Apple Invites Press to Event Next Week

Apple on Tuesday sent invitations to members of the press for an event next week where it is expected to introduce a smaller version of the iPad.

The event will take place Oct. 23 in San Jose, Calif. The invitation includes a teaser that says “We've got a little more to show you.” Last week, a person briefed on the company's plans said the event would include the introduction of a smaller iPad.

Previously, several people with knowledge of the project, who declined to be named discussing confidential plans, said that the smaller iPad would have a 7.85-inch screen, and would likely sell for significantly less than the latest $500 iPad with a 9.7-inch display.

A smaller iPad could sound a bit like a 180 for the company, because Steve Jobs, the company's late chief executive, previously wrote off tablets with smaller screens. In an earnings call in October 2010, Mr. Jobs called 7-inch tablets “dead on arrival,” presumably referring to Samsung's then -released Galaxy Tab and Research In Motion's PlayBook.

“One could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference,” he said during the call. “It is meaningless, unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one-quarter of the present size.”

“The 7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad,” Mr. Jobs added. “These are among the reasons we think the current crop of seven-inch tablets are going to be DOA, dead on arrival.”

In the company's defense, a 7.85-inch iPad would be bigger than a 7-inch tablet, so releasing such a product wouldn't undercut what Mr. Jobs said. But the late chief executive was well known for his masterful misdirection. In the past, he dismissed the idea of even making a tablet, and said he was unconvinced that people would want iPods that played video. Apple, of course, eventually delivered both.

Microsoft Surface to Start at $500

As the days tick down to Microsoft's launch of its Surface tablet, the company has revealed how it plans to price the product - more like Apple than Amazon.

Instead of adopting Amazon's lower pricing on the Kindle Fire, Microsoft said it will sell Surface for a starting price of $500, the same starting price as the current generation of Apple's iPad. People who buy that Surface model will get some extra perks though, including 32 gigabytes of storage - twice the amount of the cheapest third-generation iPad - and a 10.6-inch display, rather than the iPad's 9.7-inch display.

Microsoft said it will sell a 32-gigabyte Surface bundled with a black Touch Cover, a keyboard that also doubles as a protective shield for the tablet, for $600. A similar bundle with a 64-gigabyte Surface will cost $700. Microsoft will sell Touch Covers separately in a wider assortment of colors for $120 and a different type of keyboard cover with moving keys called Type Cover will sell for $130.

It's clear Microsoft is aiming Surface at what is shaping up to be the premium portion of the tablet market, which Apple currently dominates. Amazon, in contrast, seems intent on using price as a weapon to gain market share against its rivals. The company recently introduced an 8.9-inch screen Kindle Fire that starts at $300.

Microsoft has not yet said whether it will do a version of Surface that competes in the small-screen tablet category. Google's Nexus 7 tablet starts at $200, while Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire starts at $160. Apple is expected to announce a new, smaller iPad next week.

Surface will go on sale October 26 in Microsoft retail stores in the United States and Canada. The company said the product will be sold online in Great Britain, China, France, Germany and several other countries. Microsoft said a limited quantity will be available for ordering on Tuesday at noon Eastern time.

The company also began airing a new Surface televi sion commercial on Monday evening, feature an odd collection of foot-stomping girls in school uniforms and dancers using their Surface tablets as percussion instruments.

Seeking a Magic Tool for Personal Productivity

If big names and bold ambitions predicted success, then the new partnership between David Allen, the personal productivity guru and author of “Getting Things Done,” and Intentional Software would surely be a winner. The goal: to help organize a person's digital life

Intentional Software was founded a decade ago by Charles Simonyi, a software wizard and an early hire at Microsoft, who oversaw the design of its Office productivity applications. Recently, Mr. Simonyi is probably best known as a billionaire space tourist, having twice taken rides on the Soyuz spacecraft.

Yet Mr. Simonyi's greatest achievements are in computing. His pedigree goes back before Microsoft. In the 1970s, Mr. Simonyi, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was a member of the group at Xerox PARC that largely invented modern personal computing. He wrote a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on page - a breakthrough technique at the time, dubbed WYSIWYG, What You See Is What Your Get. Bravo would become Microsoft Word.

The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., sprang from Mr. Simonyi's research at Microsoft on “intentional programming,” clever software that better understands what a user wants to do, his or her intentions. That goal has been around since the beginning of software. FORTRAN, the first successful, higher-level programming language was designed to let engineers and scientists write programs in a vernacular that closely resembled math formulas familiar to them. FORTRAN is an abbreviation for FORmula TRANslator.

But intentional programming, in its ultimate vision, would be a big step above programming languages - essentially allowing people to tell machines what computing tasks they want done. If this sounds like science fiction to you, you have plenty of company among the skeptics.

Whether Intentional Software is an intriguing research venture or a real c ompany is an unanswered question. Its work has attracted a couple of contracts from Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced research agency, and some private-sector projects.

Eric Anderson, a software engineer, entrepreneur and chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism pioneer, was recruited to Intentional Software less than two years ago. His mission is to find wider markets for the company's technology.

Mr. Anderson, a devotee of the Getting Things Done regimen, got in touch with Mr. Allen and explained the potential of Intentional Software's technology as a “meta-tool” to help organize a person's digital life.

Mr. Allen was intrigued and both sides eventually agreed to pursue the opportunity, with a partnership announced on Wednesday. Mr. Allen describes the company's software as “a solution looking for the right problem.”

The partnership, said Mr. Anderson, will design software that sits on top of a person's digital calendar and communications including e-mail, text messages, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then, the software will automatically apply the G.T.D. principles of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reviewing and prioritizing the various channels of information in a person's life.

“This could be as transformative to the way people work as Microsoft Office has been,” Mr. Anderson.

But every person would be able to tailor the behavior of the software for individual priorities, like work chores filtered by what is immediate and what is important.

Flexibility, Mr. Allen says, is crucial to avoid the pitfall of most software, which he refers to as “Naziware.” What is needed, he said, is “an orientation tool. Right now, the computer is not an orientation tool - it's a disorientation tool.”

The partnership plans to crowdsource the design of the new productivity software. It is hoping to tap ideas from the many Getting Things Done fans about what they want to see in a super-produc tivity product and be beta testers for experimental versions of the software. And Intentional Software has set up a Web site for interested individuals and corporations, www.intentsoft.com/gtd

A timetable for shipping a product? Too soon to say precisely, Mr. Anderson said, though probably in a year or so. “This isn't going to be years and years,” he said.

Still, an

The Future, as Imagined by Google

In Eric E. Schmidt's future, his life will be a lot easier.

His bed will wake him up when he cycles out of R.E.M. sleep. A driverless car will take him to work. Returning phone calls, scheduling events and other routine tasks will be taken care of by devices using artificial intelligence. A micro-robot he swallows will monitor his insides and alert his doctor if something is wrong. At night, a robot will go to parties in his place.

“He'll have a good time and report back in the morning,” said Mr. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, speaking Monday at the company's Zeitgeist sales conference in Paradise Valley, Ariz.

Mr. Schmidt was describing to Google's biggest advertisers and partners how technology can change the world, from tracking financial assets to education to measuring the results of non-profit initiatives. Some of the things he mentioned, like universal language translation and artificial intelligence, are Google projects.

More im portant than making his daily life easier, he said, technology will open up the world to people who have never been connected, like those in developing countries.

“Imagine going from no information to all the world's information with one device,” he said. “No textbooks to all textbooks. No language to all language.”

For companies like Google, billions of people newly connected also means a new source of talent, Mr. Schmidt said.

“Maybe Botswana has the next generation of great U.I. designers,” he said. “We don't know because we haven't explored.”

Google and other tech companies will have succeeded, he said, when none of this seems magical, or even visible, because technology will imbue everything in our lives, which is a theme of Google's.

Its Internet-connected eyeglass frames are the first step, though for now they stand out on the faces of the couple dozen people wearing them at the conference while socializing at cocktail par ties and sitting by the pool, including Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin.

“Eventually technology just disappears,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It's the ultimate achievement. No more ports and prompts and plug-ins.”

Yahoo\'s C.E.O., Marissa Mayer, Returns to Work With New C.O.O.

After a two-week maternity leave, Yahoo's chief executive, Marissa Mayer, is back at work with one of her former Google colleagues in tow. (She alerted everyone to her dedication to work via Twitter.)

Ms. Mayer also announced Monday that she had hired Henrique De Castro, a vice president at Google, as Yahoo's chief operating officer. Yahoo lured Mr. De Castro with a hefty pay package that according to a regulatory filing will include a $600,000 base salary plus a bonus that - depending how he performs - could be worth twice that much. Mr. De Castro will also receive $36 million in stock, half of that as a one-time retention equity award and the other half as performance-based stock options.

Most recently, Mr. De Castro led Google's worldwide partner business solutions group, where he headed up advertising platforms and services for Google's publisher and commerce partners. Luring advertisers back to Yahoo is a top priority for the company. Yahoo was once the b iggest seller of display ads in the United States, but ceded that crown to Facebook and Google last year.

“Henrique is an incredibly accomplished and rigorous business leader, and I'm personally excited to have him join Yahoo's strong leadership team,” Ms. Mayer said in a statement. “His operational experience in Internet advertising and his proven success in structuring and scaling
global organizations make him the perfect fit for Yahoo as we propel the business to its next phase of growth.”

Before his current position, Mr. De Castro led Google's media, platforms and mobile division. That mobile experience should come in handy at Yahoo, where the company has yet to formulate a mobile strategy.

Mr. De Castro has been with Google since 2006. Before that, he served in various positions at Dell and McKinsey & Company. He is expected to start on Jan. 22.