One of the priorities of the research is what Intel calls “visual computing,” which will harness Intel’s latest Core chips, which combine the traditional microprocessor and a 3-D graphics processor that until recently had generally been a separate chip. The research will be focused on applications for both consumers and professionals.

A video showing some of that research in action is below. It shows how millions of vacation photos of Rome are being used to build an incredibly realistic 3-D model of some of its most popular tourist sites.

Mr. Scaglia, along with other former executives of Italian telecommunications operators Fastweb SpA and Telecom Italia SpA’s cable unit Sparkle, are accused of involvement in a €2 billion ($2.64 billion) money laundering and tax fraud scheme.

Prosecutors allege that executives at Fastweb and Sparkle were aware of the purchase and sale of services valued at €2 billion using phony companies backed by the ‘Ndrangheta mob of Southern Italy. The transactions included things such as Internet bandwidth, and took place between 2003 and 2006.

The alleged practice allowed Fastweb and Sparkle to reap as much as €400 million in tax credits, some of which are documented in the companies’ internal-audit reports, prosecutors say.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

While Internet companies such as Google use baked goods as names for their key strategic initiatives–recent ones related to its Android mobile operating system were called Donut and Eclair, for example–aggressive media giant News Corp. is definitely not going for sweetness in its unusual selection of a code name for its high-profile digital content effort.

That would be Project Alesia, a moniker that comes from a vicious siege from ancient times widely considered to be one of the more decisive battles in history.

And that is apparently what top News Corp. (NWS) execs think is the best way to describe their plans for stopping the decimation of premium content in the digital age and transforming their business to take advantage of new means of distribution, according to numerous sources BoomTown spoke to this week about the unusual name.

“It takes a lot of determination to succeed in what is one of the biggest challenges newspaper and all media has ever faced,” explained one source. “So, the real path to success will require ingenuity and staying on course over time…which was critical to that military victory.”

Interestingly, said several sources, the Project Alesia name was picked by James Murdoch, chairman and CEO of Europe and Asia for News Corp.

Widely considered the heir apparent to his father, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch is apparently a dedicated reader and student of Roman history.

But it has actually been the elder Murdoch who has been cast as the obvious general so far, conducting a recent series of public verbal attacks on Internet targets, especially Google (GOOG).

He has accused the search giant of “stealing” content, for example, while other News Corp. execs have echoed his gibes in various high-profile forums.

But James Murdoch has been a key player behind the scenes in the digital strategy, several sources said, an effort that also includes News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller and Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. unit Dow Jones owns this site.)

Of this top group, it is James Murdoch–who has slowly been emerging as a more high-profile player, especially internationally–who found inspiration in the past.

To understand why, you’ll first need a short and truncated history lesson, which I culled from a variety of sources online and off:

Taking place in September 52 BC in what is now France, the Siege of Alesia (also referred to as the Battle of Alesia) pitted Rome’s famed leader, Julius Caesar, against the Gallic tribes under the unified command of Vercingétorix of Averni.

More important–besides being cited as one of the best uses of siege warfare and “circumvallation” (see more about this below)–the battle of Alesia is considered a turning point in the bitter wars conducted by the Roman Republic to tame the Gauls, who had finally united as a single force in opposition to the Roman invasion.

The hard-fought win–in a battle where the Roman army was outnumbered five-to-one, outside a hilltop fort in Alesia–is often credited with reinvigorating Rome’s power over Gaul. After the loss, Gaul became a province of the Roman empire and was pretty much subdued for the next 500 years.

Alesia is often cited as one of Caesar’s greatest military victories and the fallout from it later led to his ascension to ultimate power in Rome (which was soon followed by his infamous assassination).

That’s not the ultimate end News Corp. is envisioning, of course, sticking with Alesia’s main themes of “perseverance” and innovation, said several people with knowledge of the digital content efforts.

And, no surprise, in the digital battles between traditional media and interlopers from the Web, guess who has been cast as noble Caesar and who plays the role of marauding heathens?

You know, the ones who even cast their women and children out of the fort into the middle of the siege when food started to run out? That would apparently be the Googlers of Silicon Valley, although if it were them, the food would be organic!

Not all comparisons are the same, said a source. For example, consider circumvallation, which is essentially the building of a series of encircling fortified walls around the enemy. Contravallation is also also part of the strategy, to protect from attacks by enemy reinforcements attacking from the outside.

One could easily imagine that this means creating pay walls around premium content or de-indexing it from search sites like Google, both of which News Corp. has publicly talked about doing.

Not so!

“Traditional media companies are interested in investing in innovation too, so the idea of just putting up walls around content is a red herring,” said the source. “The idea is to find new ways of distributing media that also makes money, because why should journalism in [digital] ones and zeros be any different?”

Of course, with new stats showing sites like Google News and Yahoo (YHOO) News as the place consumers are going to get more and more of their news, that is a big issue in a longer fight, which will grind on for a very long time and well before any side can ever declare victory.

And here is a clip from a 2001 movie, “Vercingétorix,” about the Siege of Alesia, not made by News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox Hollywood studio, starring that actor dude from “Highlander” (aka my fave movie of all time). It does not end well for Google, oops, the Gauls:

[The 1899 painting at the top is by Lionel-Noël Royer.]

And Google (GOOG) appears to have lost a tussle in Italian court today.

Mediaset, a commercial broadcaster controlled by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, has won a copyright-infringement ruling, and a Rome court has ordered YouTube to remove all of Mediaset’s content from the site.

Variety:

The broadcaster began legal action in July 2008 following a trawl through the YouTube site revealed 4,643 clips and 325 hours of unauthorized Mediaset material, the company claimed.

In his written report, judge Tommaso Marvasi referred in particular to the prevalence on YouTube of Mediaset’s Italo version of “Big Brother,” which he described as the most important reality show on Italian television. It is also the Mediaset program most viewed on the Internet.

In a statement, Mediaset said that the ruling was historic because for the first time the rights of the broadcasters and program editors to their exclusive products had been fully recognized.

Mediaset is reportedly looking for more than $730 million in damages, but no word on how that phase of the trial will proceed.

YouTube’s response, via a spokesman:

We are considering our next steps, including a possible appeal. Under European and Italian law, service providers such as YouTube are not responsible for screening the content people upload. But we actually go beyond the law by offering copyright holders effective tools which allow them to manage how and whether their content is made available. It’s a programme called Content ID. More than 1,000 broadcast partners including Rai and Fox Channels Italy have chosen to use it. Mediaset could simply join these other partners and use the tools as well. Alternatively, it would be enough for them to provide us the URLs of the videos and we would remove them.

Win some, lose some. Earlier this year, YouTube–along with most other Web companies that rely on user-generated and/or uploaded content–was celebrating Veoh’s U.S. court victory against Universal Music.

If that ruling stands, it appears to put almost all of the onus on content owners to keep their stuff off of video sites. Which could pose a problem for Viacom (VIA) and its billion-dollar lawsuit against Google.

For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it. Well, that, and conversations with Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, and several Italian business leaders. Mark Zuckerberg, though, is most definitely plugged into the white-hot microblogging service. This week, he used his Twitter account, plus an appearance on “Oprah,” as a platform to herald the launch of Facebook’s own Twitteresque homepage redesign. In other news, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid off AOL President and COO Ron Grant and Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. BoomTown interviewed Falco’s replacement, Google (GOOG) ad sales exec Tim Armstrong, who’ll start at AOL as Chairman and CEO on April 7.

MediaMemo had the full memo from Time Warner on the Falco/Grant-Armstrong transition and also spoke with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week. Boxee is the start-up that lets you watch Web video on your TV, basically bypassing your cable box. Which is probably why it’s caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox that would much rather have you watch TV on the Internet instead. Guess who’s the mouse? Still, Hulu is down two networks, ABC and CBS (CBS)–though presumably, the aim is to offer all three. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.) MediaMemo also noted that Google rolled out its behavioral targeting functionality this week and points out that we all might be hearing a lot more from a man named Rick Boucher in the near future as a result.

Behavioral targeting wasn’t the only thing that Google rolled out this week–it also launched Google Voice, the initiative based on the company’s acquisition of voice communications start-up GrandCentral. Digital Daily covered the story. Elsewhere in the telecom world, major Palm (PALM) investor Roger McNamee made some bold (read: crazy) assertions about iPhone users switching en masse to the Pre, which later needed to be clarified (read: backed away from) by Palm itself. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is also bullish on the Pre and its WebOS, but in a less crazy way. He gave it a glowing write-up on Friday. For a product that hasn’t yet been given a price or a launch date, it’s certainly building itself some high expectations. Of course, it’ll need to fulfill them to compete with the ever-evolving iPhone, which for which Apple (AAPL) is having a press event Tuesday to announce version 3.0 of the device’s OS.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the new version of Apple’s ever-evolving iPod Shuffle this week, which has the distinction of being the first mp3 player to “speak.” His verdict was in Wednesday’s Personal Technology column. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using a stylus with the iPhone and offered an explanation on how to change Apple’s Safari 4 beta so that it looks and works more like the previous version. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at iSkoot’s Notifier, an app designed to endow basic cellphones with smartphone-like capabilities.

More next week. And beware the Ides of March. Or not.

For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it. Well, that, and conversations with Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, and several Italian business leaders. Mark Zuckerberg, though, is most definitely plugged into the white-hot microblogging service. This week, he used his Twitter account, plus an appearance on “Oprah,” as a platform to herald the launch of Facebook’s own Twitteresque homepage redesign. In other news, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes laid off AOL President and COO Ron Grant and Chairman and CEO Randy Falco. BoomTown interviewed Falco’s replacement, Google (GOOG) ad sales exec Tim Armstrong, who’ll start at AOL as Chairman and CEO on April 7.

MediaMemo had the full memo from Time Warner on the Falco/Grant-Armstrong transition and also spoke with Boxee CEO Avner Ronen this week. Boxee is the start-up that lets you watch Web video on your TV, basically bypassing your cable box. Which is probably why it’s caught up in a cat-and-mouse game with Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox that would much rather have you watch TV on the Internet instead. Guess who’s the mouse? Still, Hulu is down two networks, ABC and CBS (CBS)–though presumably, the aim is to offer all three. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.) MediaMemo also noted that Google rolled out its behavioral targeting functionality this week and points out that we all might be hearing a lot more from a man named Rick Boucher in the near future as a result.

Behavioral targeting wasn’t the only thing that Google rolled out this week–it also launched Google Voice, the initiative based on the company’s acquisition of voice communications start-up GrandCentral. Digital Daily covered the story. Elsewhere in the telecom world, major Palm (PALM) investor Roger McNamee made some bold (read: crazy) assertions about iPhone users switching en masse to the Pre, which later needed to be clarified (read: backed away from) by Palm itself. RBC analyst Mike Abramsky is also bullish on the Pre and its WebOS, but in a less crazy way. He gave it a glowing write-up on Friday. For a product that hasn’t yet been given a price or a launch date, it’s certainly building itself some high expectations. Of course, it’ll need to fulfill them to compete with the ever-evolving iPhone, which for which Apple (AAPL) is having a press event Tuesday to announce version 3.0 of the device’s OS.

Walt Mossberg reviewed the new version of Apple’s ever-evolving iPod Shuffle this week, which has the distinction of being the first mp3 player to “speak.” His verdict was in Wednesday’s Personal Technology column. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions about using a stylus with the iPhone and offered an explanation on how to change Apple’s Safari 4 beta so that it looks and works more like the previous version. And in this week’s Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at iSkoot’s Notifier, an app designed to endow basic cellphones with smartphone-like capabilities.

More next week. And beware the Ides of March. Or not.

BoomTown’s visit to Italy has been eye-opening in a lot of ways, not the least of which is to be reminded that not everyone in the world is jacked into the matrix 24/7.

In other words, Julius Caesar conquered Rome, but Twitter definitely has not.

In fact, the conference being held here is aptly called “Tutto Cambio, Cambiamo Tutto?” (I came here to interview Huffington Post editrix Arianna Huffington and LinkedIn founder and CEO Reid Hoffman onstage about innovation and online trends.)

That roughly translates into “Everything changes, let’s change everything?”

This is not a question that is much asked in Silicon Valley, which changes just like the weather, embracing change for change’s sake.

But here, whether or not to change is much more of a debate–one in which change does not always come out on top.

Internet penetration is much lower here than elsewhere in Europe, as is everything from per capita computer ownership to online advertising spending. Television still dominates most media.

“We’re 2,000 years old” is something you hear a lot from people as an explanation for approaching everything, from social networking to iPhones to anything interactive, with some wariness.

While most people here note that they like Facebook, prounounced “FAY-sa BOO-ka,” hardly anyone sees the point of Web 2.0′s trend du jour, Twitter (“TWEE-tur”).

In fact, few have heard of it, and those who have don’t use it.

And while several people have iPhones, no one seems over the moon about the Apple (AAPL) phenom or captivated by its potential to herald Web 3.0 as the mobile revolution.

In any case, here is a video I did, speaking to both Huffington (here is her blog on the event) and Hoffman, as well as to several Italians at the conference:

Oh dear, one endless, screwed-up global airline ride without Internet connectivity and when I finally manage to get online (looking right at the Spanish Steps in Rome. Sweeeeet!), BoomTown finds that a new round o’ MicroHoo is apparently on again.

(In the immortal words of Michael Corleone–see video below–in the otherwise awful “Godfather: Part III”: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”)

Except, judging from exactly how loud the loudmouthed chatter from a trio of Microsoft execs has become–the latest being COO Kevin Turner–it’s actually not.

Because if there were real and substantial talks going on right now between Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) about a new deal to partner, of course, you likely would not hear a peep from them.

Nonetheless, Turner is the third exec from the software giant to mention that Microsoft would love to play let’s-make-a-deal with Yahoo–not to necessarily go back and swallow it whole, a deal that Yahoo would now do in a New York minute, but related to its search assets.

In an interview with the Times of London, referencing new CEO Carol Bartz:

“We’ve certainly made her aware and the Yahoo! board aware that if they are ever interested in an opportunity to partner with them on search, we’d like to sit down and at least have the conversation. It has to make economic sense to both parties.”

Turner’s words come after similar sentiments were recently expressed by both Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell and the very-on-the-topic CEO Steve Ballmer.

We’ve seen this public tactic before, of course–actually, ever since Ballmer’s ill-fated attempt to take over Yahoo ended badly. Since then, he and others at Microsoft have not failed to either insult Yahoo’s prospects or say how very much it would like to do a deal with Yahoo.

The recent carrot approach, of course, is because Microsoft is now facing three important challenges.

First, for now, it looks like Yahoo’s search share seems to have stabilized and even improved, after years of decline.

Second, for all its efforts at hiring top search guns, spending heavily and generally declaring war on market leader Google (GOOG), Microsoft’s share has remained puny and static.

And third, it is facing a much different kind of Yahoo leader, who–while not necessarily as Web savvy as she should be–is not someone who is likely to be rolled or rattled as easily as former CEO Jerry Yang.

Because, as Bartz recently quipped–this woman likes to throw out the biz bromides more than Warren Buffett–at the Morgan Stanley Technology conference:

“I said this to Mr. Ballmer, I will not negotiate with you and 30,000 of my closest friends. I will negotiate privately….If something happens, you will know about it then.”

Still, despite Bartz’s cool demeanor, she and Ballmer will surely soon–if they have not already, that is–be meeting in some “secret” airplane hangar or other remote place dealmakers like to reconnoiter.

(Here’s a we-have-a-lot-in-common opening chit-chat topic: How snarky/rude/pushy you both think bloggers like me are!)

Because in order to get some traction on Google in the search arena, Microsoft has little choice–except perhaps making a big, sloppy bid for Facebook or Twitter–but to find a way to partner with Yahoo.

Yahoo too. As much as Bartz has been bragging that she has tons of leverage (she both does and she doesn’t), she also needs a powerful and rich friend in the years ahead in the search game, which will get uglier and more expensive as growth slows and massive innovation is needed.

Already, reports of that slowdown–spurred by the economic crisis–are here. It is in these down times that doing a deal, to get ready for the inevitable revival, seem most fortuitous.

That is, if everyone can stop talking and start, well, talking.

Until then, here’s the great Al Pacino, delivering the classic line:

This morning, Apple’s U.S. iTunes Store began offering six HBO series: “The Wire,” “Flight of the Conchords,” “Sex and the City,” “The Sopranos,” “Rome” and “Deadwood.” The first three are priced at iTunes’ standard rate of $1.99 per episode. The second three are $2.99 each, marking the first time Apple has allowed variable pricing for TV shows in the U.S.

Quite a coup for HBO (TWX), especially given some of the other concessions it was able to win from Apple: HBO programs won’t be offered for purchase on iTunes until they hit the DVD window, and new episodes of series won’t be available until months after their TV premiere.