Behind Google's German courtroom battle

By Anne Broache
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Published: September 14, 2006, 4:00 AM PDT

 

Google's free Web e-mail offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker "Gmail" continue to face complications.

Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines--and miffed some British users--when it voluntarily renamed its service "Google Mail" in the United Kingdom, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.

The woes don't end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he'll never relinquish his 6-year-old trademark registration of "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" (translation: G-mail...and the mail goes right off).

"Google's behavior is very threatening, very aggressive and very unfaithful, and to me, it's very evil," he said in a recent telephone interview with CNET News.com from his part-time Los Angeles home.

A Hamburg, Germany, district court has already handed Giersch victories at both the preliminary and final stages of the litigation. Dismissing Google's arguments that the two names are not confusingly similar, it ordered the company earlier this year to remove all "Gmail" references from its German service and to cease handing out gmail.com aliases to users within the geographic area.

Buoyed by that success, Giersch said he plans new lawsuits to defend more recent registrations of the trademark in Switzerland, Norway and Monaco, where he hopes to expand his electronic postal delivery business that goes by the G-mail (short for "Giersch mail") name. He said he is also considering a suit in the United States based on alleged "investment losses" that the overseas disputes have wrought on the American arm of his venture capital firm. (Google has already encountered competition for the U.S. trademark.)

Google still maintains it has clear rights to use the Gmail name in Germany and in countries throughout the world where it has applied for such trademark rights. It lodged an appeal against the Hamburg district court's decision but claims it has nevertheless been abiding by the orders to restrict all people determined to be German residents to use only of googlemail.com, ever since a preliminary injunction was issued in April 2005.

"In no case do we offer or allow a user to use '@gmail.com' if the user's IP address is German," a company representative said in an e-mail interview.

Google has initiated its own actions against the 32-year-old Giersch in other European countries since the German litigation began, asserting it has prior rights to the Gmail name and that Giersch's registration attempts should be blocked. Giersch's lawyers said the company has filed--so far, unsuccessfully--for a cancellation of his Norwegian holding with the country's trademark office. The Google representative would confirm only that a court challenge is pending against the Swiss trademark, adding that "there are a number of cases outstanding against Giersch in Europe."

For the Mountain View, Calif.-based search market leader, the rationale is simple: "Google will take the action it deems necessary to protect our interests in Europe," the company representative said.

Google v. Giersch
Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google with a home-brewed data center in a dorm room. For Daniel Giersch's venture, it was a backpack and a bicycle.

When he was 18, Giersch founded his first company, a same-day mail delivery service designed to offer a swifter alternative to the Deutsche Post. Within a few years, by his estimation, the company was delivering 80 percent of the mail within his hometown of Itzehoe, a town of about 30,000 residents near Hamburg.

Giersch ultimately sold control of the physical delivery operations and started on a new venture he called "hybrid mail." The idea is to combine the relative security of physical mail delivery with the speediness of e-mail. A sender's document is scanned into Giersch's system at its origin, transmitted electronically to a G-mail office in the destination city, printed out at the other end and hand-delivered to its recipient. Giersch also offers users a "secure" gmail.de address, which they can obtain only by verifying their identities with a passport or other official ID card--a far different business model from Google's Gmail, he said.

In 2000, Giersch registered "G-mail...und die Post geht richtig ab" with the German trademark office. He was still investing in and developing his hybrid mail service four years later (in Germany, one has five years after registering a trademark to commercialize its use), when he saw news reports that Google planned to launch a Web e-mail service named Gmail. Google's e-mail service debuted in April 2004.

"Knowing Google is very powerful, I liked it at the time; I Googled myself everyday. I said, 'you know what? I want to call these guys,'" Giersch said in a telephone interview. "I did my MBA, and I know what a big company is looking for, and that is international growth. I knew sooner or later they would go to Germany."

After rebuffing his initial attempts to talk over the situation, Google eventually offered to buy the German trademark rights for $250,000, Giersch said. But by then, turned off by what he deemed "arrogance" on the search giant's part, he had decided never to settle. When Google started offering the Gmail service in German in 2005, Giersch believed he had grounds under German trademark law to sue the company for infringement, so he did just that.

 

New Web sites seek profit in wikis

By Robert Levine
The New York Times

Published: September 4, 2006, 9:55 AM PDT

 

Every day, millions of people find answers on Wikipedia to questions both trivial and serious. Jack Herrick found his business model there.

In 2004, Herrick acquired the how-to guide eHow.com, which featured articles written by paid freelance writers. Although the business made a profit, he realized that the revenue brought in by selling advertising would not support the extensive site he had in mind. "If the page were about how to get a mortgage, it would work," he said. "But the idea was to be the how-to guide to everything."

So in January 2005 he started wikiHow, a how-to guide built on the same open-source software as Wikipedia, which lets anyone write and edit entries in a collaborative system. To his surprise he found that many of the entries generated by Internet users--free--were more informative than those written by freelancers.

"Wikipedia proved you could get there with another method," Herrick said. Several months ago he sold eHow to focus on the new site, which now has 10,000 entries in English, Spanish and German.

Herrick is hardly the only entrepreneur inspired by the efficiency and low cost of what has become known as the wiki model. Although Wikipedia is operated by a nonprofit foundation, ideas for advertising-based wiki sites are beginning to take their place alongside blogs and social networking sites as a staple of Silicon Valley business plans.

In addition to Wikia, a site devoted to topics judged too esoteric for the online encyclopedia, there is ShopWiki, for product reviews, and Wikitravel, for tourism advice. Several start-ups allow users to operate their own wiki sites.

"Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and this is about the other 999,000 books in the library," said Ben Elowitz, chief executive of Wetpaint, a start-your-own wiki site.

Others wonder how big that library can get. All of the companies making consumer-oriented wikis are privately held and do not release revenue figures. But so far not one of them has come close to the popularity of Wikipedia, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. WikiHow had 1.1 million visitors in July, Wikia had just over 270,000, and several other wiki sites had too small an audience to be measured by the Nielsen/NetRatings methodology.

Andrew Frank, a research director at the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm, said that all of this interest in wikis might rest on some naïve assumptions.

"The assertion that these sites are cheap to run is questionable," he said. For example, to sell a substantial amount of advertising, wiki sites might have to filter for objectionable content. And he says he believes that ads on wikis could be worth less per impression than those on sites that aim at a more specific audience.

"I think there's going to be a lot of wikis," Herrick said. "But I'm not sure how many of them will make money."

Others are more optimistic. Last month John Gotts, an entrepreneur known for buying the rights to domain names, agreed to buy the site Wiki.com for $2.86 million.

"I would never have paid this much for any other domain," Gotts said. "I can't think of one that would be worth more." He pointed out that the site Wiki.com drew traffic before he bought it, even though it had little content.

The wiki concept was invented in 1994 by Ward Cunningham, a computer scientist who created a program called WikiWikiWeb as a way to share programming techniques. He named his creation after the Hawaiian word for fast.

"The subject I had in mind was the knowledge necessary to write good computer code," Cunningham said, "but I realized it would have broader implications. It's a medium that allows people to collaborate more easily than they could in systems that are modeled after the precomputer world, like e-mail."

Over the last few years, wikis have gained traction as tools in the business world, where companies run them on internal networks to foster collaboration on complex projects. The Gartner Group has predicted that half of all companies will use them internally in some fashion by 2009. There has also been at least one failed experiment with wikis in journalism: The Los Angeles Times tried online "wikitorials" but quickly abandoned the idea.

Even Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, is looking for ways to broaden--and profit from--the wiki concept. With financing from technology luminaries like Marc Andreessen and Mitchell Kapor, he and Angela Beesley started Wikia, which includes 1,500 separate wikis, from the Star Wars-focused Wookieepedia to user-generated pages on depression. Although Wikia is a for-profit company, it was founded with some of the communitarian idealism of Wikipedia, and its business plan calls for it to donate money to that foundation.

"It's never going to be a billion-dollar-revenue business," said Gil Penchina, the company's chief executive. He said that the site currently made less than a dollar a page per month, although the site's growing number of pages could make that significant.

"It feels to me like Craigslist," he said. "It's a small business, but it's a good business and it makes a lot of people happy."

If wikis become a big business, some of that idealism may fade--and consumers may begin to resent contributing to the sites free. So far, though, the sites are growing fast, thanks to dedicated volunteers. Sondra Crane, a 75-year-old retiree who lives in Altamonte Springs, Fla., has written scores of entries for wikiHow on subjects both practical (how to make pot roast) and profound (how to get old without feeling old). "I've been writing all my life and I always wanted to have my name known," she said. "I'd like to get paid--I put a lot of hours in. But it's nice to know that people are being helped."

Wikia and wikiHow operate much like Wikipedia: they let all users contribute and stipulate that any content they generate may be used freely, much as open-source software is. Other start-ups, including Wiki.com, are departing from the traditional collaborative spirit of the wiki model, in that they will let users decide who has permission to contribute to the wikis they start.

Gotts, who has been paying for Wiki.com in $10,000 installments with a final payment of about $2.8 million due within six months, said that he intended to share revenue with those who used his site to start wikis. "The main way we're going to make money," he said, "is to lead the trend for users to make money."

He said that he would let users register Wiki.com subdomains free on topics of their own choosing--he suggested that might be anything from soccer.wiki.com to smokedsalmon.wiki.com--in the hope they would attract advertising or e-commerce.

But Ramit Sethi, co-founder of PBwiki, another make-your-own wiki site, said that it was still too early to determine what model would turn wikis into money-makers.

"Nobody has found the de facto business model for wikis," said "It's kind of the Wild West."

Entire contents, Copyright © 2006 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

Double the cores, double the heat?

 By Tom Krazit, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: August 3, 2006, 4:00 AM

 

The earth may be heating up, but Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are determined to keep PC warming trends in check.

A few years ago, fast single-core processors were causing fits in the PC industry, which tried to design systems to stay reliable as the temperature rose inside the PC chassis. Newer dual-core chips from both AMD and Intel run cooler than their single-core antecedents, much to the relief of PC designers.

But as both companies prepare products that use four processing cores, some wonder if they've seen what was just a brief respite from the processor heat wave, especially as virtualization technologies reach the average user's system.

Intel, fresh off the launch of its Core 2 Duo chips, has announced plans to accelerate the introduction of a quad-core processor called Kentsfield, now expected in the fourth quarter. Not to be outdone, AMD later this year will release a product called "4x4," which is two AMD processors connected together on a high-end motherboard.

Both chipmakers' products will run hotter than the current processors, although it's unclear how much of a gap will exist. Intel hasn't released thermal specifications for Kentsfield yet, said Intel spokesman George Alfs. However, Kentsfield is essentially two Core 2 Duo processors bolted together onto a chip, so its thermal profile will certainly be higher than a single Core 2 Duo processor.

Likewise, 4x4 systems will consume more power than a dual-core AMD processor, said AMD's vice president of advanced marketing, Pat Moorhead. AMD plans to make the 4x4 product consume less power than two separate processors would in one system, although Moorhead declined to specify how the company plans to do that.

But Intel and AMD both say they've learned their lessons on power consumption and heat. A buildup of heat inside a PC can contribute to component failures, especially with sensitive items like hard drives, said In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor, during an interview at Intel's recent Core 2 Duo launch. That heat buildup requires noisy fans to keep the system cool, especially in notebooks.

Kentsfield and 4x4 are designed for high-end users who are willing to spend lots of money on a PC with cooling systems and powerful technology, said Dean McCarron, an analyst with Mercury Research. But mainstream users are not willing to take on that expense, he said.

Taming the thermals
When quad-core processors become the norm for the millions of PCs shipped each quarter, Intel and AMD will have to be vigilant about keeping power consumption at their current, PC-friendly levels. "When you push the thermals or the electric consumption too far outside the norm, that does put you into a niche segment," McCarron said.

Intel hasn't announced specific plans for quad-core processors beyond Kentsfield, Alfs said. Sources familiar with Intel's plans have indicated that when the company is ready to move from its current 65-nanometer manufacturing technology to its 45-nanometer process next year, it will start with dual-core chips to make the transition easier. And then at some later date, it will be ready to build quad-core chips with the smaller 45-nanometer transistors on a single piece of silicon, unlike the multichip package used for Kentsfield. Chipmakers also usually see a decline in power consumption as they move to smaller transistors.

Intel's Alfs declined to comment on those plans, but did say the company plans to have a wide range of products available at various levels of power consumption. This could include low-power chips for small-size PCs or high-power chips for expensive gaming PCs. Intel will talk more about its plans for quad-core processors at the next Intel Developer Forum in September, Alfs said.

AMD's first quad-core processor, to be introduced in 2007 and made with its new 65-nanometer technology, will be released within the same thermal profile as its current dual-core chips, Moorhead said. "Performance outside of an appropriate thermal envelope doesn't really do anybody any good," he said.

The definition of an appropriate thermal envelope could change, however, when virtualization technologies reach the desktop.

Virtualization software has been used primarily in servers to let IT managers run several different types of applications on a single server. Instead of running multiple servers at low utilization rates, managers can increase the utilization rate of a single server and reduce the number of boxes they have to nurture.

PC virtualization is some years away from becoming prevalent on the desktop, although early examples have started to appear in products such as Parallels, which allows Mac users to run Windows alongside the Mac operating system on Intel-based Macs.

Virtualization being still uncommon on PCs, most users currently hit the maximum performance of their processor only for short periods of time. But if they begin running numerous applications in multiple virtual environments on multicore processors, they'll be running their system at higher levels of performance for extended periods of time. That's when the inside temperature of PCs could once again start climbing.

Still, this is primarily a server problem at the moment, McCarron said. Heat could once again become an issue for PCs, however, when coupled with the demands for power from newer, more sophisticated graphics processors.

AMD's Moorhead said that although the PC industry isn't at that level yet, chipmakers will have to continue to build low-power transistors, improve the performance of power sensitive technology, and work with the PC industry to design efficient cooling products.

A dual-core or quad-core processor is still better for PC thermals than running two or four separate processors, McCarron said. But chip and PC companies will have to keep a close eye on the utilization rates of their multicore chips to stay cool into the next decade.

 

A blogger's battle from behind bars

Josh Wolf, a 24-year-old freelance journalist, made headlines last week as the first known blogger to be thrown into federal prison for not cooperating with judiciary officials.

One of the Internet's earliest video bloggers, Wolf refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005.

Wolf might normally be protected by California's shield law. But federal prosecutors, who want to see if Wolf's footage shows a San Francisco police car being set on fire at the protest, say they have jurisdiction over the case because the car was paid for in part by federal dollars. (Click here for video. Note: Contains some profanity.)

And in an ironic twist, the very members of the corporate-controlled mainstream media that Wolf and many fellow new-media members like to criticize, have come to his defense and are contributing to his legal fund. Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail last year for refusing to testify in a federal investigation, aired her support for Wolf on Saturday in front of the facility in which he is being held in Dublin, Calif., but was denied an interview with him.

Prison officials allowed CNET News.com to do a 15-minute phone interview with their now famous Netizen inmate, who calls himself a "student of anarchist philosophies." The San Francisco man said his jailing might have something to do with his politics, or at least the politics of the people on the tape. But his greater concern is what he sees as the government's attempt to further erode the protections affording to journalists.

Q: First of all, how are you holding up in there, and what's your situation like? Are you being housed in a protected area or among the hard-core felons?
Wolf: I'm holding up quite all right. I'm very lucky to be in this facility. It seems more akin to what one might expect from a mental ward, except the people aren't crazy. I've established a rapport with most of the inmates there. The food is edible, which is a great relief seeing as I'm someone who's a little finicky about food and you can't be too finicky in jail, if you know what I mean. I'm going to refrain from discussing who's in the population other than to say that everyone has been respectful to me and quite friendly and outgoing. The guards have also been very professional and treat everyone, not only myself, but everyone in the population as human beings which is something I was a little afraid I wouldn't observe but I'm happy to say is the case in this federal facility.

Tell us about your rationale in deciding not to hand over the video tapes. How much of it was about protecting your sources, or activists caught on tape, and how much of it was about First Amendment rights?
Wolf: First and foremost, this issue should be a state issue. The federal grand jury is investigating the alleged attempted damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. That is the subject of the investigation. If an S.F. police vehicle is considered federal property, then what isn't federal property? Your school? Even City Hall itself. I'm not sure that that extension is accurate, but it's not very much of a stretch and that is very disturbing.

Beyond that, I should be protected in the state system by the California shield law. The state of California, the local jurisdiction, has made no attempts to try to get this footage. This is an attempt of the federal government circumventing the state protections for who knows what purpose. Something tells me that it's about more than damage to a San Francisco police vehicle. And it's a scary position when you have the government acting in such a coercive, secretive manner. The fact that I am a journalist and should be protected is a very big part of it. When I went in and began documenting this movement, I gave my word to numerous people that I would only publish what my discretion allowed and beyond that would not turn over additional material. So they are sources in a different sort of way than the Judith Miller case, but there still is an element of protecting sources and also protecting people's right to privacy and freedoms of association.

Do you feel the federal government is making an example of you because of your political beliefs?
Wolf: I don't feel that that is the case so much, but I do feel it's an attempt of the government to further erode the protections affording to journalists. I do feel it may be a political attempt to catalogue and chronicle who in the San Francisco Bay Area identifies as anarchist, not particularly myself, but the people on the tape. I'm sure you're aware of the 1950s HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) McCarthyism. Today's communist is the anarchist. I'm very much concerned that this is a political witch hunt, although I feel it's less about me than about people out in the community.

British pensioner becomes YouTube star

YouTube, the popular online video site, has an unexpected star--a septuagenarian British widower--whose soft-spoken, humble manner has won the hearts of users of the youth-dominated Web site.

Peter posted his first video on YouTube about a week ago, under the user name geriatric1927, which refers to the year of his birth. He called it "first try."

In the clip, which starts with "geriatric gripes and grumbles" and some blues music, Peter tells how he became addicted to YouTube.

"It's a fascinating place to go to see all the wonderful videos that you young people have produced so I thought I would have a go at doing one myself," he says, sitting against a backdrop of floral wallpaper and family photographs.

"What I hope I will be able to do is to just to bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person who has been there and done that and hopefully you will respond in some way by your comments."

YouTube is one of the fastest-growing sites on the World Wide Web and announced last month that 100 million clips are watched every day. The site has almost 20 million visitors a month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

In his profile, Peter says he is widower living alone in the country in the middle of England. His favorite music is blues and he has loved motorcycles all his life. He says has no piercings or tattoos. His profile says he is 78 but he says in a video clip he is 79.

He has since posted another five videos on his YouTube page and has had about 79,000 viewings and 6,500 subscribers, putting him at the top of the most-subscribed list on YouTube in the past week.

In his second video, Peter starts with a photograph of himself on a motorbike and says he has received more than 4,700 e-mails. "I am absolutely overwhelmed and don't quite know what to say," says the white-haired pensioner who keeps his eyes closed for most of his videos.

"I just need to say thank you...this YouTube experience has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life and given me a whole new world to experience."

Peter, who talks about his life, the horrors of war and police harassment, has received wide praise for his videos and for proving technology is not just for the younger generation.

"It's great that someone from your generation has chosen to share their views on life, and a shame more elderly people don't too," wrote one commentator.

"I don't have a grandpa, but if I could choose, I'd want you to be mine!" says another.

A few who mocked him were quickly rebuked by the rest of the online community.

"IGNORE all the rude comments because obviously the people who leave nasty comments on your page are those who have the least number of comments on their videos!" said one.

Attempts by Reuters to contact Peter by e-mail were not immediately successful with the latest YouTube star inundated with e-mails.

Story Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

HP offers Debian Linux support

Debian is a steadfastly noncommercial version of Linux. But Hewlett-Packard will give it a big corporate hug Monday with the announcement of a plan to provide support for the open-source operating system.

"We've had a number of customers continuing to ask us to have broader support for Debian," and HP decided to oblige, said Jeffrey Wade, worldwide marketing manager at HP's Open Source and Linux Organization. Red Hat and Novell will remain HP's main Linux partners globally, however.

HP announced the news in conjunction with the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing company will offer technical support for installation and configuration during a server's warranty period, Wade said. And later this year, it will begin selling "care packs" to help customers with Debian problems, he said.

The move reflects the continuing price pressure that exists in the Linux marketplace, where free versions of the open-source software always are an alternative to paid versions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

Sophisticated HP Linux customers requested the Debian support, after wondering if they could get "a better value with a distribution that doesn't require a subscription fee and subsequent renewals for that subscription," Wade said.

Debian won't be on the same level as Red Hat or Novell, though, Wade said. HP won't market it, and customers will have to download the software on their own. Software combinations with partners such as BEA Systems or Oracle won't be available with Debian. And HP won't formally certify Debian for its servers.

HP expects the Debian offer to appeal chiefly to sophisticated customers who usually have internal software support and a long history of Linux expertise. However, the company is pleased with its support; of the 48,000 Linux-related support calls HP got in 2005, the company answered 99.5 percent on its own, meaning that only 180 had to be transferred to experts at Red Hat or Novell, Wade said.

HP's offer will apply to the current "Sarge" version 3 of Debian and to version 4, "Etch," due in December. (Debian versions are named after characters in the movie "Toy Story.")

The company has a long history of cooperation with Debian. It formerly employed one Debian leader, Bruce Perens, and another former leader and current contributor, Bdale Garbee, is chief technologist of HP's Open Source and Linux Organization.

Play your own Xbox game

Microsoft is trying to turn hard-core gamers into Xbox programmers.

The company plans to show off on Monday a new set of developer tools that will let college students, hobbyists and others create their own games for the Xbox 360 console, for a Windows PC or both.

Dubbed XNA Game Studio Express, the free software is expected to be available in beta form by the end of the month, with a final product available sometime this holiday season.

"The tools we are talking about make it way easier to make games than it is today," said Scott Henson, director for platform strategy for Microsoft's game developer group. Microsoft will demonstrate the new software at Gamefest, a company-run show for game developers that takes place in Seattle this week.

The approach is similar to one Microsoft has taken with software development in general, selling its Visual Studio tools to professional programmers while making a more limited "express" version free to hobbyists.

Microsoft released the first version of its XNA tools for professional developers in March 2005, ahead of the Xbox 360's release the following November.

With the hobbyist release, the software giant is hoping to lay the groundwork for what one day will be a thriving network of enthusiasts developing for one another, something akin to a YouTube for games. The company, however, is pretty far from that goal.

In the first incarnation, games developed using the free tools will be available only to like-minded hobbyists, not the Xbox community as a whole. Those who want to develop games will have to pay a $99 fee to be part of a "Creators' Club," a name that is likely to change. Games developed using XNA Game Studio Express will be playable only by others who are part of the club.

Next spring, Microsoft hopes to have a broader set of tools that will allow for games to be created that can then be sold online through Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft will still control which games get published, and it'll get a cut of the revenue.

Down the road, probably three to five years from now, Microsoft hopes to have an open approach, where anyone can publish games, and community response helps separate the hits from the flops.

That would mark a major shift in the gaming world. While people have long been able to create their own PC software, console game titles have historically been created by a far more limited set of developers.

Everyone says they could do better if only they had a chance, says Envisioneering analyst Richard Doherty. Now gamers can match their skills with the pros, he said. "They may not have a popular game, but they can at least try it."

Plus, in creating a new outlet for enthusiasts, Microsoft is looking for one more way of winning the hearts and minds of the hard-core gamer set ahead of the release of Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii, both due later this year.

Sony tried something somewhat similar with the original PlayStation, releasing in limited quantities a $750 add-on kit called the Net Yaroze that let people write their own games.

Part of the impetus for expanding the pool of developers is the growing expense of making major video games. Many games take 18 to 36 months to develop Henson said, meaning big game companies only want to back sure hits. "Future titles look like existing titles," he said. "There's not a lot of branching off and taking risks."

A particular target of the new program is colleges, with Microsoft having signed up 10 universities to use the new software as part of their curricula, some as early as this fall.

Doherty said Microsoft is the biggest beneficiary of the program as the effort both helps tie gamers to the Xbox and potentially leads to new ideas.

"I think some new talent is going to come out of it," Doherty said. "I'm not saying it's going to be 'American Idol.'"