nuohejiaoyu.com

But other phone manufacturers may struggle. While Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics have managed to take share globally, these companies will need to address both ends of what is increasingly a crowded market. Samsung increased its share to 19.3 percent from 15.2 percent during the second quarter, while LG’s market share increased to 10.7 percent from 8.8 percent.

Pricing has also likely played an important role in prompting more people to buy a smartphone over a midrange feature-phone.

That said, Nokia has a strong presence in the low-cost part of the market. And it’s likely that the company will continue to maintain strength here, leveraging its massive scale to keep costs low.

The reason cited for the sales declines in the second quarter has been the weak economy, which has battered businesses in almost every corner of the globe.

Still, demand for smartphones remained high. And sales in this category actually grew 27 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. For several quarters now, smartphones have represented the fastest growing segment of the mobile market, and this has been in spite of a global recession.

But it’s not just the high end of the market that is expected to do well in the future. As the economy picks up again, low-cost cell phones are also expected to sell well over the next few years. Market research firm Juniper Research predicts in a recent report that low-cost handset shipments will increase by 31 percent in 2014.

So where will this leave handset manufacturers? Clearly, companies that have focused on smartphones, such as Apple and Research In Motion, are positioned for success. During the second quarter of 2009, RIM and Apple each increased market share in the smartphone category. RIM increased its share to 18.7 percent, up from 17.3 percent during the same period last year. And Apple jumped from a share of 2.8 percent a year ago to 13.3 percent of the smartphone market in the second quarter of 2009.

And as smartphone sales also increase, Juniper says that the high end and low end of the cell phone market will dominate, with these two categories accounting for 79 percent of the mobile devices sold by 2014.

Midrange cell phones could soon fall by the wayside as consumers in developed markets are opting for more advanced smartphones, while wireless users in developing nations gobble up low-cost devices.

Analysts believe the trend is the result of many consumers waiting to upgrade their phones, and those who do upgrade are gravitating toward more sophisticated smartphones.

In the U.S., smartphone prices have fallen dramatically. For example, Apple is offering its 8GB iPhone 3G phone for $99 with a two-year service contract from AT&T. Other older models of smartphones can also be bought for $99 or less with mail-in rebates and other incentives.

Meanwhile, Motorola and Sony Ericsson may be the two cell phone makers most vulnerable if these trends continue. These companies have not been playing well in either market, and they have each been losing market share.

Motorola’s market share fell to 5.6 percent from 10 percent in the second quarter of 2009. And Sony Ericsson’s market share fell to 4.7 percent from 7.5 percent.

Nokia, the largest cell phone maker in the world, still maintained its leadership position, but the company’s share has slipped. Nokia had 45 percent of the smartphone market in the second quarter of 2009, down from a 47.4 percent share in the second quarter of 2008.

Compared to the second quarter of 2008, global sales of mobile phones were down about 6.1 percent. This was the third consecutive quarter that fewer mobile handsets were sold worldwide when compared to the previous year. But analysts noted that the decline was at a much slower pace in the most recent quarter compared to the first quarter in 2009, in which the drop was 9.4 percent.

Two new market studies released this week suggest that the midrange cell phone market is being squeezed out. Overall, cell phone sales were down for the second quarter, according to market research firm Gartner. But sales of high-end smartphones remained high. And sales of low-cost devices are expected to explode in the coming years as more consumers in emerging markets go wireless, a recent report from Juniper Research said.

Meanwhile, sales of midrange devices are expected to fall more than 41 percent during that period.

(Credit:
Square Enix)

Check out Don’s Facebook profile, Twitter stream, and FriendFeed.

Regardless, Final Fantasy XIII follows a long line of games in the series that has captivated players. At its Tuesday event, the company said the franchise has sold more than 85 million units worldwide since the first installment was released in 1987.

Square Enix didn’t pinpoint a U.S. release date. The company said in previous releases, it took about a “half a year to a year” for it to bring the game to U.S. store shelves. It’s still hoping to make it available in spring 2010. Unlike the Japanese version, which only be made available on the PS3, Final Fantasy XIII will be offered to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 owners. No price has been announced.

Final Fantasy XIII is on its way to Japan.

Final Fantasy XIII will also be used to help Sony sell consoles. At the event, Square Enix said its game will come bundled with the PlayStation 3 Slim in Japan. It wouldn’t divulge any more details on when it will be made available or at what price it will be offered.

Square Enix announced at a press event Tuesday in Japan that Final Fantasy XIII, the next installment in the venerable franchise, will be coming to Japanese stores on December 17, according to the company’s site and a Reuters report. It will be offered exclusively on the PlayStation 3 for about $95.

So it looks like more waiting for those living outside Japan. But if you can’t take the wait, check out Square Enix’s Final Fantasy page. It’s really well done.

Final Fantasy XIII is one of the most highly anticipated games in the industry. Its story is set in the city of Cocoon. Another world called Pulse is the “wilderness” in the game. The main character, Lightning, is destined to destroy the world. His mission is to fight against that destiny and save the world while fighting off the enemy, called Fal’Cie. Unfortunately, Square Enix wouldn’t reveal too much more information about the storyline.

Digital music site Last.fm is like Pandora on steroids. The site allows devoted music fans from around the world to compare tastes, stream music from their favorite artists, stay up to date on local shows, download free MP3s, and create their own custom radio stations.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Last.fm’s open API has given rise to hundreds of user-created applications, plug-ins, web tools, mash-ups and widgets. No other music site offers more tools or more features to help users connect with each other and the music they love.

Disclosure: Last.fm is a property of CNET parent company CBS.

If you’re interested in breaking out of your Last.fm rut, I’ve put together a quick video guide and slideshow, illustrating some ways to take your experience further.

How to do more with Last.fm–screenshots

Unfortunately, the deep features that makes Last.fm so appealing to hardcore music nerds, can also make the site a little intimidating to first-timers and casual listeners. Like a freshman dance, folks will often just find one comfortable corner of Last.fm and lose sight of everything else going on around them.

Six days later, Facebook responded, saying that the request must come from a California court, and that it was “overly broad” because the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) protects the privacy of user accounts. Midkiff, the airline’s lawyer, replied by requesting a “contempt citation against Facebook” from the Virginia’s Workers Compensation Commission.

Privacy advocates applauded Monday’s decision, likening it to Google’s mostly successful effort to fend off a subpoena from the Justice Department three years ago. Jim Dempsey, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said: “Too often, lawyers in civil cases are turning to service providers like Facebook, AOL, and Google with fishing requests. The law is clear–service providers cannot turn over content in civil cases.”

Because social-networking sites offer such information-rich glimpses into a person’s private life, insurers and employers have begun eyeing them. A personal injury lawyer in Elmira, N.Y., noted in July that an accident victim claiming to be severely injured was, thanks to Facebook, revealed to be playing in soccer games. An article last week in Business Insurance said that social-networking sites revealed exaggerated claims of injuries from a judo instructor, a bowler, and a rodeo bronco rider.

Facebook had objected to the June 4 subpoena from Colgan Air–the Manassas, Va.-based company that operates under the names United Express, US Airways Express, and Continental Connection–on privacy grounds. It said federal law prohibits divulging user data in response to a subpoena, and promised to “further litigate this issue by seeking, among other things, an injunction from the federal courts.”

James Szablewicz, Virginia’s chief deputy worker’s compensation commissioner, said in an interview on Monday that he didn’t know of any other case involving Facebook that his colleagues have faced. “I think it’s a pretty good chance that this is a case of first impression for us,” he said.

In the Colgan Air case, Facebook says it’s happy that privacy rights prevailed. “We’re pleased with the outcome and that our users’ information will be protected,” said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt.

There’s an ironic ending to this story. Julie Heiden, a Virginia personal injury lawyer representing the former flight attendant, Shana Hensley, said in an interview on Monday that the subpoena won’t be necessary after all.

The airline’s June 4 subpoena from Virginia attorney Charles Midkiff (PDF) demands “all documents, electronic or otherwise, related directly or indirectly, to all activities, writings, photos, comments, e-mails, and/or postings” on Hensley’s Facebook account.

In principle, this isn’t a novel concept: employers and insurance companies have long used private investigators to ferret out fraud and show that someone who claims to be a virtual cripple actually participates in waterskiing competitions.

“We agreed to sign a release,” Heiden said, meaning a document that authorizes Facebook to disclose the contents of Hensley’s account to her former employer. “Shana has executed the release…She has nothing to hide.”

Update 9/15/2009: Colgan Air spokesman Joe Williams says: “As you might expect, we do not comment on pending litigation.”

On Monday, the Virginia’s Workers Compensation Commission said it was no longer going to levy a $200-a-day fine on the social-networking site for refusing to comply with a subpoena from an airline that previously employed a flight attendant named Shana Hensley.

Randolph Tabb, a deputy worker’s compensation commissioner, granted it. On August 28, Tabb held Facebook in contempt for “a failure to comply” and ordered a $200-a-day fine “until such time as compliance is satisfied by the production of said documentation.”

Facebook’s response to Tabb sent last week says that “users such as Ms. Hensley rely on Facebook to protect their data and vigorously enforce the privacy decisions they make on Facebook.” It adds: “Courts have interpreted the ECPA to prohibit services such as Facebook from producing a non-consenting subscriber’s communications even when those communications are sought pursuant to a court order or subpoena.”

The state of Virginia has backed away from its attempts to force Facebook to divulge the complete contents of a user’s account to settle a dispute over workers’ compensation, narrowly avoiding what promised to be a high-profile privacy battle in federal court.

Colgan Air, which is owned by the publicly traded Pinnacle Airlines, initially paid Hensley’s disability benefits that were related to a back injury while on the job (she was diagnosed with a herniated disc that did not want surgery). After about 18 months, however, Colgan Air claimed that Hensley was not cooperating with its efforts to find her a desk job and appears to have concluded that Hensley’s holiday vacation photos posted on her Facebook account would demonstrate that any back problems were not severe.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the principles are similar to the one involving Apple Computer’s efforts to unmask product leakers (the case is O’Grady v. Superior Court). “We were very glad to see that the rule of law we helped to establish in the O’Grady case is being used to ensure that Facebook content is not disclosed in violation of federal privacy statutes.”

Put another way: unless you change your mind, we’ll see you in federal court.

It worked. Tabb backed down, reversing his previous ruling and fine, and claimed that Facebook should have made the full scope of its objections clear earlier.

Maybe it was when the TechCrunch50 conference winners were finally announced and the grand prize went not to a slick and shiny app filled with Ajax interfaces and social-media mashups, but to RedBeacon, a mundane-looking local services start-up that aims to offer an alternative to Craigslist and the Yellow Pages if you’re looking for somebody to paint your house or cater a party.

(Credit:
Josh Lowensohn / CNET)

Web 2.0 has grown up, after three years of investment, start-ups, and media hype, and it couldn’t have been more evident at TechCrunch50, a two-day parade of start-up launches that sometimes feels less like a conference and more like a fraternity reunion. By this point just about everybody knows just about everybody else; the launch demos were just as likely to come from established industry players as from hopeful young newcomers.

There were blunt words for some of the companies at TechCrunch50, especially community-based sites that require a critical mass of users to stay afloat; judges seemed skeptical that the social-media fever of the past few years can still pack enough of a punch. “Why would I leave Twitter for this?” asked Robert Scoble of one start-up–the same Robert Scoble who, in fact, did more or less leave Twitter for FriendFeed, which had impressive technology but little mainstream appeal when Facebook purchased it this summer.

Not so long ago, the Web start-up landscape was dotted with dozens of small companies with a legitimate shot at getting huge. As recently as last year, it wouldn’t have been entirely ludicrous for an ambitious entrepreneur to take the stage at TechCrunch50 and announce that he or she was hoping to build a new start-up into the next Facebook. But the big guys have gotten bigger, and everything in comparison appears to be niche, peripheral tools.

The next big game-changer in social media might be out there already, and we haven’t even seen it coming yet. But watching more than four dozen start-up pitches in a row made it pretty clear that most of the biggest splashes of Web 2.0 have come and gone: we simply don’t need another news aggregator, another discovery engine, another question-and-answer service, another blogging platform, or heaven forbid, another social network. This is good. It’s a sign of industry maturation.

Innovation on the Web these days comes in the form of fine-tuned features and tweaks, not big and lofty new schemes. TechCrunch50’s lineup showed that while there are very promising ideas out there, the new stuff is about improving existing concepts, not creating something off-the-wall new. ToyBots, a new Web-connected toy company, takes the kiddie Webkinz craze from a few years ago and infuses it with the thinking behind “hackable” household gadget Chumby. Winner RedBeacon, as well as used-car marketplace Mota and job-hunt site LocalBacon, all pitched themselves as better options than traversing the Craigslist jungle. iMo and Spawn Player are both add-ons for gamers, the former an iPhone controller app and the latter a Slingbox-like place-shifter.

For now, if we want genuine, holy-crap excitement in the tech industry, perhaps we should be looking at hardware, green tech, edgy mobile innovations like augmented reality, or perhaps even enterprise technology. TechCrunch50 seemed to have the right idea by devoting a category of pitches to new hardware companies–but the judges, whose backgrounds were in Web and software investments, admitted that this wasn’t their area of expertise.

And it’s certainly not a bad thing that Silicon Valley’s elite finally seem to be catching on to that.

SAN FRANCISCO–At some point during the TechCrunch50 conference it became evident that the Web 2.0 floodgates are no longer open.

And when something popped up at TechCrunch50 that was pretty darn original, it was met with some restraint. There was plenty of excitement over AnyClip, a new database site that indexes and deep-tags short clips from movies, but the judges rightfully expressed concerns over the difficulty of wrangling with copyrights and content owners.

Maybe it was when conference co-organizer Jason Calacanis asked one of the panels of judges what they’d thought of a round of pitches from just-launched social-networking start-ups like inbox aggregator Threadsy and photo-sharing iPhone app Clixtr. Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and former Facebook exec who will be portrayed as a “Silicon Valley bad boy” in the film adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s dot-com scandal tome “The Accidental Billionaires,” leaned his elbows on the onstage table, slouched, and declared, “I’m a little bit bored with social media.”

Outside the TechCrunch 50 conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

It’s a far cry from the days when, even in the post-Napster era, millions of dollars were pumped into music- and video-sharing start-ups that weren’t prepared to deal with the intricacies of big media. And likewise, VC dollars were once flooding into start-ups that hoped to be the biggest social network in the world. The economy put a damper on this, for sure, but so did the increasing dominance of the likes of Google, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter and Digg. The big news in venture capital on the Web these days is Twitter’s alleged billion-dollar valuation and Facebook’s employee stock trading, not in a huge rush of investors heading for the next big thing on the Web–which is exciting nonetheless, because it wasn’t all that long ago that these companies were just as small as those presenting onstage at TechCrunch50.

Or maybe it was when several Facebook execs took the stage to announce, among other things, that the social network–the subject of perpetual hand-wringing over how it would possibly make money–achieved a cash-flow positive status for the first time in the second quarter of this year, earlier than its 2010 goal.

But other “magic pixie dust” appears. Polish. Documentation. Enterprise acceptance. And more.

Regardless, Gartner is right to highlight the significant benefits of open source that transcend price tags.

Here’s Gartner’s:

In response to commercial open-source demand, many new projects are being commercialized early in their maturity phases–often by a dot-com startup, and before a broad community “network effect” is firmly established. These projects are often under the patronage (if not authoritative control) of a single vendor that employs nearly (if not entirely) all key code contributors.

For example, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration argues that “Being able to look at source code is a huge benefit, instead of just getting a black-box executable we can’t even look at….[I]t’s always nice to be able to modify something on our own. We count on [open-source vendor] Progress to do the heavy lifting, but we do keep our own options open.” The FAA depends on Progress, without being dependent on Progress, and gets a great deal of benefit from both the open-source software and the open-source vendor.

Driven by expanding mainstream IT adoption, open-source usage profiles are shifting to more-conservative, risk-versus-reward dynamics. As a result, new adopters now place an increasing premium on commercial support channels to establish service-level agreements on par with closed-source alternatives.

It would be nice to discount this cost savings as transitory–a near-term phenomenon that dissipates once vendors control open-source projects–or related to community-based open source. But Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond, supported by IT executives from Virgin Mobile and San Francisco International Airport, argued at OSCON in July that open source, commercial or community-based, saves money in deployment costs, acquisition costs, and ongoing maintenance costs (if any).

Adopters will continue to receive benefits from open-source solutions, but these benefits will be increasingly realized by advantages in investment protection, innovation and technology alignments, rather than by simple cost savings alone.

Given the momentum behind open source, and how it has grown through the economic downturn, it’s not surprising that more and more vendors are getting involved to commercialize open-source projects. What is perhaps surprising, however, is how early in the open-source project lifecycle that commercialization is emerging, as Gartner indicates in a December 2008 report (”Predicts 2009: The Evolving Open-Source Software Model”).

I’ll buy that. Frankly, whether it ultimately costs me more or less is somewhat immaterial. I don’t buy Macs because they’re cheaper. I buy them because they’re better. In like manner, I buy open-source products because they are often much better, in several ways, than proprietary alternatives. Not always, but often enough that if you’re not at least considering open-source alternatives, you’re missing out.

In part, this is due to commercial open-source vendors charging dramatically less than their proprietary peers. We can pass on sales and marketing cost savings in the form of maintenance savings.

While Gartner suggests that this trend will lead to cost parity with proprietary solutions 50 percent of the time, the facts don’t bear out this assertion. For example, Forrester finds that 87 percent of enterprises surveyed reduced costs through open source.

Gartner suggests that by 2012, “50% of direct commercial revenue attributed to open-source products or services will come from projects under a single vendor’s patronage.” What this means, however, is open to interpretation.

Forrester, too, called this out at OSCON, articulating that while many companies adopt open source to save money, and do, they discover a myriad of other benefits along the way. Increased flexibility, higher quality, and more.

(Credit:
Forrester)

Pixie dust comes and goes
Still, Gartner has a point. It’s true that there are trade-offs that come with commercialization of open-source projects. Some of the magic pixie dust arguably evaporates when a company is behind a project.

But it’s not just Linux. Is Drupal adversely affected by Acquia? Lucene/Solr by Lucid Imagination? MySQL by MySQL? Jasper Reports by JasperSoft? And so on.

In every case, I’d argue that the projects have been significantly blessed by vendor involvement, not cursed. There are downsides to company involvement, but those are primarily the vendor’s issues, not the customer’s.

For those that think community-based support is the way to go, consider CentOS, a clone of Red Hat Enteprrise Linux. CentOS recently had its leader go AWOL. While the situation was eventually resolved, a serious vendor like Red Hat mitigates the vagaries of community whims, like Red Hat’s Alan Cox deciding to stop working on tty development.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Was Linux hurt by Red Hat’s involvement? Hardly. Linux has thrived in tandem with Red Hat’s prominent role in developing the Linux kernel.

With revenue down across almost all of its businesses, Hewlett-Packard posted a 19 percent drop in profit for the third quarter of 2009.

For the quarter ended July 31, HP recorded earnings of $1.6 billion, down from $2 billion the same quarter a year ago, and earnings per share of 67 cents. A year ago the company earned 80 cents per share. Excluding $568 million in one-time items related to restructuring and acquisitions, HP earned $2.2 billion or 91 cents per share.

This post was updated at 3:30 p.m. PDT with information from the earnings call.

Hurd said HP saw better-than-expected growth in its sales in China, but the same was not true for the other major regions. “The U.S. remained stable for the second quarter in a row, but we have yet to see the same trend in Europe,” he said.

HP’s sales for the quarter were in line with expectation at $27.5 billion, but still saw a 2 percent decline in the last year. Revenue dipped, however, in its computer, storage, financial services, software, and printing businesses. The one bright spot was its services division, whose 93 percent increase in revenue to $8.5 billion is due mostly to the company’s acquisition of EDS last year. But in total, it was the third straight quarter of falling profit for HP.

Analysts had been expecting earnings between 82 cents and 92 cents per share, and revenue between $26.8 billion and $27.7 billion.

“I think what we’ve seen so far this year is what we’ll see for the rest of the year…I’m encouraged by the stability we see in the market, but we’re not ready to call it a turn.” –HP CEO Mark Hurd

HP’s shares were down 2 percent to $43.09 in after-hours trading.

For the next quarter, HP anticipates earnings per share of 97 cents, compared to the 84 cents per share during the same quarter a year ago. But CFO Cathy Lesjak was careful not to create any heightened expectations, saying that revenue growth would be “slightly below historical expectations.” Again, Europe was fingered as the reason for the uncertainty. Lesjak said that normally there’s a significant increase in sales to Europe during the fourth quarter, but that she doesn’t anticipate that this year, saying any increase would be “muted.”

Despite that, executives did not sound worried. “I’m pleased with our execution in a tough market climate,” Chairman and CEO Mark Hurd said on a conference call with analysts and media Tuesday afternoon.

As the largest supplier of PCs in the world, HP is considered a bellwether for the technology industry. Analysts peppered Hurd with questions about when he sees sales to large enterprises picking up again, which would indicate a healthier overall economy. But he didn’t provide the most calming outlook.

“I think what we’ve seen so far this year is what we’ll see for the rest of the year,” he said. “I’m encouraged by the stability we see in the market, but we’re not ready to call it a turn.”

Sales in the Americas were up 8 percent, while they were down 12 percent in Europe.

By default, selected links open up in new browser tabs, although you can go into the options to choose whether you want them to open up in new windows, or be bookmarked instead. You’re also able to change the color scheme of the box, and the outlines of the selected links–just in case you’re into that sort of thing.

Here’s a must-have Firefox add-on. Called Multi Links, this extension lets you simply right click and drag your mouse across the screen to select multiple links at once. It’s just like selecting multiple files on your computer, and highly effective for tearing through a page of links you want to look at or save for later.

(Credit:
CNET)

Want to open up multiple URLs? Just drag your mouse over them with this handy extension.

See also: Snap Links (which does the same thing, but has not been updated since February) and Selection Links.

Advanced users can utilize keyboard shortcuts to limit mouse work. For instance, holding down the control or shift button while creating a box means you can hop around a page of results–selecting the items you want to open or save, while skipping over others. The extension is also coded to ignore extra links on search pages, which keeps you from unintentionally opening up the cached and similar links on each result. This worked fine on Google and Bing, but not on Yahoo or Ask.

This extension is definitely worth keeping around because it does not interfere with normal, right-click behavior. My one hope is that future versions will forgo the options menu in place of a small pop-up, or slide-out menu that asks what you want to do with links after selecting them.

It was a good second quarter for Apple’s iPhone as the company maintained third place in global sales among smartphone companies, according to a new report from market research firm Gartner.

Gartner cited Apple’s lowering the price on the 8GB iPhone 3G and its expanding into more countries as having a “clear effect on sales volumes.” To put the iPhone numbers in perspective, Apple sold more iPhones during the launch weekend in June for the iPhone 3GS than it sold for the entire second quarter of 2008. (Apple released the iPhone 3G in the third quarter of last year.)

It appears that Apple’s good fortunes will continue. Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner, said that since the iPhone was released late in the quarter, “its full potential will only start to show in the sales figures in the second half of 2009.”

In fact, Apple had the largest gains in the smartphone market, selling more than 5.4 million iPhones in the second quarter of 2009 compared to 892,000 in the second quarter of 2008, according to Gartner. First reported by AppleInsider, the increase in sales boosted Apple’s market share for the category to 13.3 percent from 2.8 percent in the same period in 2008.

The top company in the market is Nokia, which sold 18.4 million devices for a 45 percent market share. That share is down, however, from a 47.4 percent share in the second quarter of 2008. Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, sold 7.6 million devices, finishing out the quarter with 18.7 percent of the market, up from a 17.3 percent share during the same period last year.

(Credit:
Apple)

Worldwide, mobile phone sales totaled 268.1 million for the second quarter, down 6.1 percent over the same period last year. However, the smartphone category increased 27 percent year over year, with 40 million devices sold.

At that time, Microsoft said it is aiming to have Silverlight on half of all Internet-connected devices by next year. That’s still a far cry from Adobe’s Flash, which is almost ubiquitous on PCs and on a growing number of cell phones as well.

In particular, Microsoft said the next version of the Adobe Flash rival would support its PlayReady digital rights management technology for offline content. That feature should allow studios to offer extras commonly found on DVD and Blu-ray discs on movies that are distributed digitally, Microsoft said.

Microsoft has not said when the new version–Silverlight 4–will ship. Silverlight 3 was launched in July at an event in San Francisco.

Also on Tuesday, Microsoft said it would release in the next 30 days its Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 3.0, which allows so-called “Live Smooth Streaming” of content. The technology has already been used in beta form since May to offer coverage of events such as the French Open tennis tournament, the Tour de France cycling event, and the Michael Jackson memorial.

Ahead of a broadcasting conference that starts later this week in Amsterdam, Microsoft on Tuesday shared a few new details on the next version of Silverlight.