Google Voice under FCC scrutiny

In today's podcast: Google Voice under SEC scrutiny; HP, SAP team up on data warehousing, BI; and French students may be banned from using cell phones.

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will launch an inquiry into Google Voice, the Web-based voice service, after complaints that the tech giant is blocking some calls. The FCC action comes after AT&T, in a letter to the agency Sept. 25, complained that Google was pushing for net neutrality rules that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or slowing Internet traffic while at the same time blocking some calls on its service to some phone numbers with high access charges. The FCC sent a letter to Google on Friday asking the company about its Voice service. The letter asks Google how many people have been invited to beta test Google Voice, how Google Voice calls are routed, and if Google blocks calls to some telephone carriers.

SAP and its long-time partner Hewlett-Packard will announce plans this week to more closely link their technologies for BI (business intelligence) and data warehousing. The companies plan to conduct joint development efforts resulting in tighter integration between HP's Neoview data warehousing appliance and SAP's NetWeaver Business Warehouse. However, the work won't actually be completed until the latter half of 2010. The joint SAP-HP announcement also follows Oracle's recent announcement that the next version of its Exadata data warehousing appliance would use Sun hardware instead of HP's. Oracle is in the process of acquiring Sun for US$7.4 billion, but the deal is in limbo as European authorities conduct an antitrust probe.

Pupils at French primary schools and middle schools could be banned from using mobile phones in school under draft legislation approved Thursday by the French Senate. The measure, proposed by the government, is just one clause of an enormous piece of environmental legislation that must still be debated by the National Assembly before it has any chance of becoming law. The restriction on phones was the subject of vigorous debate last Wednesday, with one senator pushing for the ban to be limited to the classroom for older pupils, so that they could make calls in the corridors during breaks. Many schools already ban the use of phones in their code of conduct.

Yahoo has opened the application floodgates to its home page, with hopes that external developers will soon build tens of thousands of programs that Yahoo.com's more than 330 million visitors will find useful. Announced in April 2008, Yahoo Open Strategy aims to open all of the company's online services, sites and applications to third-party developers, as well as give end users a "social profile" dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services. Swinging wide open the doors of Yahoo.com to external developers is a big milestone in this ambitious effort. Until now, Yahoo has erred on the conservative side when it comes to allowing tightly-integrated applications for its home page, opting to work individually with hand-picked partners.

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.