Most of the hype around President Barack Obama's dinner with a dozen of California's tech-industry leaders was around the appearance of Apple CEO Steve Jobs as he struggles with health issues.

But the dinner, which took place last Thursday, wasn't about Apple or Steve Jobs. The dinner, The White House said, was about U.S. innovation in technology and job creation.

It's also likely there was also at least some talk of President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign.

According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics and noted by the Sunlight Foundation, 6 of the 11 companies represented by their respective CEOs on Thursday night spent millions of dollars last year lobbying federal lawmakers in Washington D.C. through employees and political action committees.

And 10 of the 11 companies and their employees contributed financially to Obama's 2008 campaign for President.

Only the Westley Group, a Menlo Park venture capital firm, spent nothing on both lobbying in D.C. and Obama's presidential run -- though Twitter did spend zero on lobbying and gave just $750 to Obama.

Stanford Univeristy President John Hennessy accounted for the 12th seat at the dinner table. Stanford donated $448,720 to Obama's 2008 campaign and spent $370,000 on lobbying in 2010.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: President Barack Obama talks with Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg before a dinner with technology business leaders in Woodside, Calif., on Thursday. In the background are Carol Bartz, Yahoo president and CEO; Art Levinson, Genentech chairman and former CEO; Steve Westly, founder and managing partner of the Westly Group; and Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and CEO of Google.
Credit: Pete Souza, the White House/Flickr

A veteran blogger in Syria was jailed Sunday -- yet another example of just how important to demonstrators, and threatening to government regimes, the Internet can be.

The blogger, Ahmad Abu Khair, was arrested early Sunday morning while driving from the coastal town of Banias to Damascus, according a Facebook group calling for his release and the citizen-journalism advocacy group Global Voices.

Times reporters in Beirut said on our sister blog, Babylon and Beyond, that the charges against Khair hadn't yet been made public, but that the blogger has been a big supporter of Tunisia's success in removing now-former President Zine el Abidine ben Ali.

From Babylon and Beyond:

In a recent post on his blog titled "Inspired by the revolution" (Arabic link), Khair compared the conditions that led to the uprising in Tunisia with the situation in Syria and other Arab countries, concluding: "Change is possible ... but by revolution!"

But others have said that Khair's comments were not seen as particularly controversial and were echoed by many in the blogosphere.

"All Syrian bloggers praised the revolution and talked generally about why change is important," a source in Syria with knowledge of social media told Babylon & Beyond. "If his blog was the reason" for his arrest, "then this is surely a change of policy: If you support a revolution you'll be detained." The source asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

Khair's arrest coincides with reports that the hunger strike of jailed Kurdish-Syrian blogger and rights activist Kamal Hussein Sheikho had entered its fifth day on Sunday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (Arabic link).

The 33-year-old blogger was arrested in June at the Lebanese-Syrian border and charged with "spreading false information to weaken the morale of the nation."

Khair's arrest also arrives about one week after blogger Tal Mallouhi, 19, was found guilty of passing information to the United States and sentenced to five years in prison.

The imprisoning of activists who use the Internet to mobilize others as well as to criticize their governments is becoming a commonplace action of governments that are seeing massive protests calling for political reforms and, in many cases, a switch to democracy.

In Egypt, Google executive Wael Ghonim is credited as being one of the leaders in the ongoing revolution toward democracy that has removed former President Hosni Mubarak. Ghonim was held for 12 of the 18 days of protests that led to Mubarak's ouster. 

Another increasingly common move by governments facing unrest as protesters fill the streets is to cut off access to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and YouTube.

In Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and recently Libya, the Internet has been temporarily shut off or throttled down to a point of being unusable.

To read the full report on Babylon and Beyond, head over to the post titled 'SYRIA: Another blogger jailed as social media fuels protests in Arab world.'

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: Blogger Ahmad Abu al Khair was reportedly arrested by Syrian security forces early Sunday morning. Credit: Facebook

Arc90, the maker of the Web app Readability, is not pleased with Apple's new App Store subscription plan.

The problems? Apple rejected the Readability iOS app. And the 30% cut of revenue for subscriptions sold through its App Store is the same cut that Readability takes when it charges its users for its service.

Richard Ziade, a co-founder of Arc90 and the creator of Readability, posted a letter on both Arc90's and Readability's blogs, titled "An Open Letter to Apple" venting the frustrations of the app company.

The publicly issued complaint from Ziade is a bold one. The two companies have been on good terms, with Apple using Readability to power a feature in the latest release of its Safari Web browser called Safari Reader.

Ziade, in the letter, addressed the relationship:

Dear Apple:

It's your friends from Readability. Remember us? You put our technology into your Safari browser last year. We're writing this open letter because – well – we're a little upset right now.

Last Friday, you notified us that our Readability iOS application was rejected.

Readability's iOS app was rejected due to a policy in Apple's iOS guidelines, which says, "Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected," Ziade wrote.

Apple said last week, when it announced its App Store subscription service, that subscriptions sold in-app were all handled by Apple. Publishers and developers are allowed to offer subscriptions outside of any iOS apps, but any rate in-app must be the same or better than what's available outside of the app.

If an app doesn't offer a subscription in-app and through Apple, it will be rejected.

Ziade wrote in his letter that Apple's explanation of what will or won't be rejected isn't clear, stating:

We're obviously disappointed by this decision, and surprised by the broad language. By including "functionality, or services," it's clear that you intend to pursue any subscription-based apps, not merely those of services serving up content. Readability's model is unique in that 70% of our service fees go directly to writers and publishers. If we implemented In App purchasing, your 30% cut drastically undermines a key premise of how Readability works.

Apple touted its subscription service as an opportunity for publishers of music, videos and written content (such as news agencies). But Arc90 isn't technically a publisher.

Readability enables users to, with the click of a button, pull the words found on Websites into a text-only format, free of ads, photos and embedded videos, for what Arc90 calls "distraction-free reading."

To use the Readability app in browsers such as Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome or Mozilla's Firefox, Arc90 charges a subscriber fee of at least $5 a month. Of that monthly fee, Arc90 retains 30% for itself, passing on the other 70% to content publishers that are registered with the company.

If Readability sells subscriptions in its iOS app and through Apple, under the current App Store subscription terms, Apple would get its 30% cut before either Arc90 and any Readability-registered publishers get their respective shares of revenue.

Ziade called Apple's policy greedy:

Before we cool down and come to our senses, we might as well share how we're feeling right now: we believe that your new policy smacks of greed. Subscription apps like ours represent a tiny sliver of app sales that represent a tiny sliver of your revenue. You've achieved much of your success in hardware sales by cultivating an incredibly impressive app ecosystem. Every iPad or iPhone TV ad puts the apps developed by companies like ours front and center. It was a healthy and mutually beneficial dynamic: apps like ours get exposure and you get to show the world how these apps make your hardware shine. That's why we're a bit baffled here.

To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it's your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.

In the letter, Ziade did offer Apple a bit of a compromise, writing:

P.S. We'd we be glad to deliver Readability for iOS – with in-app purchasing – if you'd carve out 70% from your 30% fee and share it with writers and publishers, just as we do.

Officials at Apple and Arc90 were unavailable for comment.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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An Egyptian man has named his recently born baby girl "Facebook" in the wake of the 18 days of protests that used social media as an organizing tool to overthrow the government there.

Al-Ahram, an Egyptian newspaper, first reported that Gamal Ibrahim, a man in his 20s, chose to name his first daughter Facebook as a way to honor the role the website played in Egypt's undergoing revolution, according to CNN.

Google executive Wael Ghonim is among the many Egyptian organizers who used social media to mobilize demonstrators with his "We Are Khaled Said" Facebook page.

Ghonim has said he started the page days after Khaled Said was killed in public by Egyptian police, with the police receiving no punishment for the man's death.

Other websites and social media services, such as Twitter and YouTube, were also used by organizers in the protests that began Jan. 25, and the words "Facebook" and "Twitter" were seen on signs and spray-painted on walls during the demonstrations.

A translation of the Al-Ahram report provided by the website TechCrunch said: "The girl's family, friends and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. 'Facebook' received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name."

Officials at Facebook, the website, were unavailable for comment on Monday morning.

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Photo: Anti-government protesters sit next to "Facebook" spray-painted on a wall during demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 7. Credit: Dylan Martinez / Reuters

Alibaba.com Ltd., China’s largest e-commerce website, announced the resignation of two of its most senior leaders Monday after an internal investigation found more than 2,000 fraudulent virtual storefronts had been set up with the help of company salespeople.

In a company statement, Alibaba.com said Chief Executive David Wei and Chief Operating Officer Elvis Lee were not involved in the scams but wanted to shoulder responsibility for the “systemic break-down" in Alibaba.com’s "culture of integrity.”

Wei is being replaced by Jonathan Lu, chief executive of sister company Taobao.com, a hugely popular online shopping website. Alibaba.com is the flagship site of Alibaba Group, a multibillion-dollar Internet empire headed by one of China’s most charismatic business figures, Jack Ma.

In addition to Taobao, the company owns Yahoo’s China operations and Alipay.com, an online payment service. Founded in 1999, Alibaba.com has become one of the world’s largest business-to-business platforms in the world, linking sellers of Chinese manufactured goods to millions of wholesalers overseas. The company is about 40% owned by Yahoo.

The company said it began noticing a surge in fraud claims in late 2009 and launched a probe. Findings showed that about 100 members of the company’s 5,000-member sales staff helped fraudsters evade steps to authenticate their businesses so they could pretend to sell electronic goods at attractive terms and prices.

Alibaba.com said it had shutdown those storefronts but that the investigation was ongoing.

Alibaba.com shares fell 3.5% in trading in Hong Kong on Monday before the announcement.

-- David Pierson

Photo: Jack Ma, chairman and chief executive of Alibaba Group, speaks at a news conference in Beijing, January 19, 2011. Credit: Jason Lee / Reuters

The Internet has been shut down in Libya, according to multiple reports.

Al Jazeera said Friday that its broadcasting signal was being jammed on several over-the-air TV frequencies and its website had been blocked in Libya, Reuters reported.

Agence France-Presse reported Friday that Facebook access was being blocked in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.  Internet service was either slow or unavailable as protests against Moammar Kadafi continued there for the fourth day in a row.

AFP said at least 41 people have died in Libya since Tuesday. The anti-government protests and violence against demonstrators aren't limited to Libya, but have been seen this week in Bahrain, Iran, Jordan and Yemen.

The unrest follows the successes in Tunisia and Egypt, where nonviolent protesters have removed government leaders and uprisings attempting to install democracies are taking place.

Shutting down the Internet, and particularly social media websites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, are becoming standard practice in the Middle East and Africa with the same thing happening in Tunisia and Egypt during their historic uprisings.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Image:  Supporters of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi hold up his picture in Tripoli on Friday. Violence against anti-government protesters is continuing in the Libyan capital. Credit:  Mahmud Turkia /AFP/Getty Images

Verizon accounted for 28% of Motorola Mobility's revenue last year, largely on the success of its Droid phone line.

The Motorola Droid, Droid 2, Droid X and upcoming Droid Bionic are only offered though Verizon -- an increasingly important mobile carrier for the electronics manufacturer.

The relationship between Motorola and Verizon has grown over the last few years, as Motorola noted in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday.

In 2009, Verizon sales made up 17% of Motorola's revenue, up from 13% in 2008.

Verizon's selling of Apple's iPhone 4 -- which began Feb. 10 -- and any subsequent iPhones could be the largest threat so far to derailing Motorola's growth with Verizon, something Motorola alluded to in an assessment of its risks in the SEC filing.

"We have several large customers and the loss of, or a significant reduction in revenue from, one or more of these customers could have a negative impact on our business," Motorola said in the filing. "During 2010, approximately 28% of our net revenues were from Verizon Communications Inc. ... It may be difficult to replace or find new large customers, especially with increasing concentration in the U.S. where there are a limited number of carriers.

"If any significant customer, particularly Verizon or Sprint Nextel or other large customers, such as Comcast, stopped doing business with us, or significantly reduced the level of business they do with us, it could impact our ability to service other customers using similar technology and our financial results could be negatively impacted."

Motorola is looking to replicate the success it's had with the Droids on Verizon with other carriers -- namely AT&T, where Motorola is set to launch its first 4G phone, the Atrix, on Jan. 22. Both the Atrix and the Droid line of phones run on Google's Android operating system.

Google is another important relationship for Motorola. The upcoming Motorola Xoom will be the first tablet to ship with Android's Honeycomb OS, a version of Android built specifically for tablet computers.

The Xoom has been hyped as possibly the first real threat to the dominance of the Apple iPad, though Motorola has yet to reveal an official release date or price for the device. Rumors have floated saying it will sell for as little as $700 or as much as $1,200, while the iPad starts at about $500.

Whenever the Xoom drops, it will (at least initially) only be available with wireless plans through Verizon.

Motorola reported a profit of $11.5 billion in 2010, up from $11.1 billion in 2009. Profit rose 9% in the company's Mobile Devices segment and dropped 7% in the home segment, Motorola said.

Shares of Motorola rose 20 cents on Friday to $30.03.

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Photo: Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha shows off the Motorola Xoom tablet at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images

Apple might be exploring getting into the TV business -- or at least making power supplies for televisions.

The Cupertino, Calif., tech firm recently posted a new job listing on its website for an "AC/DC power supply design engineer."

The company says the engineer it's looking for would "work on the forefront of new power management designs and technologies ... for Apple's next generation Macintosh platforms spanning from notebook computers, desktop computers, servers, standalone displays and TV."

Apple recently discontinued its line of Xserve computers, but has said it's working on a new dedicated server computer offering. Until then, those looking for Mac servers can choose from Mac Pro desktops or Mac Minis to fill in.

Apple does have an product designed to work with televisions, the AppleTV, which is a small black box about the size of a hockey puck used for streaming music and video over the Internet and connecting to iTunes.

But the AppleTV is decidedly different from a television, competing more with the Boxee Box and Roku. The device connects to TVs using an HDMI cable and sells for $99.

Interestingly enough, Apple's computer monitors, which it calls a Cinema Display, have no HDMI inputs and can't work with an Apple TV.

Apple's Cinema Displays, which are only available in a 27-inch screen size, feature LED backlighting, but so far none of the company's monitors have ever been built with a TV tuner.

Officials at Apple were unavailable for comment Friday morning.

A shout-out goes to the blog 9to5mac.com which was among the first to report the job listing.

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 Image: A screen shot of an Apple job listing looking for a power supply engineer who might work on televisions.

Google has released a beta update of its Chrome Web browser -- called Chrome 10 Beta -- that is faster with both JavaScript and video, and includes a new Chrome OS-like settings interface and a password sync feature.

"Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before," Google said in a blog post announcing the update. "In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release."

The Chrome 10 Beta also has a "preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video," which will enable users with higher end graphics cards to rely on that hardware rather than a standard CPU processor.

"In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%," for computers with the appropriate graphics cards, Google said.

Chrome is released in three versions, which Google calls channels -- Dev, Beta and Stable. Dev is meant for developers adding new functionality to the browser, Beta is a public release with experimental featurers and Stable is the most polished (and ideally bug-free) version of Chrome.

Users can also sync their passwords across multiple computers running Chrome 10 Beta, along with bookmarks and other settings.

Passwords can be encrypted, or not, and syncing takes place through Chrome's setting pane, which in Chrome 10 Beta is not a pop-up box but rather a tab opening in the browser, like a web page.

The redesigned settings pane brings Chrome 10 Beta stylistically in step with the Chrome OS browser.

Inside Chrome 10 Beta, Google has given settings individual URLs -- allowing users to jump to the settings options they want without having to run through a sequence of windows.

These changes, Google said, are intended to make settings easier to find and share with others that a user may be helping -- such as friends and family assisting one another in using Google Chrome over the phone. An example of such a situation can be seen in the video above.

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Video: Google introduces its new Chrome 10 Beta settings interface. Credit: Goolge on YouTube

Image: A screenshot of the settings tab in Chrome 10 Beta.

Twitter has suspended UberTwitter and Twidroyd for violating its application policies.

Both UberTwitter, which is available for the iPhone and the most popular Twitter app for BlackBerry phones, and Twidroyd for Android phones, are built by Pasadena-based UberMedia.

In a blog post on Friday morning, Twitter said:

We ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

We have suspended UberTwitter and twidroyd for violating our policies.

More than 3 Million smart phone users access Twitter though UberMedia apps and Web-based services, the company said on its LinkedIn page.

A spokeswoman at UberMedia declined to comment on the suspension on Friday morning, but said the company was working on a statement that would be released shortly.

Los Angeles entrepreneur Bill Gross started UberMedia in early 2010 as TweetUp, later renamed PostUp before becoming UberMedia.

The company also makes the UberCurrent app for the iPhone, as well as EchoFon for the iPhone, Mac computers and Firefox Web browser.

Twitter said it suspends hundreds of applications in violation of its policies each day, but most apps are used by few people. "We are taking the unusual step of sharing this with you because today's suspension may affect a larger number of users," Twitter said.

Twitter officials were unavailable Friday to explain how exactly UberTwitter and Twidroyd were in violation of its policies.

[Updated 12:25 p.m.: Carolyn Penner, a Twitter spokeswoman, e-mailed this statement addressing the suspension:

We ask all developers in the Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.

We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.

Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money.

We've had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.]

[Updated 1:30 p.m.: A spokeswoman for UberMedia sent along a statement from CEO Bill Gross on the suspensions.

Gross said Twitter shut off access for Twidroyd, UberTwitter and UberCurrent to its service on Friday morning -- but the applications should be back up soon.

After shutting off Twitter access for the three apps, "Twitter then notified us that they believed we were in violation of several provisions of their terms of servic," Gross said. "We were immediately in touch with Twitter, and the changes they asked us to make were very small.

"As a result, we have completed the changes, and new apps are currently being posted to their respective stores. Twitter has assured us that as soon as those changes were complete, they would reactivate our applications."

Twitter asked UberMedia to change the name of UberTwitter as well, he said.

"We began a process of changing the name three weeks ago by polling our users, and we've decided based on their input to change the product name to UberSocial, which we completed today," Gross said.]

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Adventurers try to trek across Australia all the time – but few attempt the journey in a wind-powered electric car.

Two Germans, Dirk Gion and Stefan Simmerer, recently wrapped up an 18-day drive that took them 3,000 miles along the southern Australian coast in a vehicle that used the breeze to juice up its battery.

The total electricity cost for the Wind Explorer vehicle came out to less than $15. In addition to an 8-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery pack, the car is equipped with a kite system and a portable wind turbine with a 20-foot bamboo mast.

The lightweight vehicle weighs less than 450 pounds, just 150 pounds heavier than Gion and Simmerer together. And with the aerodynamic design and low-friction tires, it can run at up to 50 mph.

The duo, who have also water skiied behind a cruise ship and climbed the Tibetan high plateau, left Perth on Jan. 21 to run some tests on the Wind Explorer.

They then set off from Albany on Jan. 26 and made their way to Sydney, occasionally slamming the kite into telephone lines by accident and dodging roadside trees.

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Photo credit: Buckle Up Productions, www.wind-explorer.com

Federal regulators are probing the legality of Apple's plan to take a 30% cut of revenue from content subscriptions sold through its App Store, according to reports.

The 30% share is the same Apple takes for music and video sales through iTunes and in Apple's subscription model. As announced Tuesday, the Cupertino, Calif., company would apply that policy to subscriptions of digital newspapers and magazines, videos and music as long as the subscription for that content is sold through the App Store.

If a publisher of such content sells a subscription outside of Apple's App Store, users can access it through Apps running on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch without giving the tech giant any cut of revenue.

"Our philosophy is simple," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said in a statement Tuesday. "When Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30% share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100% and Apple earns nothing."

Apple also is leaving it up to subscribers how much personal information they share with publishers, a move that is likely to make publishers unhappy, though Apple had previously shared no user personal data at all.

And many publishers aren't excited about Apple taking a 30% cut for subscriptions sold through its system either.

According to a report from Reuters, subscription-based online music retailers such as Rhapsody and Rdio have said Apple's rates are "economically untenable."

The Department of Justice is in the "early stages" of a probe into the subscription service and what it means for competition after publishers made complaints, Reuters reported. The DOJ is currently contacting both Apple and publishers, Reuters said, citing an unnamed person who is "familiar with the department's procedures."

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Trade Commission is involved in the investigation as well.

Apple officials were not available for comment Friday morning.

The analyst firm Forrester has been among those arguing that Apple's 30% plan is too high, stating that such fees should be about 5%.

Forrester chief executive George Colony said in a blog post that Apple's iOS operating system and Google's Android platform are ushering in a shift away from the "Microsoft desktop standard" toward an "App Internet" that uses the Web to power app-based experiences.

This change is "forever changing many, many markets" Colony said, noting that a recent Forrester survey said 39% of tablet users spend more time using the device's Web browser, while about 45% spend about an equal amount of time using apps and a Web browser, and 16% of users spend the majority of their time using apps.

"These are the formative and critical moments in the development of the App Internet market -- the winners could become dominant for decades," he said. "And Apple is blowing it. It risks replaying the PC wars of the early 1980s when Microsoft welcomed everyone into their development world while Apple stayed 'pure' and scared away its allies."

That decision led to Microsoft becoming the dominant PC platform; Apple could end up on the losing end of the mobile market as well if it keeps demanding such high revenue cuts, Colony said.

"Apple has to play chess here, not checkers," he said. "It has to stay reasonable and accommodating and play for the ultimate prize -- dominance of the App Internet. If it doesn't, we'll look back at this moment and call it the top for Apple."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: A man stands near Apple's iPad advertisement in Shanghai on Jan 26. Credit: Eugene Hoshiko/Associated Press