LITTLE ROCK — Palm OKs sale of developers' programs
Palm Inc. will let developers start selling applications for its Pre phone through the company's online store in mid-September, stepping up competition with Apple Inc.'s App Store.
Developers will get a 70 percent share of each program's sales, Palm said last week, matching the arrangement offered by Apple. Free programs will be distributed at no cost. Palm currently distributes about 35 programs for the Pre, which made its U.S. debut in June.
Palm has received interest from thousands of developers who want to create programs for the Pre, said Katie Mitic, senior vice president of product marketing. Palm is playing catch-up with Apple, which has more than 65,000 applications available for its iPhone. Users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion programs from Apple's store, which opened in July 2008.
"One of the most important things to a developer building applications for our platforms is, 'How will I make money?'" Mitic said. "We're now giving them the answers."
Pre developers can start submitting applications for sale through the site, Mitic said. The approval process will take a few days to a few weeks, she said. The store's applications are part of a developer testing program.
After the Pre debuts in Europe and Canada, developers will be able to distribute their programs there as well, Mitic said. "We're taking a phased approach, and we're going to be starting in the [United States] and learn before we move into other geographies."2 firms join for mobile-movie downloads
NEW YORK - Blockbuster Inc. plans to offer movies that can be watched on Motorola Inc. cell phones. It marks the struggling rental company's first step into mobile video and is its latest effort at chasing down the customers who have abandoned its traditional video stores.
Blockbuster's plan expands on the company's On Demand movie downloading service offered through set-top boxes for TVs.
Kevin Lewis, Blockbuster's senior vice president for digital entertainment, said last week that the company is still working on specifics, including when the service will be available and how much it will cost.
Consumers will be able to pay for separate titles. Television series could be available along with new releases, Lewis said.
Customers will likely be offered the ability to download the videos to their phones - so movies won't necessarily be cut off without cell phone service.
Blockbuster has been scrambling to find new revenue sources as traffic at movie rental stores wanes and customers move to online video and order-by-mail services like Netflix.
Blockbuster joins a growing field of video services on cell phones.
Mobile customers can get clips on the mobile version of Google Inc.'s YouTube and movie rentals from Apple Inc.'s iTunes store on the iPhone. Verizon Wireless also offers V Cast, which shows sports, news and comedy clips on phones, starting at $15 per month.
Web-address trimmers form link archive
SAN FRANCISCO - The growing popularity of Web-address shortening services like bit.ly creates the potential for a bevy of broken links should one of the providers suddenly cease operations.
Those providers are now teaming up with data aggregation and syndication services company Gnip Inc. to form a system for archiving link data. That way, the links would keep working, even if the shortening service itself doesn't.
The development comes less than a week after link snipper tr.im decided to cease operations - although it later reversed course.
These services convert super-long Web addresses into a handful of characters. That helps prevent those addresses from breaking into multiple lines when used in e-mails, news stories and other places. It also helps users stay within the 140-character limit on Twitter.
Called 301works - 301 is the server code for a redirect - the service is expected to launch in several weeks, Gnip said. Members will periodically submit lists of the original Web addresses that users shorten through their sites, along with the corresponding shrunken links they create, so the information can be stored.
Boulder, Colo.-based Gnip is footing the bill for now, and it will run and manage it. Participants are going to pick a nonprofit organization to manage the directory in the long term, Gnip said.
Bit.ly, Twitter's default link shortener, is participating, along with Cligs, URLizer, urlShort and several others. Tr.im has not yet decided if it will join, Woodward said.
Microsoft fights ban on sales of Word
SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp. has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to allow it to keep selling Word software as it fights an unfavorable patent ruling.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas found Microsoft infringed on a patent held by a Canadian company, i4i LLP. Earlier this month, the judge ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million and to stop selling copies of its word processing program that use the patented technology within 60 days.
The patent relates to the way Word 2003 and 2007 let users customize document encoding.
Microsoft says it and the public will suffer if Word goes off the market while the company devises a workaround.
Business, Pages 20 on 08/24/2009