A Messenger for the Internet of Things

The vision of the Internet of Things is inspiring, if much-hyped. Billions of digital devices, from smartphones to sensors in homes, cars and machines of all kinds, will communicate with each other to automate tasks and make life better.

But some daunting obstacles litter the road to this mechanized nirvana. A crucial challenge is figuring out how all the smartish gadgets will talk to each other. A group of technology companies â€" including Cisco Systems, I.B.M., Red Hat and Tibco â€" thinks a technology with a mouthful of a name is the answer. On Thursday, they are officially introducing the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol as an open standard through an international standards organization, Oasis.

MQTT, the less-than-catchy abbreviation for the software, is not really a lingua franca for machine-to-machine communication, but a messenger and carrier for data exchange. MQTT’s advocates compare its potential role in the Internet of Things to that played by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, on the Web. HTTP is the foundation of data communication on the Web.

MQTT’s origins go back nearly two decades. Its co-inventor, Andy Stanford-Clark, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at I.B.M., has long been a passionate home-automation tinkerer. His laboratory has been his house, a 16th-century stone cottage with a thatched roof on the Isle of Wight, in the English Channel. His electronic gadgets range from temperature and energy monitors to an automated mousetrap. His TedX talk explains the back story.

His home automation projects required machine-to-machine data communication, and Mr. Stanford-Clark wrote his own code.

At I.B.M. he became immersed in the technology for machine-to-machine communication in the late 1990s, when the company was working with industry partners to mine sensor data from offshore oil rigs for preventive and predictive maintenance.

One of those industry partners was Arlen Nipper, an American engineer and expert in embedded systems for oil field equipment. Together they wrote the initial version of MQTT in 1998. They kept improving their open-source messenger software over the years.

“Our goal was to give it enough legs so that it could make a difference,” Mr. Stanford-Clark said.

It has made steady progress, and is used by many industrial companies and others. Facebook, for example, has adopted MQTT for the live notifications it sends to Facebook users on devices running Apple’s iOS software â€" that is, iPhones and iPads.

Formally going through the standardization process is an endorsement that should help further. And there is increasing demand for machine-to-machine communications. Vijay Sankaran, director of application development for Ford, said improved message-handling technology will be vital to the company’s plans for automated diagnostics and new consumer services.

Mr. Sankaran pointed to two examples. In the Focus Electric car, he said, Ford wants to get continual, detailed sensor data on the state and performance of the vehicle’s electric battery, then feed that information into product development.

And drivers, Mr. Sankaran said, seek to do more things while in their cars. A stock trader, for example, might want to continue trading from the road. If the trader sent in an order to sell 30,000 shares of Apple, he said, that transaction must be reliably and securely communicated.

“You need an advanced messaging engine for these kinds of services,” Mr. Sankaran said.

For MQTT to emerge as a major standard, used across the industrial landscape, it will need backing beyond the Oasis consortium. Oasis is heavy on information technology companies rather than industrial technology heavyweights including General Electric, Honeywell, Siemens and United Technologies.

These companies make many of the sensor-equipped big things in the so-called Internet of Things â€" like jet engines, power turbines and oil field equipment.

Investigations Expand in Hacking of A.P. Twitter Feed

Three federal agencies are now investigating an incident Tuesday in which hackers hijacked the Twitter account for The Associated Press and momentarily erased $136 billion from the stock market after they posted a fake Tweet reporting that there had been explosions at the White House that injured President Obama.

A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attack on Twitter, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating who was behind the attack, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are investigating the impact of the attacks on the maket.

“We have standard operating procedures whenever there are market developments, and this is no exception,” said John Nester, an S.E.C. spokesman. “These procedures start with getting the facts about what occurred. We do not limit ourselves to looking at the catalyst for an event, but also its repercussions, to determine whether any further inquiries or actions are warranted.”

The A.P.’s account was the fourth prominent Twitter account of a media organization to be hacked in recent months â€" accounts for CBS, NPR and the BBC have all been hijacked by hackers recently â€" but the A.P. incident had the most serious impact. Within seconds of the fake A.P. post, the Dow Jones Industrial Average nosedived, dropping 150 points, before recovering five minutes later. High-frequency trading algorithms that re designed to make trades based on certain headlines served as a catalyst.

The C.F.T.C. is now investigating trading in 28 futures contracts that took place over that five-minute period, according to CNBC. A C.F.T.C. spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment but John Chilton, an commissioner with the agency, told CNBC Wednesday that “We need certain rules of the road for technology and that’s particularly true with the advent of social media.”

Mr. Chilton, who referred to high frequency traders as “cheetahs,” noted that there was no “kill switch” in their technology to prevent them from acting on misinformation. “We need to set up basic rules of the road,” Mr. Chilton said. “We should not just accept technology blindly.”

The timing of the A.P. on Twitter comes just two weeks after Bloomberg announced that it would start incorporating Twitter feeds into its financial information terminals. The new feature allows traders to monitor social media buzz and market-moving news from their Bloomberg terminals. Ironically, Bloomberg introduced the service, in part, to prevent the spread of misinformation on Twitter after an erroneous tweet suggested that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was dead last August, creating a surge in crude oil prices.

The incident Tuesday also raised questions about security on Twitter. Logging on to Twitter requires the same process for a company as for a consumer â€" just one user name and one password â€" and security experts say Twitter could do more.

Until now, Twitter has resisted incorporating two-factor authentication, a verification approach that can, for example, send a second, one-time password via text message to users’ mobile phones to keep attackers from hijacking their accounts with a single, stolen password. Microsoft rolled out two-factor authentication last week. Apple added it in March. Both Google and Facebook have offered the service for years.

“It’s a very established baseline,” Mark Risher, co-founder of Impermium, an Internet security start-up that aims to help social networks, said Tuesday. “But there are costs, and user friction is introduced. You could put four deadbolts on your front door, but it’s going to be a pain every time you go to the drugstore. That said, why not offer it? I don’t have a good answer for that.”

Paid Games on Smartphones Expected to Outpace Hand-Held Consoles

When I was a kid I carried around a little backpack that held my Nintendo Gameboy, a Sega Game Gear and several dozen game cartridges for each portable system. Today’s children simply carry around a smartphone and can play hundreds of thousands of games on a single device. No backpack or external game cartridges are required.

That trend is only going to grow. A report released on Wednesday by IDC, a leading technology research firm, concluded that paying for games on smartphones and tablets would outpace paid gaming on portable video game hand-held devices by the end of the year.

The report, Worldwide Gaming-Optimized Hand-Held, Smartphone, and Tablet Gaming 2013-2017 Forecast, noted that free smartphone and tablet gaming has been overshadowing play on hand-held game consoles, including those made by Nintendo and Sony, for some time. In the coming months, paid-for games will surpass hand-held consoles and  grow rapidly well into 2017, the report said.

For a long time, products like the Nintendo 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Vita boasted of  superior graphics and better game play as their benefit over smartphone gaming. Today’s smartphones and tablets contain enough memory, processing power and screen resolution to  outperform hand-helds sometimes. People can also download and update new games wirelessly without going to a store to buy new game cartridges.

Apple, Google and Microsoft also offer technologies that allow people to play games on large television screens with their smartphones and tablets.

Lewis Ward, research manager at IDC, said in a statement that although Google’s Android operating system remains fragmented, with hundreds of variations in the marketplace, it “is on its way to becoming a massively popular gaming platform in Asia/Pacific in particular.” Apple’s iOS  has been a popular game platform for several years.

Mr. Ward said that if Nintendo and Sony hoped to compete with smartphone games, both companies would have to explore new business models, including offering “freemium” products, which can include ad-supported games, or products that are initially free but then require paid additions.

The switch by consumers to mobile games will probably affect investor confidence in Nintendo and Sony. IDC noted that the revenue for mobile and portable gaming is forecast to reach $23 billion by 2017.

The Digital Ad Industry Gets Dressed Down in Washington

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, a West Virginia Democrat, lambasted the digital advertising industry on Wednesday for failing to voluntarily honor privacy requests from online consumers called “Do Not Track” signals.

These are settings in Internet browsers â€" like Firefox from Mozilla and Chrome from Google â€" that individual users may activate to indicate that they do not want advertisers to collect information about their activities across the Web.

In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission recommended that industry adopt such a browser-based system to give consumers a simple one-time mechanism to opt out of data-mining for advertising purposes. In February 2012, the Digital Advertising Alliance, a trade group, pledged to honor such Do Not Track browser signals â€" under certain conditions.

Since then, however, negotiations between advertising groups and privacy advocates have bogged down over basic questions of how exactly to define, standardize and respond to the privacy signals. Although major browsers now allow users to express their preferences about online tracking, very few companies now honor browsers’ don’t track me flags.

Frustrated by the seemingly slow progress, Mr. Rockefeller grilled industry representatives on Wednesday afternoon at a hearing about Do Not Track by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

Do Not Track “is still just an idea, not a reality,” said Mr. Rockefeller, who is the chairman of the committee. “What exactly is the holdup?”

In his testimony at the hearing, Lou Mastria, the managing director of the Digital Advertising Alliance, responded that the industry had set up an online program, “Your AdChoices,” which consumers may use to opt out of receiving tailored ads â€" ads, that is, that are based on data collected about a user’s online activities and preferences.

His group and its members, Mr. Mastria said, “provide meaningful and effective consumer choice tools to consumers that, with the click of one button, provides consumers with the exact choice that a browser setting could provide.”

Although the industry ad choices program does put some limits on its members’ use of consumer data â€" restricting it to activities like fraud prevention and security â€" Mr. Rockefeller says the industry’s exceptions for market research and other uses promote unfettered data collection about consumers’ online activities. The senator introduced a bill in February that would direct the F.T.C. to create standards for Do Not Track mechanisms as well as develop rules that prohibit companies for collecting data about consumers who opt out of tracking.

“I do not want to hear assertions that the current self-regulatory scheme fulfills Do Not Track requests,” Mr. Rockefeller said. Under the ad industry’s current program, he said, “companies continue to collect vast amounts of consumer data and only promise to not use this information for specific purposes, such as targeted advertising.”

Today’s Scuttlebot: Twitter Corrections and YouTube Money

The technology reporters and editors of The New York Times scour the Web for important and peculiar items. For Wednesday, selections include Bill Gates on education and other topics, a ranking of technology companies based on their efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, and rethinking some assumptions about Google Glass.

Comparing the Valuations Behind Amazon and Apple Shares

And people wonder why it’s hard to understand the stock market.

Take a consumer sitting at home buying stuff on Amazon.com with his iPhone. To him, Apple’s product is a clear leader in the market, while Amazon is the retailer he uses most. Amazon’s shares are up nearly 40 percent over the last 12 months, while Apple’s are down nearly 30 percent over the same period. So why have their stock prices diverged so much when both companies appear to be at the top of their game?

Growth is the most common answer you’ll hear. When a company convinces investors that its earnings can keep going up, an enthusiasm grows around the shares, and they tend to perform well. Wall Street analysts expect Amazon’s earnings next year to be 66 percent higher than the forecast for 2013. They project a 10 percent uptick for Apple.

But there’s another conversation you need to have.

It revolves around whether the market has already factored the hoped-for growth into the stock price. It is possible to pay too much for excellence.

There are all sorts of ways to gauge how much credibility investors ascribe to a company’s “growth story.” One is to look at what investors are paying now for a company’s free cash flows, or the hard dollars it takes in from profits (minus the spending it does on plant and equipment). The results are stark. Apple’s stock market value is nine times last year’s free cash flows. On this metric, Amazon is at over 300 times. Sane investors would never touch a stock with such a dear valuation unless they felt cash flows were going to soar in the future.

And this brings us to the part of investing that usually separates winners from losers: guessing whether companies will actually do what we expect them to.

Amazon’s believers don’t mind that it’s spending such huge amounts on setting up new operations for its retail and data businesses. At some point, hopefully in the not too distant future, that spending will fall as the expansion reaches its limits. In that case, Amazon will be churning out much bigger cash flows as it enjoys near unassailable dominance.

Sure, but how wondrous will those cash flows be? Amazon’s operations produced $4.2 billion of cash flows last year. Let’s generously assume 10 percent annual growth for them, which would take them to $5.1 billion by the end of 2014.

Let’s be kind again and assume that capital expenditures fall a lot, to, say, $1 billion a year, from last year’s $3.8 billion. Free cash flows in 2014 would therefore total $4.1 billion.

Now, remember, at this future point, Amazon’s growth in free cash flow will have slowed a lot. Investors will probably decide to attach a lower valuation to the company. Being generous, let’s assume they value those hypothetical 2014 free cash flows at 21 times, Google’s multiple today. That would give Amazon a market worth of about $86 billion. That’s 30 percent lower than today.

Of course, the stock market believes what it wants to believe. It may well decide to remain starry-eyed about Amazon and give it a much higher valuation for years to come. But Apple’s recent drubbing suggests even the strongest runs can end nastily.

Test Run: Splitsider Presents, an Online Movie Hub

The other night, a friend invited me to a screening of “The Exquisite Corpse Project,” a documentary about comedy writers trying to collaborate on a movie.

I was feeling under the weather and had a mountain of work, so I sent my regrets. But my friend, who was involved with the movie as part of a comedy site he runs called Splitsider, offered to let me watch through a new digital distribution service it was introducing to let people stream and download new releases through a Web browser.

The service, called Splitsider Presents, lets people buy and watch comedies and documentaries. After signing up and logging in, you pick your film and pay $5 or so. (Splitsider splits the revenue with the filmmakers.) The service is generous with your content, which is DRM-free. You can download the video up to five times, or stream it up to three, with each stream expiring after six hours.

Anyone familiar with the way the popular comedians Louie C.K and Aziz Ansari released stand-up specials online for a few bucks will recognize this format. But Splitsider hopes to reel in up-and-coming artists who may not have the built-in fan base, exposure and reach of Mr. C.K and Mr. Ansari.

Splitsider Presents joins a few other contenders in the space, including VHX and Vimeo, which are coming up with ways to let filmmakers and artists sidestep traditional distribution deals to release their work directly to fans.

As someone who does not own a television or plan to buy one, I find it thrilling to come across ways to watch new and interesting things on my browser and various tablets. The site was easy to use, the stream high-quality. Best of all, I didn’t even have to leave my couch.

Test Run: Splitsider Presents, an Online Movie Hub

The other night, a friend invited me to a screening of “The Exquisite Corpse Project,” a documentary about comedy writers trying to collaborate on a movie.

I was feeling under the weather and had a mountain of work, so I sent my regrets. But my friend, who was involved with the movie as part of a comedy site he runs called Splitsider, offered to let me watch through a new digital distribution service it was introducing to let people stream and download new releases through a Web browser.

The service, called Splitsider Presents, lets people buy and watch comedies and documentaries. After signing up and logging in, you pick your film and pay $5 or so. (Splitsider splits the revenue with the filmmakers.) The service is generous with your content, which is DRM-free. You can download the video up to five times, or stream it up to three, with each stream expiring after six hours.

Anyone familiar with the way the popular comedians Louie C.K and Aziz Ansari released stand-up specials online for a few bucks will recognize this format. But Splitsider hopes to reel in up-and-coming artists who may not have the built-in fan base, exposure and reach of Mr. C.K and Mr. Ansari.

Splitsider Presents joins a few other contenders in the space, including VHX and Vimeo, which are coming up with ways to let filmmakers and artists sidestep traditional distribution deals to release their work directly to fans.

As someone who does not own a television or plan to buy one, I find it thrilling to come across ways to watch new and interesting things on my browser and various tablets. The site was easy to use, the stream high-quality. Best of all, I didn’t even have to leave my couch.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Review Roundup

Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, will arrive in stores over the next week in the United States. Analysts expect this phone to be a potent challenger to the iPhone, but several technology writers who got the device early agree that the Galaxy S4 is good, but not great. Many felt the new software features were gimmicky and cumbersome.

Here are samples of what a few prominent technology writers had to say.

Michael Calore of Wired magazine said the many features of the Galaxy S4 were impressive. But he noted that the software is “a big bag of ‘why?’” and the features were limited to working with a few apps.

But all that business of waving your hand or moving your eyes to scroll while reading â€" it only works in the crummy Android browser. It does not work in Chrome, where I do all of my browsing. It doesn’t work in Google Reader or Flipboard or Instapaper or the Kindle app, where so much reading happens. Looking away from the screen doesn’t pause a video in YouTube, only in the Samsung video player.

Walt Mossberg of All Things D said the S4 is “a good, but not a great, step up.”

It’s an evolution of the prior model and despite some improvements, it still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android. I found Samsung’s software often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional.

Brad Molen of Engadget said the Galaxy S4’s design didn’t feel fresh, but the device was an improvement over its predecessor. But he echoed the complaints about the software.

Software-wise, Samsung’s brand-new features are innovative and clever, yet most of them don’t solve any actual UX problems; they seem impractical and are (in some cases) less convenient than tried-and-true methods we’ve used in the past.

David Pogue of The New York Times said the smartphone was good for both gadget nerds who love to tinker and people who are new to smartphones because of “Easy Mode,” which simplifies the home screen.

For everyone else, the S4 may be buggy in spots and laden with not-quite-there features. But the basics are excellent; this phone is still a fast, bright, handsome pocket rocket. It easily earns its place as a successor to the Galaxy S3 and a rival to the iPhone.

Group Takes Credit for Hacking A.P.’s Twitter Account

Hackers hijacked the Twitter account for The Associated Press on Tuesday and sent out an erroneous message reporting explosions at the White House that injured President Obama.

Within minutes, Jay Carney, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, confirmed that the president was unharmed, and Julie Pace, the chief White House correspondent for The A.P., announced at a White House briefing that the account had been hacked.

Twitter suspended the account but by then the post had already moved markets. The Dow Jones industrial average abruptly plummeted more than 150 points, then surged back after it became clear there had been no incident.

A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attack. The group’s Twitter account is linked to the Web site Syrianelectronicarmy.com, an Arabic language Web site that broadcasts what the group says are its latest computer attacks. Even as the Twitter accounts for @AP and @AP_Mobile were suspended Tuesday afternoon, the Syrian Electronic Army was posting.

Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama http://t.co/HTKoO6gIL6

â€" SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA6) 23 Apr 13

The A.P.’s account was the sixth prominent Twitter account to be hacked in recent months. On Saturday, three CBS-affiliated Twitter accounts were hacked and used to post suspicious links.

Hackers, saying they were part of the Syrian Electronic Army, claimed responsibility for hacking several NPR Twitter accounts last week as well as BBC Twitter accounts last month.

The episodes raise questions about the security of social media passwords and the ease of access to brand-name accounts. Logging on to Twitter requires the same process for a company as for a consumer â€" just a user name and one password.

Security experts say Twitter could do more. The company has yet to offer its users two-factor authentication, a service that texts a second login PIN to users’ mobile phones, to keep attackers from hijacking their accounts with a single, stolen password.

Microsoft rolled out two-factor authentication last week. Apple added it in March. Both Google and Facebook have offered the service for years.

“It’s a very established baseline,” said Mark Risher, co-founder of Imperium, a Silicon Valley start-up that aims to help social networks. “But there are costs, and user friction is introduced. You could put four deadbolts on your front door, but it’s going to be a pain every time you go to the drugstore. That said, why not offer it? I don’t have a good answer for that.”

Officials at Twitter did not return requests for comment. In the past, the company has said that security is something it does not take lightly. Twitter has automatic and manual controls to help identify malicious content on the site, and last year Twitter sued those responsible for five of the most-used spamming tools on the site.

But preventing hacking and identifying fake accounts continues to be more art than science. Security researchers estimate that as many as 20 million Twitter accounts on the platform are fakes, and real accounts continue to be catnip for hackers.

Security experts also say it is not clear whether two-factor authentication would have prevented the attack on The A.P.’s account. Paul Colford, a spokesman for The A.P., said the hacking incident was preceded by a “phishing” attempt on The A.P.’s corporate e-mail network. Employees had been sent e-mails with malicious links or attachments that, once clicked, would give an attacker a foothold.

“In the case of a phishing message, two-factor authentication would not eliminate the problem,” Mr. Risher said. “There are ways to circumvent this. I could create a fake Web page for Twitter and ask you to enter your user credentials.”

Mr. Colford said the phishing attempt had been blocked, raising the question of how hackers had grabbed credentials for the account.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2013

An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed a statement about a phishing attempt on The A.P.'s corporate e-mail system to a spokeswoman for the news organization. That person, an employee of The A.P., was not authorized to speak for the organization.

A version of this article appeared in print on 04/24/2013, on page B3 of the NewYork edition with the headline: In Hacking, A.P. Twitter Feed Sends False Report of Explosions .

Pivotal’s Audacious Plan

Pivotal, an ambitious creation of the data storage giant EMC and its hefty affiliate VMware, on Wednesday said it would make cloud-based industrial software applications faster than anyone has before, and announced it had the means to do so â€" a $105 million investment from General Electric.

That values Pivotal, which became independent of EMC on April 1, at roughly $1 billion, about eight months before the company is expected to have a single product.

If Pivotal succeeds, it will go against the technology industry’s lousy record of making a successful company that starts out big. Give management points for a big vision, at least.

“We’re convinced there is an opportunity here as big as data storage was for EMC, or server virtualization was for VMware,” said Paul Maritz, a longtime Microsoft veteran who ran VMware for four years.

EMC has a market capitalization of $47 billion. It owns about 80 percent of VMware, which it bought in 2004 for $635 million, and then partly offered to the public. VMware is valued at $32 billion.

The opportunity is to remake the way industrial companies make software, in a world in which millions of sensor-enabled cars, turbines, and household objects have sensor-enabled telemetry, or data about a thing’s place and status. Mr. Maritz said software needs to be made the way it is at consumer Web companies like Google and Facebook, where applications are created in days or weeks, compared with months, even years, in big business.

“Soon everything will have telemetry, and to service jet engines in real time you need Google-type processing and analysis,” he said. “Cellphone companies will want to see if a radio tower is overcrowded, and then do what airlines do - kick off the lowest-value customer.”

At present, enterprise software that even tries to do this is “abominable,” he added. “These are NASA-scale problems we will be working on.”

His observation about the level of connectivity affecting everything in business is an increasingly common one in Silicon Valley. On Tuesday, Salesforce.com, the biggest maker of online software, said it would remake its company for a world dominated by mobile computing, clouds and social networks.

Along with GE, Ford and AT&T have been building up their presence in the valley to learn more about connected systems. There are also about 80 startups in the valley working on big data products of one form or another, and many are talking with big business.

Pivotal has 1,250 employees, mostly from earlier acquisitions by both EMC and VMware. It includes software for building cloud computing systems; data storage, management and analysis software; tools for outside developers to make applications; and services by experts in both software manufacture and data analytics.

This sounds somewhat like the kind of cloud-based services increasingly offered by Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. These companies lack aspects of the business software creation capability, but VMware has been particularly nervous about AWS.

At a conference in Las Vegas in February, Pat Gelsinger, VMware’s president, lashed out at Amazon for stealing its business by enabling companies to move their data and computing jobs to AWS.

Mary Camarata, a spokeswoman for AWS, declined to comment. “We obsess on our customers instead,” she said.

General Electric has been increasingly vocal about the need to build businesses for the so-called “Internet of Things,” with a greater awareness of what its power systems, engines and medical devices are doing.

“Machine-to-machine communications over the Internet will change the way we do business,” said William Ruh, the vice president of GE’s software and analytics division. With the Pivotal investment, he said, “we’re going to learn a lot about infrastructure and software.” He added, “Industrial data is very different from consumer data too, and we’ll help Pivotal understand the requirements.”

Part of the difficulty will be in learning how to make software that is highly reliable, something largely unknown on the consumer Internet. If something goes wrong on Twitter, a “fail whale” appears; on a jet engine in midflight, lives may be threatened.

If successful, Pivotal may be the first tech company to make a lasting mark without passing through a small startup phase. Companies that were big at the start and didn’t make it include @Home, a high speed cable provider backed by several cable companies; Taligent, a creation of IBM and Apple to battle Microsoft; and Symbian, a mobile operating system that at one point was backed by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung.

Mr. Maritz said he was clear about the challenge. “We’ll lose people,” he said. “We’ll have to have a clear vision, and make hard choices. Building a successful culture is an elusive thing, based on actions and not words.”