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IP addresses, strings of numbers that identify computers on the Internet, should generally be regarded as personal information, the head of the European Union’s group of data privacy regulators said Monday.

Germany’s data protection commissioner, Peter Scharr, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of Internet search engines operated by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and others comply with EU privacy law.

He told a European Parliament hearing on online data protection that when someone is identified by an IP, or Internet protocol, address “then it has to be regarded as personal data.”

His view differs from that of Google, which insists an IP address merely identifies the location of a computer, not who the individual user is — something strictly true but which does not recognize that many people regularly use the same computer terminal and IP address.

Scharr acknowledged that IP addresses for a computer may not always be personal or linked to an individual. For example, some computers in Internet cafes or offices are used by several people.

But these exceptions have not stopped the emergence of a host of “whois” Internet sites that apply the general rule that typing in an IP address will generate a name for the person or company linked to it.

Treating IP addresses as personal information would have implications for how search engines record data.

Google led the pack by being the first last year to cut the time it stored search information to 18 months. It also reduced the time limit on the cookies that collect information on how people use the Internet from a default of 30 years to an automatic expiration in two years.

But a privacy advocate at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, said it was “absurd” for Google to claim that stripping out the…

Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualization, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware Inc., the frontrunner in that area.

Virtualization allows one physical computer to house multiple “virtual machines,” each one acting like a separate computer with an operating system and all the software that runs on top of it.

For office workers, virtualization might mean that “their computer” is actually a virtual machine running on a server — not the actual hardware on their desks — and can be accessed from any work station. That, in turn, could make it easier for IT workers to install new applications across an entire company network or back up an individual’s computer with all its settings, and would make losing a laptop much less disastrous. What’s more, older hardware that would have been replaced can have a longer life connecting to virtual desktops housed on more powerful servers.

To help move the virtual desktop scenario forward, Microsoft said Monday it plans to acquire Calista Technologies Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based startup founded in 2006. Calista’s technology makes logging on to a virtual desktop feel more like working on a physical Windows computer, Microsoft said. No financial details of the agreement were disclosed.

Microsoft also said it will expand an alliance with another virtual desktop computing company, Citrix Systems Inc., that will help their respective products work well together.

Redmond-based Microsoft also announced it will cut the cost of licensing Windows for use on virtual machines to $23 from $78 per year for its big business customers.

Reversing its previous policy, the company said all versions of Windows Vista, including the least expensive Vista Home Basic, can be virtualized.

Microsoft is set to launch the next generation of its…

After seven months as chief executive, Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang has concluded hundreds of employees will have to be fired to help the slumping Internet icon recover from years of misguided management.

The Sunnyvale-based company’s biggest purge since the dot-bust most likely will be announced next week, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday. The person asked not to be identified because the exact number of jobs to be cut is still under discussion.

Yang and his management team already have committed to jettisoning at least several hundred jobs to help boost Yahoo’s profits and placate investors demanding more action to reverse a steep decline in the company’s stock price.

Securities analysts are betting Yahoo will trim its 14,000-employee payroll by about 5 percent — or 700 workers. If that many people are dumped, Yahoo could save about $100 million (EU69 million), JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan estimated in a Tuesday note.

Besides trimming Yahoo’s expenses, job cuts could help buy Yang more time to carry out his strategy to re-establish Yahoo as a main entry point to the Internet and create a more compelling online advertising network.

Many investors had been questioning whether Yang was too emotionally attached to the company that he started in 1995 to make the tough decisions needed to turn it around, said Standard and Poor’s equity analyst Scott Kessler.

“A lot of what drives the market comes down to perception and, rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that Yahoo needs to be repaired,” Kessler said. “To gain credibility, you need to make hard choices like this.”

From Wall Street’s perspective, the layoffs are long overdue. Through September, Yahoo generated just under $364,000 (EU251,138) per employee, well below an average of nearly $565,000 (EU389,816) per employee at six other major Internet companies, including Google Inc. and eBay Inc., Khan…

Companies such as Salesforce.com have been delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for customer relationship management and other business needs for years. And while some I.T. professionals have been cautious about relying on such hosted applications, that could soon change.

On Tuesday, EMC announced EMC Fortress, described as a secure development platform, and its first application, an online backup service called MozyEnterprise. The release follows EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems last October.

“Our strategy is focused on bringing new software-as-a-service offerings to market, powered by EMC,” said Tom Heiser, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s new SaaS unit.

EMC said MozyEnterprise automates secure online backup and recovery over the Internet for “consistent and reliable” offsite data backup.

Acceptance of SaaS

The release indicates a “growing acceptance of software-as-a-service offerings,” Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, said in a telephone interview. “Salesforce.com has turned the corner on the traditional reticence.”

The cornerstones of SaaS adoption are expense and simplicity, King added. “Software as a service plays well where there’s an enterprise-class product that’s easier to use and more cost-effective than running the solution in-house,” he said.

The timing of this product intersects with the rapidly expanding amount of storage available in employee laptops and desktops. “EMC really hit the note here,” King said, “because business employees are storing more and more data on laptops than ever before.”

Most businesses, King went on to say, realize that the “information being stored on employee laptops constitutes valuable corporate data and that adequate backup is important.”

Verizon Signs On

King expects MozyEnterprise to conquer lingering concerns about storing corporate data offsite. “There have been some issues around whether businesses are willing to store data in a data center with other businesses’ information,” King said. With MozyEnterprise, though, “not only is data encrypted on backup, it’s also stored in an encrypted…

Companies such as Salesforce.com have been delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for customer relationship management and other business needs for years. And while some I.T. professionals have been cautious about relying on such hosted applications, that could soon change.

On Tuesday, EMC announced EMC Fortress, described as a secure development platform, and its first application, an online backup service called MozyEnterprise. The release follows EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems last October.

“Our strategy is focused on bringing new software-as-a-service offerings to market, powered by EMC,” said Tom Heiser, senior vice president and general manager of EMC’s new SaaS unit.

EMC said MozyEnterprise automates secure online backup and recovery over the Internet for “consistent and reliable” offsite data backup.

Acceptance of SaaS

The release indicates a “growing acceptance of software-as-a-service offerings,” Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, said in a telephone interview. “Salesforce.com has turned the corner on the traditional reticence.”

The cornerstones of SaaS adoption are expense and simplicity, King added. “Software as a service plays well where there’s an enterprise-class product that’s easier to use and more cost-effective than running the solution in-house,” he said.

The timing of this product intersects with the rapidly expanding amount of storage available in employee laptops and desktops. “EMC really hit the note here,” King said, “because business employees are storing more and more data on laptops than ever before.”

Most businesses, King went on to say, realize that the “information being stored on employee laptops constitutes valuable corporate data and that adequate backup is important.”

Verizon Signs On

King expects MozyEnterprise to conquer lingering concerns about storing corporate data offsite. “There have been some issues around whether businesses are willing to store data in a data center with other businesses’ information,” King said. With MozyEnterprise, though, “not only is data encrypted on backup, it’s also stored in an encrypted…

Nikita Ivanov and his 14 employees are working on an application that would harness the processing power within millions of cell phones to create one big supercomputer. The idea is to enable companies and government agencies to exploit all the idle computing power in their employees’ mobile phones and perhaps even handsets belonging to non-employees who have agreed to lease that spare capacity.

To create this “grid” computing application, Ivanov’s startup firm has chosen a mobile software platform that doesn’t yet run on a single commercially available phone. Rather than Windows Mobile or the Symbian operating system, GridGain is using Android, a platform spearheaded by Google that has drawn scores of software developers with its promise of flexibility to create unusual applications.

GridGain is one of thousands of Android-based projects in the works. Another would enable users to record and share audio tours of museums or galleries. One is a music player that can connect a cell-phone user with people who have similar musical tastes and happen to be nearby. All underscore the ways that developers hope to use Android to take phones in new directions with greater ease than today’s prominent wireless platforms. To succeed, though, they, along with Google and its partners, will need to work some kinks out of the system.

No Support for Bluetooth

It’s telling that Android, first unveiled by the Google-led Open Handset Alliance in November, is spurring all this interest among developers even though no wireless carriers have definitively agreed to allow such handsets on their networks. Or that Android is still missing many key capabilities such as support for Bluetooth wireless connections to headsets and other devices.

Nearly 200 industry movers and shakers recently surveyed by Chetan Sharma Consulting said they believe Android-based mobiles won’t make even a small dent during 2008 in the smartphone market, which…

IP addresses should be classified as personally identifiable information, the head of the European Union’s data-privacy regulators said on Monday. Google begs to differ.

EU regulators are preparing a report on the privacy policies of Internet search engines, including those operated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, and how well they comply with EU privacy laws. Peter Scharr, Germany’s data-protection commissioner, heads the group and has said that an IP address must be regarded as personal data when it can be used to identify someone. Google disagreed in a hearing Monday before the European Parliament.

“If a law-enforcement authority makes a concrete request to, let’s say, investigate child pornography, and if it is made through valid legal process, we respond to it,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, told the hearing on online data protection.

“The rules vary in each particular country,” Fleischer said, “so this is why we have to face it with a good team of lawyers. We also challenged a disproportionate request for millions of pieces of information in a U.S. court, and we won.”

Political Privacy Wrangling

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has not come to a consensus on whether IP addresses should be defined as “personal data” subject to privacy rules. Fleischer maintains there is no black-and-white answer. Sometimes an IP address can be considered personal data and sometimes not, he said, depending on the context and what personal information it reveals.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, disagreed. “I wish this was the case, but we are moving toward the IPv6 model, for which it will be even more the case that IP addresses will be personably identifiable,” he told the European Parliament.

Google’s proposed acquisition of DoubleClick underscores the need to take data protection into account, he continued. The Google-DoubleClick deal is currently being examined by…

If mobile phones are getting too small for your fingers or eyes, a Dutch company called Polymer Vision has a unique solution. It announced a phone with a foldable screen that offers a display larger than the device itself.

Called Readius, the device has a five-inch, black-and-white display that unfolds and folds. The screen can display only 16 shades of gray, but the company says it is twice the surface area of the largest mobile-phone display. When closed, the device is the size of an average mobile phone.

Polymer Vision is a spinoff from electronics giant Philips, and the Readius will be available by the middle of this year. No price has been announced.

New Mobile-Phone Category

Polymer said the Readius introduces a “whole new mobile-phone category,” combining the “‘reading friendly’ strengths of e-readers with the ‘high mobility’ features of mobile phones.” The Readius can run for up to 30 hours on a single battery, is a HSDPA tri-band phone with standard POP3 and IMAP support for e-mail, and has microSD High Capacity storage.

Users do not want to deal with problems that result from the small device-versus-screen size tradeoff, said Polymer CEO Karl McGoldrick in a statement. Such devices have either small screens or are too bulky to carry in a pocket, he said.

To solve the problem, Philips spent years working on foldable displays. In 2002, after more than 10 years of research into what it called organic electronics, Philips announced the world’s first flexible display. In 2004, Polymer, which was then part of Philips, announced the first rollable display that was as thin as paper. The first prototype of the Readius was presented in 2005.

‘Very Innovative Device’

Chris Hazelton, an analyst at industry research firm IDC, remembers when the prototype was announced. “It sounds like a very innovative device,” he said, adding that he…

The iPhone is getting ready for work. On Monday, AT&T announced business plans for Apple’s popular touch-screen device, and there are reports that IBM soon will announce Lotus Notes e-mail for the iPhone.

When the iPhone first was released in June, the criticisms leveled at it centered around its lack of support for enterprise requirements. For instance, anyone who was already a business customer of AT&T and wanted to get an iPhone had to get the consumer plan.

The new business plans, announced on AT&T’s Web site, require a two-year commitment — as does the consumer version — either as a new service agreement or as a renewed agreement for existing customers.

Lotus Notes E-Mail Support?

Three plans are available: the Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone 200, the Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone 1500, and the Enterprise Data Plan for iPhone Unlimited. All three offer unlimited data access and visual voicemail in the U.S.

The plans differ in the number of short message service (SMS) communications that are allowed. The iPhone 200 plan, for instance, offers 200 SMS messages monthly for $45, the iPhone 1500 is $55, and the Unlimited plan is $65. There are also step-ups for global data plans, which cover 29 countries.

The next step toward welcoming the iPhone into corporate I.T. departments, according to an Associated Press report last week, could be an announcement from IBM that will come later this week. IBM reportedly will offer Lotus Notes e-mail for the iPhone, free to users with a current Lotus Web-access license, and $39 a year for new users.

Dropping the ‘Other Shoes’

“Right now,” said Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, “the iPhone is still a consumer device.” No matter what functionality or plans are added to it, he said, it has been designed to be the best entertainment…

Microsoft has offered new details about its plans to move more deeply into the virtualization market where VMware is king. Virtualization, Redmond said, is key to its vision of what it calls Dynamic I.T.

Toward that end, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Calista Technologies. According to Microsoft, the buyout is aimed at improving the end-user experience for virtualized desktops and applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In addition, Microsoft announced an expanded alliance with Citrix Systems in the areas of client and server virtualization. And the software giant said it plans more flexible licensing options for virtualization with Windows Vista and new tools to deploy its virtualization software.

Microsoft’s Dynamic I.T.

Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the server and tools business at Microsoft, said that few customers are able to reap the benefits of virtualization today because it is too cost-prohibitive and complex.

“Our approach is not only one of the most comprehensive in the market today, but we believe it is also one of the most economical,” Muglia said in a statement. “This combination brings a big strategic advantage and cost savings to customers.”

Microsoft’s plans for virtualization are a key part of the company’s overall vision and long-term strategy. The goal of what the company calls Dynamic I.T. is to deliver computing resources anytime and anywhere, and to create an I.T. environment that is more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective.

Microsoft said its strategy for client and server virtualization is to provide the best value in the industry with a complete set of solutions from the desktop to the data center. For example, customers can virtualize nearly all components of their desktop — including the operating system, applications, data, and preferences — and make them accessible from practically any machine.

Optimizing the Data Center

These initiatives put Microsoft on course to…