Top game designer leaving EA

US videogame publisher Electronic Arts announced that top game designer Will Wright, superstar creator of "The Sims," "SimCity" and "Spore," was leaving the company.

EA said Wright was quitting EA to run "Stupid Fan Club," an entertainment think tank developing properties for videogames, movies, television, the Web and toys.

The Redwood City, California-based EA said in a statement that it will make an equity investment in Stupid Fun Club but declined to specify the amount.

"The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change," said Wright. "Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms.

"In my twelve years at EA, I've had the pleasure to work alongside some of the brightest and most talented game developers in the industry and I look forward to working with them again in the near future," he said.

"Will is a great designer and he's been part of a great legacy of globally recognized game franchises," said EA chief executive John Riccitiello.

The departure of Wright is the latest bad news for EA. The former industry leader has reported a net loss for eight quarters in a row.

EA, which has lost its spot as the world's top videogame maker to Activision Blizzard, recently announced plans to cut 11 percent of its workforce, or 1,100 jobs, and close 12 facilities.

Clinton promotes Roma rights in video blog

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton highlighted the need to protect the rights of Europe's Roma minority on Wednesday, marking International Roma Day with a video message on her official blog.

Clinton released the video on State Department's "Dipnote" website, although the traditionally nomadic people, widely plagued by poverty and discrimination in central and eastern Europe, has long been unable to access modern communication tools.

"Many Roma still live on the margins of society," acknowledged Clinton.

"They continue to experience racial profiling, violence, discrimination and other human rights abuses.

"Too often they lack identity documents or citizenship papers, which excludes them from voting, social services, education, and employment opportunities that would enable them to participate more fully in the countries in which they live."

European governments have a "special responsibility to ensure that minority communities have the tools of opportunity they need to succeed as productive and responsible members of society," said Clinton.

The large ethnic group numbers some 10 million, and Clinton said the population's well-being has been a personal interest for her for a long time.

"I saw firsthand the plight of the Roma -- particularly Romani women and children -- when I visited Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe as First Lady."

The United States, she said, is "committed to protecting and promoting the human rights of Roma," and will push for Roma integration through the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"It is in the interests of the larger European and global community to create conditions that maximize success for all people within our borders and beyond," she said.

Serbia, which currently holds the presidency of the Decade of Roma inclusion -- an international initiative aimed to improve Roma welfare -- pledged Wednesday to improve the community's standards.

Speaking before lawmakers on International Roma Day, Labour and Welfare Minister Rasim Ljajic said Roma welfare remains "far from satisfactory."

The ethnic minority in Serbia is 10 times poorer than the rest of the population," he noted, citing surveys that show that one in four "does not have even an elementary education."

HP Releases Automation Tools for Virtual Data Centers

Hewlett-Packard hopes to play a bigger role in managing the virtual data center with updates to its Business Service Automation software announced on Tuesday.

HP released updates to two products in the suite, Storage Essentials and Operations Orchestration, and introduced a new subscription service, BSA Essentials, that it said will help keep systems patched and in compliance with auditing standards.

Virtualization has allowed companies to reduce hardware costs and conserve floor space through server consolidation. But it has also created headaches for large organizations that are struggling to manage hundreds of virtual hosts and their related storage and networking resources, said Bob Meyer, head of HP's virtualization group, in a press briefing at HP's offices.

The update to Storage Essentials means the software can now discover VMware hosts in a network and map out their related storage and storage-area-network dependencies, allowing admins to keep track of who is using which resources. It will also track how much capacity assigned to the virtual hosts is actually being used, so that unused storage can be reallocated.

The update is available now for VMware environments and HP is working on a version for Microsoft's Hyper-V. It plans to support Citrix XenServer in the future, though Hyper-V is its first priority after VMware, said Michel Feaster, senior product director for Business Service Automation.

Another challenge for IT departments is the time it takes to provision the storage and networking for virtual servers. A virtual server can be set up relatively quickly, but storage and networking admins are having to spend too much time provisioning other parts of the infrastructure, according to HP.

Its answer is an update to Operations Orchestration, a workflow tool for automating the provisioning of servers and storage. The tool now has templates to guide administrators through the server, network and storage configuration for virtual environments. This should make the process faster and ensure the work is done in a standard way, reducing errors, HP said.

The tool integrates with VMware Virtual Infrastructure, XenServer and HyperV, "so you can automate tasks using the management interfaces provided by those virtualization vendors," said Kalyan Ramanathan, HP director of product marketing.

Forrester analyst Glenn O'Donnell, who was at the HP briefing, agreed that as virtualization moves from test and development into production use, more automation is required. Otherwise capital savings will be lost through higher operational costs, he said.

"You shouldn't have high-priced network engineers Telnetting into a router doing grunt work; you have to automate it," he said.

Administrators will resist automation because it undermines their role, but it's a necessary change as businesses try to cut costs in today's economy, he said.

HP also introduced a new service called BSA Essentials. HP will monitor clients' systems to see that they comply with internal and external policies, like being up-to-date with security patches or meeting certain security or configuration requirements. The service is billed as a percentage of the software license fee, HP said.

It also launched the BSA Essentials Community, a Web site where BSA customers can share best practices and other tips.

The new products mean HP will be able to compete more directly with VMware, which also hopes to play a bigger role in data center management through its upcoming Virtual Data Center OS.

"VMware will be in 'coopetition' with HP and everybody else out there," O'Donnell said.

Google Secure Data Tool Ties Apps to Company Data

Google's new Secure Data Connector could result in a plethora of tie-ups between its productivity software and a range of enterprise applications and data sources.

The SDC, announced late Tuesday evening, allows data from behind-the-firewall sources and applications to be securely accessed via Google Gadgets, Google spreadsheets or its App Engine development platform.

Google's announcement gained initial backing from none other than Oracle, which said that its Siebel CRM (customer relationship management) software will support the SDC. Oracle also announced Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps, with which users can create gadgets for Google Sites.

In addition, Google partner Cast Iron Systems has added SDC to its data integration software.

The SDC provides "the secure tunnel" through which data can flow, while Cast Iron's technology provides data integration tools and templates for a wide variety of applications, said Chandar Pattabhiram, vice president of product marketing.

Google's goal is to "encourage adoption of Google Apps by making it a more realistic option for enterprises with the bulk of their assets behind a firewall," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with Redmonk.

Also, "it certainly could see partnerships with firms that do not have significant productivity technologies potentially threatened by Google Apps, i.e. Oracle," O'Grady said.

Some businesses are already partly down the path laid out by technologies like the SDC.

The Schumacher Group, a Lafayette, Louisiana, company that provides medical staffing for hospital emergency departments, is using Cast Iron, the SDC and Google Gadgets to build an information portal for its 2,500 physicians in the field, said CIO Doug Menefee. It is not being used to transport any private patient data, he added.

Menefee is a big fan of cloud-based services, saying the model allows businesses to be much more nimble and competitive, given the quicker implementation compared to on-premises systems. "If I was starting up a new business today, I'd be totally SaaS," he said.

But cloud computing has some challenges of its own.

For example, one significant hurdle for Schumacher's portal project lies in user authentication. The company is using a third-party identity management product to provide single sign-on for both the portal and users' Google accounts, according to Menefee.

"We work with 2,500 providers. To ask them to have multiple user names and passwords, that's not a user-friendly way to do it," he said.

Australia government faces upper house broadband battle

Australia's government faces a battle to win backing for an ambitious super-fast broadband network spanning the nation, with rivals rejecting the plan and newspapers calling it either "brilliance or a rash extravagance."

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on Tuesday said he would develop a $31 billion private-public broadband network that would take eight years to build and be the country's largest infrastructure project.

"Our initial position is that it's a heck of a lot of money," said independent upper house senator Steve Fielding, whose support the center-left government needs to win approval for the scheme in an upper house dominated by conservative opponents and independents.

"The government has stalled for 18 months. How can we be guaranteed they're going to get on with the job now?" Fielding told a radio station on Wednesday.

Rudd's plan had fundamental flaws, including where the money would come from as Australia teeters closer to recession, and whether the network would be obsolete by the time it was completed, Fielding said.

Conservatives wielding the largest bloc of upper house votes also opposed the scheme, with Liberal Party Senate leader Nick Minchin calling the plan a joke.

But newspapers said if Rudd's internet plan was carried out competently, it would equip Australia with the world's foremost tool for innovation and growth. The government, riding high in opinion polls, faces re-election late in 2010.

Senior political columnist Peter Hartcher said Rudd had "thrown out three decades of ideology" in the wake of the global financial meltdown, displaying a distrust of the market and placing government back at the center of national planning.

"With the government to own 51 per cent of the equity, Rudd has in effect closed the Australian sub-branch of the Thatcher-Reagan revolution," Hartcher wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper.

Rudd's Labor had seized the opportunity presented by problems in its original, modest election plan to launch a grand big-government broadband scheme, veteran political analyst Michelle Grattan wrote in The Age.

"The government's breathtaking broadband project is either a stroke of ambitious brilliance or a rash extravagance that might be impossible to implement," Grattan said.

Rudd, whose popularity is near-record levels in opinion surveys, said late on Tuesday that conservative opponents risked an election backlash in opposing a scheme that he expected would receive wide public backing.

With the government needing to raise A$20 billion ($14.26 billion) in private investment and more from the sale of bonds to the public, Treasurer Wayne Swan said the government contribution would not be anything close to the full A$43 billion project cost.

"I don't believe we'll have to finance the lot of it by selling bonds to the public. We will certainly finance the government contribution by selling bonds," Swan said.

Actor Jackman condemns "Wolverine" leak

In a blaze of publicity, Australian actor Hugh Jackman zoomed in by helicopter and flying fox to an event to promote the latest X-Men movie, saying he was "heartbroken" that the film had been leaked on the Internet.

At the start of a world tour to promote "X-Men Origins: Wolverine," Jackman unveiled 20 minutes of footage from the action blockbuster to fans and media on Cockatoo Island in the middle of Sydney Harbor, where some of the film was shot.

"Jumped from chopper, arrived to work via flying fox and apologized (sic) to AUS (Australian) media for Opera House slip up," Jackman wrote on the social networking service Twitter.

The Sydney-born actor was referring to a message, or tweet, sent out on his new Twitter account on Monday in which he mistakenly called the Sydney Opera House the Opera Center.

His Twitter account is just one of the social networking tools being used to promote the comic-book superhero film. Jackman also stars in a YouTube clip in which he urges fans to vote for their city to host the film's premiere later this month.

Jackman, who not only stars in the movie but also produced it via his company Seed Productions, said he was upset for everyone involved in the movie that an unfinished version was posted online last week, almost a month before its launch.

The leak sent production company 20th Century Fox, a unit of News Corp, into a spin to stop the spoiling of one of the year's most anticipated movies.

Oman Web forum trial raises transparency concerns

The trial in Oman of a Web moderator over criticism of the government in a popular Internet forum has led to calls for the Gulf Arab state to ease its grip on the media and improve business transparency.

Ali al-Zuwaidy was detained for 11 days earlier this year for questioning over an anonymous post suggesting corruption in state telecom firm Omantel and for publishing a cabinet directive putting an end to live radio phone-ins.

A verdict in Zuwaidy's trial is due on April 21.

It is the latest in a series of legal cases concerning Internet blogs, forums and websites in the Arab world, where rights groups say governments are clamping down. The Internet has become a popular arena for discussion partly because of restraint observed in traditional media.

Oman, a country of 3.3 million people on the tip of the Arabian peninsula, has one of the most closed media and political cultures in the Gulf region, analysts say.

"We view this case as threatening freedom of expression in the country and we think it is not in the interest of the state's development efforts," said Said al-Hashemi, a member of the Omani Writers Association which has provided legal aid for Zuwaidy, a writer and civil aviation administrator.

"There is corruption in some institutions. If we don't have the right to criticize then there is a problem," Hashemi said, adding that three journalists were detained briefly last year over reports they published in Omani papers.

Ministry of Information officials declined to comment when contacted by telephone.

Live broadcasts of a popular morning radio show where Omanis call in to discuss issues of governance were stopped last year, journalists say. A document saying the cabinet ordered ban was published on the "Sablat Oman" forum last year.

Omani newspapers have said that Zuwaidy, who could face a total of four years in prison and hefty fines, is accused of publishing a confidential document that he obtained in his capacity as a state employee and insulting the former Omantel CEO, Mohammed al-Wohaibi.

Wohaibi resigned last month, citing personal reasons. Omantel bought Pakistan's Worldcall Telecom last year, a controversial investment seen as contributing to a slowdown in Omantel's fourth quarter net profit.

The government is trying to increase foreign investment in Oman, offering tax breaks and other incentives.

Mohammed al-Balushi, an editor at the daily al-Shabiba, said Web forums had become a popular venue for debate and revealing information -- though Internet penetration is low -- because of an atmosphere of self-censorship in the press.

"The radio program was popular. Why should there be a trial? The show offered a service to the public," he said.

A diplomat said the trial was part of a wider targeting of Web sites. The government amended a telecoms regulatory law last year to include Internet crimes. A court acquitted a Web site owner two years ago over comments critical of officials in a country whose elected parliament only advises on laws.

Germany Fines Microsoft for Anticompetitive Office Pricing

Germany has fined Microsoft €9 million (US$11.9 million) for illegally pressing a retailer to sell its Office productivity software for a certain price, one of the country's competition authorities said Wednesday.

Microsoft has accepted the fine, according to a statement from the Bundeskartellamt, which is affiliated with the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Microsoft officials did not have an immediate comment.

Microsoft employees and those of a national retailer met on two occasions and agreed on the resale price of "Office Home and Student 2007." An advertising campaign for the software then launched in October.

Suppliers and retailers are allowed to discussed pricing strategies within some limits, the Bundeskartellamt said.

"However, this must not lead to a form of coordination where the supplier actively tries to coordinate the pricing activities of the retailer and thus retailer and supplier agree on future actions of the retailer," the agency said. "In the present case, this boundary has been crossed.

Taiwan Chip Maker Sues Apple Over IPhone, IPod Touch

Taiwan chip designer Elan Microelectronics said Wednesday it is suing Apple over the infringement of two U.S. patents.

The company is asking a U.S. court to prohibit Apple from producing, using and selling iPhones, iPod touches and MacBooks, over the patent violation.

The company filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Elan said in a statement to the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.