telecommunications

This holiday season, mobile phone makers and carriers are pushing some shiny new toys: cellphones with touch-sensitive screens like the one on the Apple iPhone.

The companies are hoping to duplicate the blockbuster success of the iPhone with models that, in their glassy minimalism, end up looking a lot like it. These include the G1, powered by the Android software from Google; the Instinct and Omnia from Samsung; the LG Dare; and most recently the much-anticipated BlackBerry Storm from Research In Motion.

EMC on Monday announced its first cloud-infrastructure offering. Dubbed EMC Atmos, the offering is a multi-petabyte information-management solution that aims to help customers automatically manage and optimize the distribution of rich, unstructured information across global, cloud-storage environments.

Verizon Communications Inc. said Monday earnings rose 31 percent in the third quarter as wireless did better than expected, while its traditional phone business continued to decline.

The country's second largest telecommunications company, after AT&T Inc., earned $1.67 billion, or 59 cents per share, up from $1.27 billion, or 44 cents a share, a year ago.

Revenue rose 4.1 percent to $24.7 billion.

According to research from IDC, a provider of market intelligence for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets, by 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe: An Updated Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2011" highlights several findings that will affect individuals and business around the world in the years to come, such as:

* At 281 billion gigabytes (281 exabytes), the digital universe in 2007 was 10 percent bigger than originally estimated.

Sending a text message home to boast about a beach vacation should cost less than half of what it does now, EU regulators said Tuesday.

The European Commission wants to set a price cap for text messages of 11 euro cents (16 U.S. cents), far below the current EU average of 29 euro cents (43 cents).

The EU's top telecom official, Viviane Reding, said she was putting the new rules forward because telecommunications companies had not responded to her call for them to lower the roaming charges for sending or receiving mobile phone text messages outside a user's home nation.

The National Security Agency, other governmental agencies, and President George W. Bush are named in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The action by EFF, a nonprofit with offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, also accuses Vice President Dick Cheney; David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff; Alberto Gonzales, former White House counsel and attorney general; and John McConnell, director of national intelligence, of participation in domestic surveillance.

The European Union's telecommunications minister plans to propose a new set of price controls that would sharply cut the roaming fees charged by mobile operators to send short text messages while also reducing the cost of surfing the Internet on a cell phone.

Details of the proposal, obtained by the International Herald Tribune on Wednesday, show that the minister, Viviane Reding, will seek to cap retail roaming fees for short text messages, or SMS, within the European Union at 11 euro cents, or 16 U.S. cents, a message.

Scott Goldman uses his mobile phone to call friends and business contacts all over the world, from Britain to Australia. But the Southern California-based consultant doesn't pay a dime in international tolls to his mobile-phone carrier, AT&T, the biggest in the U.S.

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it will add the former chief executives of Viacom and Nextel Partners to its board of directors as part of the company's deal to ward off a proxy fight with billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

The company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., selected Frank Biondi Jr. and John Chapple, former chief executives of Viacom Inc. and Nextel Partners, respectively, from a list of nine recommendations from Icahn.

The fees that cell phone carriers charge customers who break service contracts took a big hit in a California courtroom when a judge said such charges by Sprint Nextel Corp. likely violate state law.

The judge, in a tentative ruling issued late Monday, said Sprint will have to pay $18.3 million to customers who sued over the fees and credit $54.8 million to those who were charged but did not pay the fees.