NewsScan Daily, 10 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 10 June 2003 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
        Tech Consolidation on the Horizon?
        E-Trade Offers Portable Mortgages
        Kids Get Spammed, Too
        Black-Hat, White-Hat Robots
        It's a Radio World
        Marketing East, Marketing West, Marketing Yourself is Best

FEATURES
        Flash Card
        Summer Census (Cont'd.)
        NewsScan's Contribution to Adult Literacy Programs
        Worth Thinking About: Dark Matter

TECH CONSOLIDATION ON THE HORIZON?
Oracle's hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft is a harbinger of things to 
come, say many analysts, who've been watching for signs of an impending 
consolidation in the software market. "This is the first week of what will 
be a decade of consolidation in the applications space," says a Banc of 
America securities analyst. "The large suite vendors are going to get 
larger and stronger, and everyone else is going to get weaker. If 
stand-alone firms are attractive, they'll be swallowed." Experts say Oracle 
CEO Larry Ellison's surprise move is a shrewd one -- one that will benefit 
his company whether or not he actually makes the acquisition. If the deal 
goes through, Oracle will surpass Microsoft in the market for 
business-application software, and if it's rebuffed (as expected), Oracle 
may still succeed in sowing doubt among PeopleSoft's customers following 
Ellison's pledge to stop selling PeopleSoft's HR management software. 
Either way, Oracle has thrown a potential monkeywrench into PeopleSoft's 
plans to acquire J.D. Edwards. If PeopleSoft backs out, Oracle may snap up 
J.D. Edwards for itself, and if Oracle's bid for PeopleSoft doesn't pan 
out, it's rumored that No. 1 business applications maker SAP might make a 
play for it. (Los Angeles Times 10 Jun 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-merger10jun10,1,278214.story?coll=la 
-headlines-technology

E-TRADE OFFERS PORTABLE MORTGAGES
Online financial services firm E-Trade Group rocked the mortgage market 
yesterday, announcing fixed-rate loans that buyers can take with them to 
finance their next house. Although the interest rates on the portables is 
slightly higher than on a convention mortgage (5.875% vs. 5.5%), the new 
offering will appeal to homebuyers that want to lock in their monthly 
payments at today's low rates, while retaining their flexibility to change 
residences. In addition, borrowers with portable mortgages won't have to 
suffer through the lengthy credit checks and job verifications necessary 
when one buys a new home. If the new home cost isn't covered by the balance 
on the portable mortgage, E-Trade says it will finance a second mortgage at 
the prevailing market rates. The E-Trade 30-year portable mortgage can be 
transferred once, according to a company spokeswoman -- a reversal of an 
earlier statement that there were no limits on the number of times the loan 
could be transferred. (AP 9 Jun 2003)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20030609/D7RIGHIO0.html

KIDS GET SPAMMED, TOO
A new study by Applied Research probably won't surprise anyone, but it does 
highlight the consequences of the current spam-run-amok Internet culture. 
According to the research, which was commissioned by Internet security firm 
Symantec, more than 80% of kids (aged 7 to 18) get "inappropriate" 
unsolicited commercial e-mail on a daily basis, and their spam looks just 
like yours: sweepstakes offers (80%), "relationship-related" e-mail (62%), 
financial come-ons (61%), weight-loss ads (55%), pharmaceutical ads (51%), 
and, of course, p*rn (47%). Symantec has characterized spam as a new summer 
hazard, right up there with sunburns and insect bites. Almost half of the 
1,000 respondents said they were online more than two hours a day in the 
summer, compared with only 23% during the school year. (CNet News.com 9 Jun 
2003)
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-1014951.html?tag=fd_top

BLACK-HAT, WHITE-HAT ROBOTS
MIT robotics professor Cynthia L. Breazeal, whose special interest is 
robots that seem to have emotional as well as physical responses to the 
real world, says: "For me, as for many of us who do robotics, I think it is 
science fiction. My most memorable science fiction experience was 'Star 
Wars' and seeing R2D2 and C3PO. I fell in love with those robots." Then why 
do fictional robots seem  menacing? "We have a lot of suspicion of robots 
in the West. But if you look cross-culturally, that isn't true. In Japan, 
in their science fiction, robots are seen as good. They have Astro Boy, 
this character they've fallen in love with and he's fundamentally good, 
always there to help people. In a lot of Western science fiction, you need 
some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western 
culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of 
fear of creating something that goes out of control.  Also a lot of Western 
sci-fi books and movies are about the basic notion of taking responsibility 
for what you create. If you're talking about creating any new technology, 
this is always an issue." (New York Times 10 Jun 2003)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2003/06/10/science/10CONV.html

IT'S A RADIO WORLD
Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has recently told its top supplier 
that they'll need to have all their products "chipped" -- i.e., provided 
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that can be tracked by remote 
radio receivers for inventory tracking and management. And now Microsoft 
has announced that it will develop software and services for RFID 
technology, and make its desktop, server and applications software all work 
with RFID. (Reuters/Yahoo 10 Jun 2003)
http://shorl.com/jekyvyjobrypri

MARKETING EAST, MARKETING WEST, MARKETING YOURSELF IS BEST
Anu Shukla, a Silicon Valley marketing expert and now a principal of the 
San Mateo-based startup company RubiconSoft (a maker of software to pull 
together inventory, forecasting, and sales data from many sources), got her 
first introduction to marketing in her native India, where she found that 
people "were saying things like, 'Let's not show this or that in the 
picture because people will think it's too expensive or you need lots of 
education to use it.' It was fascinating to hear them discuss the messaging 
of the product." Now, with Rubicon, Shukla's strength is in niche 
marketing, a focus she explains by saying: "I was a user architecting the 
solution for myself. I knew exactly what the market needed" -- software to 
plan and track marketing efforts. One of her associates says: "She really 
knows how to connect with people. And it's not fake either. People can tell 
the difference real quick." (San Jose Mercury News 10 Jun 2003)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/6053541.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
      "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the 
conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for 
absorbing positive knowledge." (Albert Einstein)

NEWSSCAN'S CONTRIBUTION TO ADULT LITERACY PROGRAMS
      NewsScan subscriber Karen Watterson recently sent us a note saying, 
"At some point, you might want to pat yourselves on the backs and let us 
readers know how much the HonSub links have generated..." Good suggestion 
-- but the pat on the back goes not to us but to all of you! As a result of 
your book purchases made on Amazon via the NewsScan link, we have been able 
thus far to donate $3,681.72 to Literacy Action's outreach programs to help 
adults learn to read. Many thanks to all of you who have helped make that 
possible!

SUMMER CENSUS (CONT'D)
      Many thanks for all your messages about our little Summer Census 
(summer here, at any rate; not everywhere). It will take us a good while to 
acknowledge them all, but it's already clear that NewsScan readers are in 
every part of the world and occupied in virtually every kind vocation and 
avocation imaginable (no pun intended: "virtually" used to be a real word).
      Once again: If you have a few minutes, please tell us a little about 
yourself. A couple of sentences will do the trick. Send to 
[email protected].

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: DARK MATTER
      In his book "The Universe in a Nutshell," theoretical physicist 
Stephen Hawking speculates on the nature of Dark Matter, presently an 
unobservable part of our galaxy:
      "Various cosmological observations strongly suggest that there should 
be much more matter in our galaxy than we see. The most convincing of these 
observations is that stars on the outside of spiral galaxies like our own 
Milky Way orbit far too fast to be held in their orbits only by the 
gravitational attraction of all the stars that we observe.
      "We have known since the 1970s that there is a discrepancy between 
the observed rotational velocities of stars in the outer regions of spiral 
galaxies and the orbit velocities that one would expect according to 
Newton's laws from the distribution of the visible stars in the galaxy. 
This discrepancy indicates that there should be much more matter in the 
outer parts of the spiral galaxies.
      "Cosmologists now believe that while the central parts of spiral 
galaxies consist largely of ordinary stars, their outskirts are dominated 
by dark matter that we cannot see directly. But one of the fundamental 
problems is to discover the nature of the dominant form of dark matter in 
these outer regions of galaxies. Before the 1980s it was usually assumed 
that this dark matter was ordinary matter comprised of protons, neutrons, 
and electrons in some not readily detectable form: perhaps gas clouds, of 
MACHOs-'massive compact halo objects' like white dwarfs or neutron stars, 
or even black holes.
      "However, recent study of the formation of galaxies has led 
cosmologists to believe that a significant fraction of the dark matter must 
be in a different form from ordinary matter. Perhaps it arises from the 
masses of very light elementary particles such as axions or neutrinos. It 
may even consist of more exotic species of particles, such as WIMPs -- 
'weakly interactive massive particles' -- that are predicted by modern 
theories of elementary particles but have not yet been detected 
experimentally."

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0553676431/newsscancom/ref=nosim 
for Stephen Hawking's "The Universe in a Nutshell" -- or look for it in 
your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations 
to adult literacy programs.)

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