The Week in iOS Apps: A better Facebook

This week's roundup of iOS apps offers new ways to shop, track your life, and make new websites. Already this week we brought you news of the Angry Birds Star Wars game, word of updates to theClear and FreshBooks apps, as well as the announcement that Microsoft Office may finally be available on iOS in 2013.

Here are other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week.

Apple Store: Siri: Buy me a new iPad mini! OK, so we're not sure that gadget shopping will be quite that easy, but the latest update to the Apple Store app for iPhone does let you use Siri to shop around and compare prices on Apple products. (Of course, you'll have to have a Siri-enabled device--an iPhone 4S or 5, or a third- or fourth-generation iPad--to take advantage of the new features.) The updated app also lets you buy gift cards and have them emailed to friends from within the app--and those cards can even be loaded into the recipients Passbook. Apple's technology has finally found its best purpose: To make it really easy for you to buy more of Apple's technology.

Evernote: This free app for iPhone and iPad--which lets you save pictures, notes, and clippings from just about everything that you read or experience--has long been one of the best-selling offerings in the App Store. Now it's received a massive overhaul to its user interface, with a new homepage that allows easier access to notes, notebooks, tags, and premium features. (On the iPad, there's also homepage access to your most recent notes.) And the note list has been reconfigured to a "card style" to showcase the content therein. What's more, geotagged notes can be displayed on a map to show when and where you collected them.

Facebook/Tumblr: Facebook's free app for iPhone and iPad hasn't always been popular--and the company's inability to "get" the mobile arena has arguably hindered its success on the stock market--but this week's update has some notable improvements, making it easier to find friends online and chat them up immediately (see the photo at top), along with the improved ability to share multiple photos quickly. Elsewhere in social media, the Tumblr iPhone app has also been updated, bringing a new dashboard and gesture-based navigation. Telling people way too much about yourself is easier than ever.

Petfinder Mobile: How much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I browsed to its waggly tail! How much is that doggie on my iPhone? (Arf, arf!) I can share its details via Facebook, Twitter, or email!

Summly: This free news aggregator app for iPhone really boils down the news, offering 400-character summaries of the top stories in the subject areas you choose. (You can click on the story and go more in-depth with the longer articles from the source.) Version 2.0, launched this week, addressed user complaints with a thorough overhaul of the navigation, cleaning up story lists.

Webr/Zapd: You probably don't need convincing that the iPhone is a content-creation machine, but here are two more reminders. Version 2.0 of Webr, a website-making app, lets users add video and audio links to their sites; it also offers new themes and the ability to create and manage up to three websites. Version 2.0 of Zapd, a similar offering, now lets you collaborate with other users in website creation, and offers new website themes, with additional themes being added every month.

Other apps of note: Reeder for iPhone now lets users post to App.Net and Quote.FM ... the best-selling novel War Horse is now available as a standalone multimedia iPad app, as is Goodnight Moon, the beloved children's classic ...  and Scanner Pro now lets users batch-upload multiple images to their account.

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Manufacturer sues IBM over SAP project 'disaster'

IBM has been slapped with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor's business.

In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.

"Seizing upon Avantor's decision -- and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor's industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service -- IBM represented that IBM's 'Express Life Sciences Solution' ... was uniquely suited to Avantor's business," the lawsuit states. "The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform."

But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was "woefully unsuited" to its business and the implementation brought its operations to "a near standstill," according to the suit.

IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with "incompetent and reckless consultants" who made "numerous design, configuration and programming errors," it states.

In addition, IBM "intentionally or recklessly failed" to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.

"To conceal the System's defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled -- even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor's ability to service its customers," the suit states.

The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, "was a disaster," with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing "that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations," the suit states.

Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.

For example, before the go-live, IBM and Avantor met with one of Avantor's biggest customers, which voiced worry that its EDI (electronic data interchange) with Avantor for product ordering wouldn't work after the changeover, and IBM assured the customer it would, according to the suit. "In fact, the EDI interface immediately failed upon go-live."

"IBM, meanwhile, has already pocketed over $13 million in fees from Avantor for a systems implementation project it mismanaged and was unable to perform properly," the lawsuit states. "Incredibly, IBM is now seeking to profit from its misconduct by demanding millions of dollars in additional fees to redesign and rebuild the defective System it implemented."

IBM said it disagreed with the claims and will defend itself against them vigorously. "We believe the allegations in the complaint are exaggerated and misguided and are surprised that Avantor chose to file suit," a spokesman said via email. "IBM met its contractual obligations and delivered a solution that Avantor continues to use in its operations."

Avantor's suit does state that IBM made efforts to right the project's course, albeit ultimately ineffective ones, following a June meeting with Avantor's then-CEO, Rajiv Gupta.

IBM "began to acknowledge the severity of the situation" and replaced many of the original consultants, according to the suit. These workers did extensive redesign and programming.

In July, "IBM told Avantor to cancel every pending order and reset the entire System in light of pervasive warehouse problems," it states. "IBM said this was necessary to discover the root cause of the problem. Ultimately, IBM acknowledged that it had to engage in extensive remedial efforts to redesign and rebuild the System that Avantor hired it to deliver."

"Numerous" IBM workers have told Avantor personnel that IBM failed to manage the project correctly and use SAP "best practices," according to the complaint.

IBM workers even called the project the worst SAP implementation they'd ever seen, it adds.

Avantor is seeking assorted damages in an amount to be determined at trial.

In many respects, the lawsuit reflects other high-profile litigation over SAP projects.

But Avantor broke from tradition by calling attention to its lawsuit via a press release, as companies suing systems integrators and ERP vendors rarely actively seek publicity.

One famous exception came several years ago when Waste Management sued SAP over an allegedly failed project. Waste Management won a sizable settlement from SAP after a public bout of ugly back-and-forth allegations.

It wasn't immediately clear Friday whether Avantor also plans to initiate legal action against SAP, or even has grounds to do so.

An SAP spokesman said Friday he hadn't been aware of Avantor's suit against IBM and declined comment.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

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Space-station commander controls Lego robot on Earth with futuristic network

Late last month in Germany, a robot made its first moves on Earth under commands from an orbiting spacecraft.

Though that may sound ominous, it doesn't represent an impending threat to humankind. The robot was made of Legos, and it only traversed a European Space Agency test facility. The commands were sent by Sunita Williams, commander of the 33rd expedition of the International Space Station. The ESA-led experiment may have helped lay the groundwork for future expeditions to the Moon, Mars and beyond.

ESA and NASA carried out the exercise to test Disruption Tolerant Networking, a set of protocols designed for communication across the void of space. Researchers created DTN to overcome problems that prevent space missions from using Internet Protocol, the system that runs the Internet and most other networks on Earth. In the process, they may create a technology that helps soldiers keep in touch across war zones and consumers use smartphones as they move in and out of cell coverage.

The Internet doesn't work in space because it takes too long to send data packets across the enormous distances. Even at the speed of light, a one-way transmission from Earth to the Moon has a built-in delay of 1.7 seconds, and one from Earth to Mars would face an eight-minute delay. Space networks also suffer from higher error rates than the terrestrial Internet does because of interference from solar radiation, and their transmissions can be blocked temporarily as celestial bodies move through space.

"As NASA extends its reach to the Moon and beyond, a networked architecture such as DTN will be required to successfully complete these missions," the agency wrote on its Web page about the project. NASA envisions DTN being used between assets on the surface of planets and sister spacecraft orbiting above, or between craft in deep space and command centers on Earth.

While IP expects a continuous, end-to-end data path between two devices using it, DTN sends data on its journey one "hop" at a time. At its heart is the Bundle Protocol, which stores bundles of data at each hop until the next link becomes available and then forwards them.

Spacecraft and all forms of surface vehicles have been communicating by radio ever since the dawn of the Space Age, but the technologies they use are specialized and custom-built. NASA and ESA hope to make DTN into the equivalent of IP for space, a standards-based, publicly available protocol. That would reduce labor costs for setting up communications for each mission, NASA said.

Having a standardized communication protocol will become more important if space exploration escalates to setting up bases on the Moon or other planets, said Adrian Hooke, NASA's space DTN project development manager.

"Just as you can communicate on Earth without the Internet, you could build such a space base without DTN, but its communications systems would be very expensive and unreliable, since there would be lots of custom and manual capabilities required that are already fully standardized by DTN," Hooke wrote in an email interview.

NASA has been working on DTN "in earnest" since 2000, according to Hooke. A key proponent of the technology is Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the current Internet. It has used the system successfully to transmit data through space. In the latest experiment, ISS commander Williams controlled the Earthbound robot in Darmstadt, Germany, for about 90 minutes and exchanged data with it. The network connection between the robot and the ISS, more than 200 miles above Earth, delivered 50 kilobytes per second down and 82 bytes per second up. Data took seven seconds to make the round trip.

The agency expects to be able to use DTN on missions that will launch around 2015. But the technology may also have more down-to-Earth applications. Because it's designed to handle intermittent link connectivity, or communication without a constant connection, it could be useful for military networks or for using any type of battery-powered mobile communications device that goes in and out of range of a network, NASA says.

There is no limit to how far DTN could go. "There are no limits -- DTN could run into interstellar space," Hooke wrote. "It's more a question of how long the user can wait for a response."

However, the hop-by-hop nature of DTN would require some nodes along the way. These could be supplied by spacecraft purpose-built as relays or by older craft that had already fulfilled their original purposes, according to Hooke.

The "Interplanetary Internet" that NASA envisions might be a network of networks all built on DTN, but with two sets of standard protocols.

"DTN can run over the terrestrial Internet protocols in small areas of space where the communications environment is a lot like that on Earth. However, the performance of the Internet protocols rapidly breaks down in long-delay or disrupted environments, so DTN will be the end-to-end protocol, traversing local "islands of IP" along the path," he wrote.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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Google access returns to China after brief blocking

Access to Google services in China appeared to return Saturday morning after they were blocked briefly as the country prepares to appoint new leadership.

The blocking appeared to last for about 12 hours, with Internet traffic resuming to the sites after 6 a.m. local time, according to Google's Transparency Report, which monitors company's services worldwide. In Beijing, Google was accessible, although loading the sites was slow.

GreatFire.org, which monitors China's online censorship, also said Google access appeared to be restored in many locations across the country.

This is the first time Google has been blocked in China since 2010, in what was then only a brief disruption. It's unclear why the sites were targeted this time, but China's Communist Party is currently holding its 18th Party Congress, where it will name the country's new leaders.

The blocking also occurred just two weeks after Chinese censors targeted The New York Times after it had published an article on the billions in wealth amassed by the family of Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao. The New York Times' website continues to be inaccessible from within the country.

China periodically increases the level of Internet censorship when sensitive government-related matters arise. This happened last year when an online call was made urging the Chinese people to protest. Subsequently, Google accused the Chinese government of disrupting access to its Gmail service in the country.

In this latest Google blocking, some Internet users took to China's Twitter-like microblogging sites to complain, and pointed to how Gmail access had been closed off.

Google's popularity in the nation, however, has declined since the company shutdown its China-based search engine in 2010. The company current has a 5 percent share in China's search market, according to data analytics website CNZZ.com.

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Apple, HTC settle patent suits worldwide

Apple and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC have settled all of their outstanding patent disputes, they said late Saturday.

The settlement includes a 10-year agreement under which the companies will license current and future patents from each other, they said in a brief statement. The terms of the settlement are confidential and were not disclosed.

The patent dispute between the companies, one of many being fought in the mobile device industry, began in March 2010 when Apple filed suits at the International Trade Commission and U.S. District Court for Delaware accusing HTC of patent infringement.

HTC hit back with its own lawsuit and the fight escalated.

The top executives from each company provided much the same commentary in the joint statement.

Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, said, "HTC is pleased to have resolved its dispute with Apple, so HTC can focus on innovation instead of litigation," while Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "We are glad to have reached a settlement with HTC. We will continue to stay laser focused on product innovation."

Apple was the world's number two smartphone maker in the second quarter, accounting for 16.7 percent of shipments, according to research from IDC. HTC was in fourth place with a share of 5.8 percent, IDC said.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address ismartyn_williams@idg.com

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