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KARACHI, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Pakistan has begun phasing out this month the use of central bank foreign exchange reserves to pay for oil imports, forcing commercial banks to find currency, a central bank spokesman said on Friday.

The move was made to comply with an undertaking to the International Monetary Fund in November in return for an emergency $7.6 billion loan package to stave off a balance of payments crisis.

From Feb. 1, the central bank no longer provided dollars to pay for imports of furnace oil, used to fuel power stations, and from Aug. 1 it would stop providing the currency for imports of diesel and other refined products.

The central bank would carry on providing currency for crude oil imports until Feb. 1 next year.

Syed Wasimuddin, the chief spokesman for the State Bank of Pakistan, said furnace oil payments had represented about 22 percent of the total drain on reserves from oil imports.

According to the latest official data, Pakistan's oil import bill rose 38.6 percent to $5.88 billion during the first half of the fiscal year to June 2009, compared with a year earlier. (Reporting by Sahar Ahmed; editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

Box.Net Unwraps Social Network Features

By David Needle
February 6, 2009

It's tempting to say Box.net is thinking outside the box with its latest release, but that turn of a phrase isn't quite accurate. The company says its move to add more social network features is more a natural evolution of its business.

Box.net continues to offer its namesake free online storage service that lets up to five people store and share files. Now it's following the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model popularized by Salesforce.com by offering more features and administration for $15 per user per month.

"Our roots have been in how to make it easy to share things. We're incredibly focused on the end user," Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box.net, said during a demo of the new service at company headquarters. "We have hundreds of thousands of people we don’t have a business relationship with that use the service for free."

But that could change with the added features in the business upgrade that went live Thursday. The service offers Facebook-like profile pages for every employee that includes information about their role and current projects as well as contact information (e-mail, phone number, and a picture). The profile also shows the employee's latest activity, including what content they've most recently edited, commented on or discussed.

Box.net joins a chorus of companies looking to address the needs of businesses that wish to add collaboration and social network features to their internal systems. Businesses are generally wary of simply leveraging a consumer service like Facebook because of security concerns and the mixing of personal and professional information, which could be a huge distraction in the workplace.

"Open social networks are scary to most businesses," said Box.net's vice president of marketing Jen Grant. "We have granular permissions on every folder and we've integrated the things that make a social network effective."

For example, "Updates" in Box.net are essentially news feeds that show what a person is working on – not where they're going to dinner, or how sick their cat is. Grant said this kind of focused content is to Box.net what a resume is to LinkedIn or music to a MySpace user.

"With Box, if someone in California is putting together a campaign that's useful for someone in Florida, it's easy for them to connect and share materials," said Box.net user Patti Langdale of Meritage Homes, the 12th largest homebuilder in the U.S. "The new changes continue to build upon what we like so much about Box – it's easy for our marketing managers to share ideas, connect and re-use successful materials," she said in a statement.

Intel: There’s a Multi-Function Chip in Your Future

By Don Clark

Tech companies use trade shows to hawk products to customers and the press. But technical conferences are where some of the most intense trash-talking happens, disguised in arcane papers that let engineers boast about their prowess to peers from competing companies.

Intel’s latest papers at the annual International Solid-State Circuits Conference, which starts Sunday in San Francisco, are a case in point. The company is using the event to show off new details of the inner workings of some previously discussed chips, including an eight-processor version of a product called Nehalem that Intel plans to begin selling for use in server systems later this year.

An Intel “system on a chip”

But Intel’s broader point is that miniaturization is reaching a point that many new kinds of functions can economically be squeezed on individual pieces of silicon, creating new opportunities to sell what the industry calls systems on a chip, or SOCs. The trend will allow products with “unprecedented complexity,” says Mark Bohr, a leader in developing Intel production processes who holds the title of senior fellow.

One hot topic is radio components, which are often based on analog technologies and esoteric materials–making them hard to combine with the digital silicon transistors that are Intel’s calling card. Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, another fellow at the company who directs its communications circuits research, says the company will disclose a paper at the ISSCC conference that describes components built with conventional production processes that can send wireless data at 2.5 gigabits per second–much faster than the data rates of 50 to 100 megabits that represent the peak today.

At speeds like that, a user could walk up to a kiosk at an airport and download a DVD-quality movie to their laptops in 15 seconds, Intel estimates.

Intel, so far at least, can not match the track record of cellphone chip specialists such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm in making SOCs with radios on them. But Intel has the motivation, and the money, to keep pushing. While reminding reporters in a conference call that he was discussing research papers, not products, Soumyanath sounded optimistic that such gigabit-class radio chips are certainly coming. “My guess is in three to five years time,” he says.

Intel Now Shipping Atom N280 Processor

Agam Shah, IDG News Service

Intel confirmed on Thursday that it's shipping the Atom N280 processor to PC makers, which should bring more performance and improved graphics capabilities to netbooks.

The new single-core Atom processor is paired with a chipset that allows users to watch high-definition content on netbooks while drawing less power. The new GN40 chipset includes a hardware-based high-definition video decoder that allows users to watch 720p HD video content.

Intel originally perceived Atom chips for netbooks to run basic applications like Web surfing and productivity applications. The capability to decode HD video should allow netbooks to better handle streaming video content, said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman.

Previous Atom chips -- like the Atom N270 with the 945GSE chipset -- do not include hardware-based HD video decoders. Seeing a void, companies like Nvidia released products to improve netbook graphics capabilities. Nvidia's Ion platform allows netbooks to display 1080p content, for example.

The Atom N280 runs at 1.66GHz, a marginal speed increase over the N270, which runs at 1.6GHz. The new processor also has a faster front-side bus that runs at 667MHz. The front-side bus helps connect the CPU to system components. The Intel Atom N280 processor draws about 2.5 watts of power, similar to the N270.

Intel did not disclose pricing of the chip.

The N280 will power Asus' $399 Eee PC 1000HE netbook, which the PC maker claims offers up to 9.5 hours of battery life. No shipping date for the netbook has been announced, though Amazon i

Intel Now Shipping Atom N280 Processor

Agam Shah, IDG News Service

Intel confirmed on Thursday that it's shipping the Atom N280 processor to PC makers, which should bring more performance and improved graphics capabilities to netbooks.

The new single-core Atom processor is paired with a chipset that allows users to watch high-definition content on netbooks while drawing less power. The new GN40 chipset includes a hardware-based high-definition video decoder that allows users to watch 720p HD video content.

Intel originally perceived Atom chips for netbooks to run basic applications like Web surfing and productivity applications. The capability to decode HD video should allow netbooks to better handle streaming video content, said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman.

Previous Atom chips -- like the Atom N270 with the 945GSE chipset -- do not include hardware-based HD video decoders. Seeing a void, companies like Nvidia released products to improve netbook graphics capabilities. Nvidia's Ion platform allows netbooks to display 1080p content, for example.

The Atom N280 runs at 1.66GHz, a marginal speed increase over the N270, which runs at 1.6GHz. The new processor also has a faster front-side bus that runs at 667MHz. The front-side bus helps connect the CPU to system components. The Intel Atom N280 processor draws about 2.5 watts of power, similar to the N270.

Intel did not disclose pricing of the chip.

The N280 will power Asus' $399 Eee PC 1000HE netbook, which the PC maker claims offers up to 9.5 hours of battery life. No shipping date for the netbook has been announced, though Amazon i