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Hundreds of people lined up at some Verizon Wireless stores on Friday to buy the BlackBerry Storm, the first touch-screen phone from Research In Motion that aims to compete with Apple’s iPhone.

More than 200 people had waited at a Verizon store in mid-town Manhattan early in the morning, many of whom were turned away after it ran out of the new phones less than an hour after opening at 8 a.m. The angry customers caused a ruckus and police came to restore order.

Verizon said hundreds of others were in lines outside its stores up and down the U.S. east coast, but added that it had “plenty of phones” and would keep getting more shipments. It declined to give specifics on inventory levels.

Anthony Lewis, who was at a Verizon store near New York’s Bryant Park, at first tried to get the Storm at electronics stores nearby. But he was disappointed, despite putting his name on a list ahead of the Friday debut.

“I had two pre-orders at Best Buy and Circuit City. Now I’m here and I’m hearing it’s sold out,” said Lewis, 28, of Brooklyn, New York. “I guess 8 a.m. in the morning is too late.”

A Verizon employee at the store told customers that if they ordered the phone online or in the store, they would get the gadget in five to seven days.

Vodafone Group Plc, part owner of Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone, had said on Thursday that it was struggling to meet demand for the Storm, which it launched on November 14.

Vodafone, which is giving away the phone to UK customers who sign a contract, had said it had thousands of pre-orders.

STORM OR BRIGHT SPOT?

After briefly rising as much as 5 percent Verizon shares were up 40 cents, or 1.5 percent, at $26.90 in afternoon trade on New York Stock Exchange where rival AT&T Inc shares were down 3 percent at $23.76. Both stocks have been volatile in recent months due to the weakening economic situation.

But analysts said the Storm launch was likely the cause of the share moves on Friday.

“We’ve heard nothing but good things about it. It’s a small bright spot in a really bleak world.,” said Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder referring to the Storm. He said that he had even “heard from some competitors who thought it was pretty impressive.”

Verizon Wireless is making a big bet on the Storm for the crucial holiday season. The No. 2 U.S. mobile service heavily promoted four different phones last holiday season, but its focus this year is on the first touch-screen BlackBerry.

Both the Storm and iPhone cost $200 for customers who agree to a two-year service contract and both come with a built-in camera, and music and video players.

Verizon said it was getting reports of queues elsewhere in the country, with more than 100 people lining up outside a store in Bridgewater, New Jersey and another on L Street in Washington, DC. Spokeswoman Brenda Raney said it was too soon to say if stores were selling out.

“If a store has already run out, it’s evidence of pent up demand,” she said. “We don’t normally have people line up.”

However excitement over the launch stilled paled in comparison to iPhone debuts, when ardent fans camped out days in advance to ensure that they got their hands on the first devices. AT&T Inc is the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone.

In San Francisco, smaller lines of about 20 were seen at Verizon stores at 8 AM. At one of them, an employee estimated that the store had sold about 100 phones since 7 o’clock.

Standing on line in San Francisco’s financial district, Fred Vassard, a systems administrator, said he owns both versions of iPhone, but was dissatisfied with its phone capabilities. He wants Storm for both work and personal use.

“It’s a touch-screen so it has more real estate, the reviews were so-so, so I’m hoping I can find some positives in it. But the phone part will work better,” he said.

After rising almost 7 percent at one point in the session Research in Motion’s U.S. shares were up 80 cents or almost 2 percent at $42.32 on Nasdaq.

Although the crew of the spacecraft Endeavour experienced a glitch in the first space walk when an astronaut accidentally let her tool bag float away, NASA had a lot to celebrate as it announced success with a high-tech space program.

NASA, along with Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president, successfully tested a deep-space network modeled after the Internet. Engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have transmitted dozens of images to and from the spacecraft located 20 million miles from Earth using disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) software.

DTN, which sends information differently from the TCP/IP protocol used by the Internet, was developed a decade ago by NASA engineers and Cerf, who is known to many as the “father of the Internet” and is a visiting scientist at JPL.

Interplanetary Internet

“This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet,” said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture at NASA.

The month-long experiment is the first of many planned tests to qualify the technology for use on future space missions. If NASA continues to succeed with DTN, astronauts on manned missions will be able to communicate with researchers worldwide. NASA is planning its next round of testing next summer, using DTN software on the International Space Station.

“We have been doing this test for a month and it has been working well and it’s exciting getting the word out that we had a good round of testing,” said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN experiment operations center at JPL, in a phone interview.

“We needed some way of automating and routing this process in a standard way so any other space agency can pick up the protocol and use it,” Torgerson said. “The more nodes you have, the more paths you have to get data back and the easier it is to receive the data.”

Like the Endeavour team’s first walk, not everything in the testing went off without a hitch. “There was an unexpected uplink system failure at one of the deep-space network sites, which interrupted some file transfers, and the DTN protocol took care of retransmitting the missed data automatically so nothing was lost,” Torgerson said.

Securing the Network

The next step for the team at JPL is to add additional applications to the DTN, according to Torgerson. Also on the to-do list for JPL is to test the security and authentication protocols.

“Authentication is very important. It is really easy for a ham radio hacker to put his antenna up in his backyard (and listen to information),” Torgerson added. “You have to be able to protect someone from sneaking into your network.”

Each node in the network will have its own authentication protocol and will be able to authenticate a bundle or quantum data similar to packets on the Internet. Each node will have bundled authentication capabilities to be sure that data is from an authorized sender.

“Of course, the vision for us is once we get this in place every spacecraft will have a DTN capability and will be able to form a much richer network and cut out a labor-intensive process,” Torgerson said.

Earth vs Space

Unlike TCP/IP, cocreated by Cerf, DTN keeps an end-to-end connection. If a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Each node instead holds on to the information until it can communicate with another node, and therefore no information is lost when there is no immediate connection.

NASA uses the analogy of basketball players passing the ball to the player closest to the basket to describe DTN’s store-and-forward method.

Google referred all questions about the test to NASA, “since Google didn’t directly collaborate with NASA for this project,” according to Andrew Pederson, a Google spokesperson.

Jerry Yang, the chief executive of Yahoo Inc, will step down from his role as soon as the board finds a replacement, the Internet company said on Monday and its shares rose 4 per cent.Under Yang, Yahoo talks for an acquisition by Microsoft Corp broke down, rival Google Inc pulled out of a deal to sell some ads on Yahoo, and the company’s shares have withered as it tried to find its way amid tough competition and a swooning global economy.

“The company is in desperate need of change and this is clearly one way to do it,” said Ross Sandler, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Sandler said he expects the shares to move higher as investors speculate that Microsoft might make another play for the company, with Yang gone. “Jerry was the roadblock for the last deal getting done,” he said.Yahoo shares rose to $11.10 in after-hours trading from their Nasdaq close of $10.63.

The shares are down nearly 65 per cent from the year’s high of $30.25, reached in February, two weeks after Microsoft made its offer public.

Microsoft Corp withdrew its $47.5 billion buyout offer in May.

Yahoo co-founder Yang took on the CEO role in June 2007 in an effort to turn the company around. He will return to his former role as Chief Yahoo once a successor has been found.

“From founding this company to guiding its growth into a trusted global brand that is indispensable to millions of people, I have always sought to do what is best for our franchise,” Yang said in a statement.

Yahoo has hired the executive search firm of Heidrick & Struggles to look for both internal and external candidates.

In an e-mail sent to employees, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, Yang said it was a joint decision by him and Yahoo’s board.

Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock is leading the effort to find a replacement, Yang said in the memo. Yang said he will continue to serve as a director.