Microsoft Raises Office Price

Microsoft has quietly increased prices of Office for the Mac as much as 17% and stopped selling multi-license packages of the application suite.

The move puts Office for Mac 2011 on the same pricing schedule as the new Office 2013 for Windows. The price increases and the disappearance of the multi-license bundles also makes Microsoft’s Office 365, a software-by-subscription deal the company has aggressively pushed, more competitive with traditional “perpetual” licenses.

It’s not clear when Microsoft raised prices. The oldest search engine cache Computerworld found with the new prices was Feb. 2, so the company boosted them before then, likely on Jan. 29, the day it launched Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium. Microsoft did not mention the changes to Office for Mac in its press releases that day, or otherwise publicize the move on its Mac-specific website.

The single-license Office for Mac Home & Student now costs $140, a 17% increase from the previous price of $120. Office for Mac Home & Business, an edition that adds the Outlook email client to Home & Student’s Excel, PowerPoint and Word, runs $220, or 10% higher than the older $200 price.

The new prices are identical to those of Office 2013 for Windows, as are the percentage increases.

Buyers can still find Office for Mac 2011 at the older, lower prices, however. Although Microsoft has boosted prices on its online store — as has Apple’s e-store, which also sells the suite — other retailers have not yet joined them.

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Amazon Looking For Investors

Amazon has issued its first bonds in nearly 15 years as it looks to borrow money while interest rates are low.

Amazon’s position as the undisputed king of online retail has put the company in a good position to take advantage of cheap borrowing rates. Amazon issued three, five and 10-year bonds at 0.38, 0.63 and 0.93 percent above US Treasury rates with investors clamouring to get a ride on the firm’s coattails.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s $3bn bond issue has attracted more than $10bn in investor interest. According to ratings agency Moody’s, the firm will use the cash generated in the bond sale to make investments such as buying its corporate headquarters.

Standard and Poor’s rated Amazon’s debt as AA- and said there was minimal financial risk with Amazon. While Moody’s rated the bonds at Baa1, the agency also forecast strong growth in sales for Amazon in the coming years. It seems that Amazon, given that it hasn’t got any other bonds, is proving popular with bond investors despite reporting low profits and recently having been grilled in the UK Parliament over allegations of tax avoidance.

Amazon has been diversifying the ways it generates cash, and while it long ago moved away from simply selling books, the firm is a big player in cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division and is aggressively marketing its own brand of electronics devices in the Kindle range of ebook readers and tablets.

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RIM’s PlayBook Tablet Pulled

Models of Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablet have been yanked from online stores of some top retailers in the U.S. and Canada, a move one analyst said could mean that the company is gearing up for a successor tablet.

The PlayBook tablet is no longer listed on the online stores of consumer electronics retailers including Wal-Mart, Best Buy, RadioShack and Staples. The products are listed as being out of stock in Office Depot’s online store.

In the BlackBerry maker’s home country of Canada, only the 32GB model is available on the websites of retailers Futureshop and Best Buy Canada, at a discounted rate of C$149.99 ($153). The 16GB and 64GB PlayBook models are out of stock.

However, the tablets remain available on RIM’s own online store.

RIM did not respond to requests for comment.

The first PlayBook shipped in April 19, starting at $500 for a 16GB model, but has sold poorly since. PlayBook sales dropped to about 130,000 in RIM’s most recent fiscal quarter, which ended on Sept. 1.

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IDL Goes Live

The Internet has a cluster of superheroes ready to defend it, the Internet Defence League (IDL).

The IDL was set up by protest group Fight for the Future following the recent outbreak of web site blackouts that were launched to protest against legislation like SOPA and PIPA. It offers web sites a way to show that they are always ready to defend the internet against attack.

“The Internet Defense League takes the tactic that killed SOPA and PIPA and turns it into a permanent force for defending the internet, and making it better,” it says on its homepage. “Think of it like the internet’s Emergency Broadcast System, or its bat signal!”

Like those earlier protests, the idea is to get the more informed people, people that are actually operating internet properties, into the debate.

“Internet freedom and individual power are changing the course of history. But entrenched institutions and monopolies want this to stop,” explains the group. “Elected leaders often don’t understand the internet, so they’re easily confused or corrupted.”

Anyone that runs a web site is invited to join, and the idea is to get millions of people involved. Once they have joined the IDL they will be given software code to add to their web sites to show that they are members.

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Is NFC Taking Off?

Analyst working for Berg Insight have noted a growth in global sales of handsets featuring Near Field Communication (NFC) increased ten-fold in 2011.

More than 30 million units were sold in 2011 and the market was growing at a compound annual growth rate of 87.8 percent. It predicts that shipments will reach 700 million units in 2016. The global rise in smartphone adoption is also driving higher attach rates for other wireless connectivity technologies in handsets including GPS, Bluetooth and WLAN, the report said.

Some of the reason for the growth is the reduction in the cost of the technology. It is now a staple feature on high-end smartphones and most medium- and low-end models. Declining costs will also enable broader integration in the featurephone segment that is rapidly gaining smartphone-like functionality.

Shipments of WLAN-enabled handsets have more or less doubled annually in the past four years and the attach rate increased to 33 percent in 2011.

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RIM Hopes Apps Will Help Sales

Research In Motion is highlighting the native and Android apps available on its struggling PlayBook at the Consumer Electronics Show as it gets ready to launch the first major overhaul of the tablet’s software in February.

The company is showing the PlayBook OS 2.0 in its booth, demonstrating the Android apps that will finally be available to users of the tablet. RIM said in March last year that it would release a player that would let users of the tablets run apps designed for Android, and that capability will finally be available with PlayBook OS 2.0.

Popular games such as Cut the Rope and Plants vs. Zombies will be available in the store, said Alec Saunders, vice president of developer relations and ecosystem development. The apps appear and work like any other app; users don’t have to launch a separate player to run them.

Not just any Android app will be accessible to users, and that’s by design, Saunders said. “We don’t want to enable an open marketplace the way the Android Market is,” he said. Android developers must use a software package to make their apps compatible with the PlayBook, and then they must submit it to RIM’s standard app curation process. The company hopes to weed out the malware and pirated apps that often appear in the Android Market, he said.

When PlayBook OS 2.0 becomes available, “some number of thousands” of Android apps will be available in the market, Saunders said. The company has been working with some of the aggregator marketplaces to port apps and attending Android meetups to encourage developers to make their apps available to PlayBook users, Saunders said.

RIM is taking pains to attract as many developers as possible by supporting as many languages and frameworks as possible. “One thing we’re focused on is providing a rich palette of tools developers can use,” Saunders said. RIM has developed ports for a number of frameworks and languages to make it easy for developers to use whatever tools.

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GoDaddy To Drop SOPA Support

Giant domain name registrar GoDaddy.com has yanked its support from the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act after owners of several websites stated they would take their business elsewhere.

Negative feedback about SOPA from a number of customers forced GoDaddy to take a second look at the legislation, said Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO. Go Daddy has concerns about the free speech and Internet security implications of the legislation, but until now, has worked with lawmakers to address those issues, he said.

“It’s clear to us the bill’s not ready in its current form,” Adelman said Friday. “Looking at this over the last 20 hours, we’re not seeing consensus in the Internet community, we’re hearing the feedback from our customers.”

On Thursday, Reddit user selfprodigy said he was pulling 51 domain names from GoDaddy because of the registrar’s support of SOPA. The same day, Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger family of humor websites said said his company would move its 1,000-plus domains off Go Daddy unless it dropped its support for the bill, known as SOPA.

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Hitachi-LG Executives Plead Guilty

Three executives at Hitachi-LG Data Storage (HLDS) have agreed to plead guilty and serve prison time in the U.S. for their participation in a number of conspiracies to rig bids and fix the prices of optical disk drives sold to large computer manufacturers, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday.

Young Keun Park, Sang Hun Kim and Sik “Daniel” Hur conspired with others to suppress competition by rigging bids for optical disk drives sold to Dell and Hewlett-Packard and to fix prices for optical disk drives sold to Microsoft, the DOJ said. The conspiracies happened at various times between November 2005 and September 2009, the DOJ said.

Under a plea agreement in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Park and Kim each have agreed to serve eight months in prison and Hur has agreed to serve seven months in prison. Each has also agreed to pay a US$25,000 fine.

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FCC Warns Against Jammers

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has issued warnings to 20 online retailers offeriing illegal mobile phone jammers, GPS jammers, Wi-Fi jammers and other signal jamming devices, the agency said Wednesday.

The sale and use of devices that jam the signals of authorized radio communications are illegal in the U.S., the FCC said in its enforcement action. The agency will “vigorously” prosecute violations going forward, it stated in a press release.

“Our actions should send a strong message to retailers of signal jamming devices that we will not tolerate continued violations of federal law,” Michele Ellison, chief of the FCC’s enforcement bureau, said in a statement. “Jamming devices pose significant risks to public safety and can have unintended and sometimes dangerous consequences for consumers and first responders.”

Jammers, sometimes used in classrooms, theaters and churches, are prohibited because they can prevent individuals from contacting police and fire departments or family members during an emergency, the FCC said. “Use of jamming devices can place you or other people in danger,” the agency said.

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Will HP Temporarily Resurrects The TouchPad?

Hewlett Packard Co plans to produce “one last run” of TouchPads, days after declaring it will discontinue a line of tablets that failed to challenge Apple Inc’s domination of the booming market.

A day after the chief of HP’s personal devices division told Reuters the TouchPad might get a second lease on life, HP announced a temporary about-face on the gadget after being “pleasantly surprised” by the outsized demand generated by a weekend fire-sale.

HP slashed the price of its tablet to $99 from $399 and $499 the weekend after announcing the TouchPad’s demise on August 18, part of a raft of decisions intended to move HP away from the consumer and focus on enterprise clientele.

That ignited an online frenzy and long lines at retailers as bargain-hunters chased down a gadget that had been on store shelves just six weeks.

“The speed at which it disappeared from inventory has been stunning,” the company said. “We have decided to produce one last run of TouchPads to meet unfulfilled demand.”

HP may lose money on every TouchPad in its final production run. According to IHS iSuppli’s preliminary estimates, the 32GB version carries a bill of materials of $318.

“We don’t know exactly when these units will be available or how many we’ll get, and we can’t promise we’ll have enough for everyone. We do know that it will be at least a few weeks before you can purchase,” HP said in a blogpost.

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