ARLINGTON, Va. – Foreign language education company Rosetta Stone Inc. said Thursday it lost a court case in which it sued Google Inc. for allowing rivals to advertise copycat software when Rosetta trademarks are used in search terms.

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U.S. officials on Monday welcomed a new study showing the importance of innovation to U.S. economic growth and promised vigorous action to curb the huge international trade in fake and pirated goods.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new approach to software development that will allow common computer programs to run up to 20 percent faster and possibly incorporate new security measures.

The researchers have found a way to run different parts of some programs – including, for the first time, such widely used programs as word processors and Web browsers – at the same time, which makes the programs operate more efficiently.

In order to understand how they did it, you have to know a little bit about computers. The brain of a computer chip is its central processing unit, or “core.” Computing technology has advanced to the point where it is now common to have between four and eight cores on each chip. But for a program to utilize these cores, it has to be broken down into separate “threads” – so that each core can execute a different part of the program simultaneously. The process of breaking down a program into threads is called parallelization, and allows computers to run programs very quickly.

However, some programs are difficult to parallelize, including word processors and Web browsers. These programs operate much like a flow chart – with certain program elements dependent on the outcome of others. These programs can only utilize one core at a time, minimizing the benefit of multi-core chips.

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The world’s top cellphone maker, Nokia, is working on its own Internet tablet, scheduled to reach stores later this year, a technology sector analyst said on Tuesday.

Analyst said in addition to Nokia also many other handset and PC vendors like Samsung Electronics and HP are set to follow Apple’s move into a new category of devices between PCs and smartphones.

Over the weekend, Apple sold more than 300,000 iPads on the tablet computer’s first day in stores, a strong showing that roughly matched Wall Street forecasts and mirrored the iPhone’s debut in 2007.

“Right now the supply chain is being primed up for a fall release. It has to be on the shelf by September-October to meet demand for the holiday window,” said Ashok Kumar, analyst with Rodman and Renshaw.

A spokesman for Nokia declined to comment.

The Finnish cellphone maker introduced its first laptop last year and has made small phone-like devices for browsing the Internet in the past, but with very limited success.

Analysts said many more companies were due to launch their own tablets shortly.

“The market will play host to a flood of ‘me too’ tablets in 2010 but it’s an immature product category with an unproven use case,” said CCS Insight analyst Geoff Blaber.

“Apple’s brand and service offering means the iPad will be an exception in a category that will struggle to gain consumer acceptance,” Blaber said. [ Kumar said the device would likely use Microsoft’s Windows software, but several other analysts said it could also use the new MeeGo operating system, the software venture of Nokia and Intel.

“MeeGo is probably aimed mostly at the tablet market. I don’t think Nokia or Samsung can afford to stay out of the tablet market,” said Tero Kuittinen, analyst at MKM Partners.

“Nokia simply has to make a go at this segment, since it may end up cannibalising the high-end smartphone market substantially,” Kuittinen said.

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Even before the dust has settled after this weekend’s iPad bonanza, Apple is ready to announce a new iPhone operating system.

Technology journalists received an e-mail from Apple on Monday morning inviting them to “a sneak peek of the next generation of iPhone OS software.” The event is set for Thursday at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

The invitation shows a big “4,” which most likely signals version 4.0 of the iPhone operating system. Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch currently run the 3.1 OS, which was last updated in July 2009.

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It’s only been out for around 24 hours, and the Dev Team have already cracked it, that’s right, the iPad has been jailbroken. What else would I be talking about?

MuscleNerd from the Dev Team posted a picture, and also the following YouTube video on his twitter account showing how they’ve already got root acess into the device using a version of the Spirit jailbreak by fellow hacker Comex. This hack targets a bug in mobile Safari on firmware 3.1.3 on the iPhone, and 3.2 on the iPad which clearly doesn’t escape the same flaw.

There’s still a lot of work to do before it’s available for public consumption, but that’s all the proof we need for now. For those of you lucky enough to have your hands on one of the 700.000 iPad’s sold on launch day, it wont be long before you can start applying your own themes, sounds, and a whole host of other things I’m sure will become availble soon after it’s out there for the masses.

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Apple said Monday that it sold more than 300,000 iPads on Saturday, the day the product was released across the country.

“It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world — it’s going to be a game changer,” said Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple, in a statement. “iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad.”

The figure includes iPads that were pre-ordered and delivered to customers on Saturday as well as sales in Apple’s retail stores. By comparison, Apple sold 270,000 first-generation iPhones when the device went on sale in 2007.

In addition, iPad owners were hungry for apps and downloaded plenty over the weekend: Apple said that on Saturday, iPad owners downloaded more than a million applications from its app store and more than 250,000 electronic books.

Currently, Apple is only selling iPads that connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi. The company plans to sell costlier iPads with cellular data connections later this month.

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Microsoft is moving full steam ahead toward delivering most of its new SQL Server 2008 R2 versions to customer by May. But its high-end SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse isn’t going to be out in the first half of this year, as the company originally anticipated.

Microsoft officials confirmed in January that the company will begin shipping almost all of its new database SKUs in May 2010. At that time, they said they expected the Parallel Data Warehouse to be out by first half of 2010 (making it sound like it might slip to June).

On April 2, Microsoft officials said that the R2 Parallel Data Warehouse — codenamed “Madison” and based on the DATAllegro technology Microsoft purchased in 2008 — has no public due date. Microsoft is shipping a final technology preview of that product to private testers today and is seeking more Technology Adoption Program (TAP) participants interested in the data warehouse SKU, officials said via a blog post.

“Although our intent was to deliver SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse in the first half of 2010, we are still gathering customer feedback and working to ensure the high quality release our customers expect. Based on feedback from the customer Technology Adoption Program, we expect to announce more specific release timing, final configurations and pricing for our hardware partners in early summer (northern hemisphere). Stay tuned!” according to the SQL Server Team blog post.

The Parallel Data Warehouse version of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be sold preloaded on servers as a data warehouse appliance. Using the DataAllegro technology Microsoft acquired in 2008, it will scale customers’ data warehouses from the tens of terabytes, up to one petabyte plus range, according to the company.

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Even as the buzz builds toward the April 3rd ship date of the iPad, Apple is preparing to announce its “next big thing” — a new personalized, mobile advertising system that could well be called the “iAd” — Online Media Daily has learned. The new ad platform, which will be officially unveiled to Madison Avenue on April 7th, has been described as “revolutionary” and “our next big thing” by Apple chief Steve Jobs, according to executives familiar with the plan.

Precise details of the system and its features could not be discerned at presstime (and calls to Apple had not been returned), but it is believed to have been built on top of Quattro, the mobile advertising developer Apple acquired in January for nearly $300 million, and it is expected to be the first real battle of a Silicon Valley Holy War between Apple and arch frenemy Google that is shifting its front line to Madison Avenue.

The war has been mounting ever since Google introduced its Android mobile operating system to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and agreed to acquire mobile ad firm AdMob for $750 million, but it is expected to reach ballistic proportions following Apple’s April 7th announcement, which insiders say will be every bit as important as other recent marketplace introductions, including the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad launches.

Aside from the super egos involved — Jobs vs. Google chief and former Apple board member Eric Schmidt — the battle is key to the business imperatives of both companies, which have been racing to develop new revenue streams and models to expand beyond their core: in Apple’s case, consumer gadgets; in Google’s case, search advertising.

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Apple has been dealt a severe blow having been told that it no longer has a monopoly on the letter “i” as part of the name for its products.

A trademarks tribunal has knocked back Apple’s bid to stop a small company from trademarking the name DOPi for use on its laptop bags and cases for Apple products.

Apple argued that the DOPi name – which is iPod spelt backwards – was too similar to its own popular portable music player, which has sold in excess of 100 million units worldwide.

Apple has long since relied on its legal muscle to pursue any individual or company it sees as infringing on its copyright and trademarks.

But its ambitions to make widespread claims on the letter “i” came to a grinding halt when the tribunal rejected Apple’s claim that punters might be confused into thinking that they were buying an Apple product.

While the case does not affect Apple’s current trademarks, companies wanting to use the “i” prefix will have a better chance of getting away with it, lawyers say.

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