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Motorola has been shaking up its top management as it struggles to get its fledgling handset business back on track. The company has seen its market share in the handset market fall dramatically over the past year. The company fell from second place to third in terms of handset shipments during 2007. Meanwhile, market leader Nokia has grown market share to about 40 percent.

The biggest problem Motorola has been facing is a lack of compelling and popular handsets, especially in Europe. The company hasn’t had a hit phone since the Razr. Amid the turmoil, the company announced last month that it is considering “strategic options” to get the company back on the right track, which could include selling its handset business. Still, top executives are adamant that the company does not want to sell the handset business, and it’s looking for other alternatives.

Brown became CEO in January after former CEO Ed Zander was forced to step down amid pressure from investors due to the company’s worsening financial situation.

Mobile phone maker Motorola has named Paul Liska, a former private equity executive, as chief financial officer, the company said late Thursday.

Liska, who had been a partner for private equity firms including MidOcean Partners, CVC Capital Holdings and Ripplewood Holdings, will take the top finance spot at the company starting March 1. He will replace acting CFO Tom Meredith, and he’ll report directly to Chief Executive Officer Greg Brown.

Liska has experience helping get value out of businesses. While working in private equity, his task was to go in and help run companies, which were typically underperforming. And before working for private equity firms, Liska had been at Sears, where he ran its credit business. While there, he helped Sears sell the division to Citigroup in 2003 for $6 billion.

Most Gmail users were unable to get to their accounts on Tuesday as an outage struck the Google e-mail service. Google said service returned to normal at about 2:40 p.m. PDT for most users.

Gmail went offline Tuesday for some users.

Updated 2:44 p.m. PDT: Google posted an update to its Apps Status page about a minute after we got off the phone with the company, saying all is well.

This story was corrected at 2:41 p.m. PDT to include information from the correct Google Apps Dashboard incident.

Outages pose problems for Google, as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues that its service availability is competitive with most organizations’ abilities to run their own e-mail servers.

Gmail is used by tens of millions of people, and its fast growth carried it past AOL’s e-mail service into third place, according to ComScore.

Updated at 1:50 p.m. PDT: Some users reported being able to access their Gmail accounts from the iGoogle home page, but this didn’t work for everyone we briefly surveyed in the office, and it seemed sporadically available this way for others. Google said it would “provide an update by September 1, 2009, 2:16:00 PM UTC-7 (PDT), detailing when we expect to resolve the problem” on its Apps Status page.

“The problem with Google Mail should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience and continued support.”

Updated 2:03 p.m. PDT: Google apologized for the outage on the Gmail blog and also said the problem was affecting the company internally.

“We know many of you are having trouble accessing Gmail right now–we are too, and we definitely feel your pain. We don’t usually post about minor issues here (the Apps status dashboard and the Gmail Help Center are usually where this kind of information goes). Because this is impacting so many of you, we wanted to let you know we’re currently looking into the issue and hope to have more info to share here shortly.”

Updated at 2:35 p.m. PDT: A Google representative declined to elaborate on exactly what was causing the issues but pointed interested parties to the Apps Status dashboard and the Gmail blog for further updates, which the company hopes to issue soon. Corporate users of Gmail through the Google Apps program–a key set of customers, as Google hopes to grow that business–as well as individual users, are affected, he confirmed.

Updated 2:20 p.m. PDT: Google still doesn’t know what’s wrong, according to the latest update to the Apps Status dashboard. “We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by September 1, 2009, 3:13:00 PM UTC-7 detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Also, at this time, Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (applies only to Google Apps Premier and Edu customers) is not available.”

Some Gmail users are starting to report the service coming back for them, but not everyone is as lucky. Believe it or not, this reporter (Tom Krazit) has it working in one
Firefox tab and inaccessible in another.

So, what happened? We’ll attempt to find out.

Updated at 1:58 p.m. PDT: How widespread is this outage? Please let us know if you’re down, and where you are, in the comments below.

“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a majority of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail,” Google said at 12:53 p.m. PDT on its Google Apps status dashboard after it discovered the problem.

However, hours later, the problems persisted for many, and the Twittersphere was abuzz with griping.

Customers of Google Apps Premier Edition, who pay $50 per user per year, get extensions of their service contracts, if their services are down for longer than a certain duration. The dashboard showed only mail to have troubles, not other Google Apps services, such as Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The problems appeared to affect the Web-based version of the service, but affected accounts could be reached–at least sporadically–using third-party e-mail software that used the IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, interface. Google provided instructions on how to do that here.

Google didn’t immediately comment on the scope and cause of the outage. It’s not the first Gmail outage this year.

…[E]ach Dash Express…becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. Each device not only receives and displays information, but transmits it as well, acting as a “probe,” as Dash calls it, to measure local traffic speeds. This information is compiled by the company and then broadcast back to all other Dash units in your area, almost instantly painting streets on your map with color codes to indicate traffic speeds.

What does it do?

Walt Mossberg reviewed the Dash Express earlier this week, an in-car slice of salvation for anyone that spends much time in the
car.

In other words, the Dash Express makes one’s car a giving/receiving node on a traffic network, helping others while one is helped. It’s an excellent representative sample of Tim O’Reilly’s principle of the importance of data and of defaulting to collaboration.

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Head over to Mossberg’s full review for the nuances of the device. He tests it with just two nodes and finds that it does a great job even with limited adoption. Just think of how good it will be once thousands or millions of cars have the Dash Express on board?

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Yahoo! has taken a step beyond Google by opening up its website and other services to third-party developers, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

It’s a good move toward an “open-source web,” one that may prove to be a key wedge to driving developers away from Google and toward Yahoo!, but still leaves Yahoo! and other cloud-based applications vulnerable to obsolescence.

In other words, it’s good to see Yahoo! becoming more permeable to outside development, but it would also be nice to see its applications outlive the company’s attention span or life span. Perhaps open data, open APIs, and open source are the right recipe for a robust web?

The efforts…range from allowing users to search other content — such as classified-ad sites — from within Yahoo Mail to allowing them to access online music download services like that of Amazon.com Inc. from within Yahoo Music…[as well as] redesigning [Yahoo!'s] home page to make it easier for users to tap these third-party services.

“Have you disassembled the headphones with remote yet? Have you figured out, how the buttons work? Do they work by connecting two lines with a resistor? Is it possible to add such a remote to other headphones?”

See more pics after the jump.

CNET tends to review products from the outside looking in (see Donald Bell’s full review of the new Shuffle). But the good folks over at iFixit make it habit to start right from the inside. In the case of the third-generation Shuffle teardown, like with all recent iPods, Apple doesn’t make it easy to crack the case. And although only one screw had to be removed, iFixit describes how it had to insert a “metal spudger into a crevice between the rear cover and the rest of the Shuffle” to get the device open. As you might expect, things are pretty simple–and tiny–under the Shuffle’s hood.

(Source: iFixit via Gizmodo)

(Credit:
iFixit)

There are a couple more pictures after the jump, but the full dissection (with lots more photos) is available at iFixit, where one unsatisfied reader writes:

As always, feel free to comment.

(Credit:
iFixit)

The vision of the city, designed by Foster and Partners, is to be a model for sustainable architecture.

No
cars will be allowed in the city. People will get around through an electric light-rail system that will be linked to the center of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

An artist’s rendering of the overall plan of Masdar City. A model will be unveiled Monday.

A vision of Masdar Institute of Science and Technology.

The cleanest city in the entire world will take root next month in Abu Dhabi, a place best known for its oil.

A desalination facility will be 80 percent more efficient than existing plants, and all wastewater will be purified and recycled to grow plants that could be used for biofuels.

At the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, a model of Masdar City is scheduled to be unveiled on Monday. The three-day conference is hosted by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co.’s Masdar Initiative, which is investing in a range of ventures, including clean-tech start-ups.

The city will be placed to take advantage of the cool sea breezes, while a perimeter wall around the entire city will protect buildings from the hot desert air and noise from the nearby Abu Dhabi airport.

A solar-photovoltaic power plant will deliver energy to buildings. Builders also envision using solar canopies that provide shade, as well as power.

In February, Masdar (which means “the source” in Arabic) will break ground on the six-square-kilometer city that its backers say will be the first zero-pollution, zero-waste city. The city will be capable of housing 47,500 people, who are scheduled to start moving there in 2009. Construction is expected to take 10 years.

(Credit:
Foster and Partners)

(Credit:
Masdar)

Masdar City will be the home of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, which backers hope will attract some of the best academics from the around the world. Also envisioned are research and development facilities from multinational companies and start-ups in the clean technology area.

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So, thank you, Zimbra, for providing offline access to my corporate e-mail (We use Zimbra here at Alfresco), and for helping to enrich Yahoo’s e-mail experience. But it’s just insurance to me now. You’ve converted me to life in the browser. I’m not going back.

Yahoo announced today that it’s letting Zimbra run amok, improving its Yahoo Mail with offline access. CNET’s Stephen Shankland has a good review of how this impacts Yahoo Mail users, as well as some warts that remain.

It’s a pretty significant move since it means that Zimbra is now reaching more than 250 million people, instead of the “mere” 11 million that it was touching before. That’s even more than the number of people currently using
Firefox. Next time your mom asks what open source is, you can tell her “Zimbra” or “Firefox.” She’s likely to appreciate the value of open source (and the job you do) between those two examples.

The ironic thing for me is that despite berating Zimbra for a year to develop an offline version of its excellent software, I almost never use it anymore. E-mail for me has become a tab in my Firefox browser. Sure, if I get on a plane then I’ll use Zimbra Desktop, but even with how much I fly (125,000-plus miles each year), that’s still only 1 percent of my life). I almost never need it.

(Credit:
CNET)

Sources:
Alley Insider and Marketwatch

Previous to this announcement, videophiles have pretty much gotten a free-ride on renting higher-priced high-definition media, as Netflix offered both HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs to subscribers for no additional charge over a standard subscription–until Netflix stopped offering HD DVDs in February. Netflix continues to offer the ability to watch some movies online (”Watch Now”) at no additional charge, but the selection is still pretty limited at this point (check out our hands-on from last year).

In addition to the Blu-ray news, Hastings also reiterated that Netflix is looking to bring the Watch Now feature to set-top boxes, which was reported back in January. In addition to the initial partnership with LG, Netflix plans to pair up with two additional major companies, and one additional small company. No details yet about who the small company is, but if we had to take an early guess…maybe Slingbox? It would certainly be a compelling upgrade to an already excellent product, and it makes sense since a Slingbox is by nature always connected to the Internet. We’ll have to wait to find out, but not all that long: Hastings said the Watch Now-enabled boxes will all be out by the end of the year, with the one from the “small company” available even earlier.

Bad news today for home theater fans: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said on a conference call that because Blu-ray discs cost more to purchase, the company plans on charging a premium on accounts that rent Blu-ray movies. Hastings said “consumers are used to paying more for high-definition,” but with Blu-ray renters making up only a small percentage of Netflix subscribers, this certainly won’t help spur adoption.

On Wednesday, the Democratic presidential nominee wannabe issued another one of those insufferably boring candidate white papers on how she would improve the country as its 43rd president. The main news? Clinton wants to spend $7 billion to promote what she terms an “insourcing” agenda, offering a package of tax incentives and investments to companies that create jobs in America.

•  More venture capitalists are taking a magnifying glass to deals they previously would have funded. You want a new round of cash? Assume the position.

•  At least 15 new “Innovation and Research Clusters” across the country

(Credit:
Declan McCullagh/CNET News.com)

•  An increase in the existing R&D credit by 50% and the creation of a new 40% R&D credit for basic research

OK, nothing wrong with a little pork barrel action this time of the campaign season. And some of the ideas are not half-bad: So, for example, she favors:

Apart from the big companies, however, the start-ups and entrepreneurs that provide the tech industry with its lifeblood must wonder why they don’t get included in the conversation. It’s not as if they can’t use the help. With the VCs spooked by an increasingly gruesome economy, the days of easy money are over.

•  The pace of VC investment in Web 2.0 companies has begun to decline. Might 2008 be the make-or-break year for many advertising-based start-ups?

Hillary Clinton is on to something but she’s not thinking big enough.

•  In the first three months of 2008, the number of VC-backed mergers and acquisitions f
ell to an all-time quarterly low for the decade

I don’t buy the end-of-the-world scenario that another mega-bust is on the horizon. Still, these are turbulent times and start-ups will get knocked around a bit before things calm down. Instead of being forced into ridiculous choices between political camps, they have more issues to attend to. Such as how to survive when times get tough. And they could use friends in high places–that is, assuming the folks in Washington will pay attention.

On the flip side, Clinton would end tax incentives that allow companies to ship jobs and capital overseas. She also wants to end the practice that lets companies defer paying U.S. taxes on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries. But the reforms offered by Clinton, Obama, and McCain are primarily focused on big companies. It’s a page out of the Willie Sutton handbook of political nose-counting: you suck up to the places where the most votes are.

So, what's a start-up again?

•  New “Insourcing Markets Tax Credit” to spur business investment communities facing global competition

•  $500 million annual investments to encourage the creation of high-wage jobs in clean energy manufacturing technologies

It looks like the leaks were pretty much dead-on, and Sony does indeed have a brand-new ultraportable laptop called the Vaio TT. It’s a thin, lightweight 11-inch model, available in two different shades of black, plus red or gold.

We’re especially interested in the Vaio TT because it’s the successor to Sony’s Vaio TZ line, one of our all-time favorite ultraportable laptops, and a reminder that even though they’re similar in size, there’s a big difference between what a $500 Netbook and a $2,000-plus fully featured ultraportable laptop can do.

Sony’s new Vaio TT ultraportable.

The basic Vaio TT runs about $2,000, while the Blu-ray version is $2,700. A version with a single 128GB SSD drive will cost $2,750. The system is available for order starting today, and should ship to retail stores sometime later this fall.

(Credit:
Sony)

(Credit:
Sony)

Sony says the new system has a lightweight carbon-fiber chassis that weighs about 2.87 pounds and measures less than one inch thick. Unlike Netbooks, the Vaio TT (and other ultraportables such as the Toshiba R500) has room for an optical drive, and there’s even a Blu-ray option. Yes, that seems rather pointless, but at least there’s an HDMI output for sending the Blu-ray signal to a larger display. Solid state hard drives are also available, including dual 128GB drives (making for a sizable 256GB of SSD storage).