Web site visitors and page views based on the surfing behavior of about 2 million people at home, work, and college, with statistical extrapolations to gauge total traffic.

Ballmer also said that the on-again, off-again talks with Yahoo are in the “off-again” stage.

Microsoft also has to spend more in other areas than Google, by virtue of its No. 2 position. Marketing was one area, he said, where Microsoft will have to outspend the market leader. “Google doesn’t have to. We do,” Ballmer said.

“Some say it’s too expensive,” Ballmer said. “It’s a relatively small percentage investment from an overall Microsoft standpoint, in order to have a real opportunity at significant acceleration of our market value. I think it is a very good risk return.”

Ballmer’s comments came at the start of Microsoft’s financial analysts meeting, which runs all day here.

(Credit:
Ina Fried/CNET News)

In any case, Ballmer made the familiar case that the scale of the opportunity for a company of Microsoft’s size is too big to ignore.

(It seems every time Microsoft talks about the opportunity, it grows, even if Microsoft’s market share doesn’t.)

Update: Ballmer went into detail of where that online spending is going. He talked about how Microsoft’s costs to maintain its search index have to be nearly as high as Google, despite the fact that Microsoft has a lower volume of searches.

But, he said, as both advertising and content move online, the opportunity is huge.

Ballmer did say that the investment will have to continue until Microsoft gets more scale, which he said he could not put a time frame on.

REDMOND, Wash.–In trying to explain Microsoft’s continued decision to spend in its money-losing online services business, CEO Steve Ballmer likened it to a game of high-stakes poker.

But, he said, the company thought it was important that “whoever gives this presentation was actually still going to be here in three weeks.”

Updated 10 a.m. PDT, with more details on spending plans

Of note, one slide Ballmer showed pointed to an investment of 5 percent to 10 percent of operating income until the company has a more significant share of the market.

The money that Microsoft is spending, he said, is a few hundred million dollars in losses each year, but amounts to around 5 percent of the company’s overall operating income.

“We are going to have to ante up in a significant way to even be in this game,” he said.

Originally, Ballmer said, he wasn’t planning to give the online pitch, but said recent organizational changes (i.e. the departure of online business head Kevin Johnson) forced him into duty.

Ballmer: Online investments a fraction of operating income.

“There’s at least a trillion dollars just in media, communications, and advertising, not all of which we can capture,” Ballmer said.