(03-05) 08:02 PST SAN JOSE — They were older, most of them refugees who had fled Vietnam decades ago. One after another, they walked to the podium at San Jose City Hall and gave testimony that for many marked a personal first: participating in a public hearing.

One thousand people showed up for the meeting Tuesday night, drawn by a passionate controversy over what to call the mile-long strip of primarily Vietnamese restaurants and shops on Story Road between Highway 101 and Senter Road.

Most pleaded for the council to name the stretch Little Saigon to honor the fallen capital city of their homeland, and the Little Saigon that has become their home.

“Little Saigon … is part of what we left behind,” said Andy Pham of San Jose. “I’m angry … the council is ignoring us.”

After hours of testimony, the council finally voted 10-1 to rescind the controversial name approved last June, “Vietnamese Business District.” But the council members sought to avoid future controversy and stopped short of renaming the area, instead ending discussion around 1:45 a.m. and directing staff to create a process for naming areas and districts in San Jose in the future.

“The council expressly resolves that it recognizes the widespread support for the name ‘Little Saigon’ in the broader Vietnamese-American community,” read the motion. “Nonetheless, the council also determines that it is up to local members of any future business district to decide what they want to call their district.”

With more than 350 residents signed up to testify at the public hearing, Mayor Chuck Reed limited each speaker to one minute, then urged them to try to deliver their message in less than a minute. But many spoke broken English - and some spoke in their native Vietnamese.

When a translator tried to translate, Reed politely told the translator not to bother - he had heard the words “Little Saigon.”

“It’s pretty clear what they said. I don’t think we need a translation,” the mayor said.

The dispute over what to call the 1-mile strip is as puzzling to outsiders as it is all-consuming to certain members of the Vietnamese American community.

It all started last year, when the City Council proposed designating the area an official Vietnamese business district and allocated $100,000 for signs and banners. At first, the council suggested what it believed to be the noncontroversial name of Vietnam Business District.

In November, following a prolonged outcry, the council changed the proposed name to Saigon Business District, only to find that the name still did not satisfy those who favored Little Saigon.

Last month, city lawmakers decided to rescind the November vote and put the matter before voters. But a week later, Reed and Councilwoman Madison Nguyen - who originally proposed naming the district - changed their minds and said an election would be too expensive and divisive.

For former citizens of South Vietnam who came to the United States during the Vietnam War, the issue represents nothing less than who they are, where they came from and how their old homeland is regarded and remembered by their new one.

In Vietnam, Saigon is no longer Saigon. It was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after anti-communist South Vietnam fell at the end of the war and was combined with the communist north into one country.

To some in San Jose, the name Vietnam Business District, as first proposed by the council, would have been a further slight to the memory of Saigon and a further slap at their past.

Crowds squeezed between police barricades to form a line outside City Hall on Tuesday before the meeting. Some people wore stickers with the South Vietnamese flag and the name “Little Saigon,” and some made placards to show their support of the name.

“Little Saigon identifies our community,” said San Jose resident Hieu Tran. “We will not forget. It has to be that name, Little Saigon. We have Little Saigons elsewhere, and we need our own in San Jose.”

Only a few people in the crowd carried signs supporting the mayor.

“Little Saigon is a symbol - it’s like our identity,” said Barry Do, leader of San Jose Voters for Democracy. “We are the political refugees. We will never forget why we are here.”

But to the new generation of Vietnamese Americans, the name is something only their parents and grandparents could fret over. There were few younger people in the crowds Tuesday night. Most appeared to be older, first-generation Vietnamese refugees.

Reed is among those surprised by the fervor of the outcry.

“I never expected this much difficulty with what seemed to me to be a simple thing,” he said.

Nguyen, the first Vietnamese American elected to the San Jose City Council, said she did not want to take sides between the Little Saigon and the Saigon Business District proponents. Some 110,000 Vietnamese Americans live in Santa Clara County, the largest community outside Orange County.

“Little Saigon gives them something to remember their heritage,” said San Jose resident Sammy Castillo, who showed up to the meeting to support the Little Saigon name. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.

PARIS: Social networks may be nothing new to habituйs of the Internet, after several years of intense competition among Facebook, MySpace and Friendster generated tens of millions of members.

But now the market is teeming with companies that want to bring the same phenomenon to the mobile phone. There are so many “mobile social networking” upstarts, in fact, that when New Media Age magazine surveyed the field to identify just the “ones to watch,” it ended up naming 10 companies with wide potential.

Some of those in the thick of battle are resigned to having a lot of company. “If there werent competitors, there wouldnt be a market,” said Dan Harple, founder and chief executive of Gypsii, an Amsterdam-based mobile social network that is one of the contenders. “Maybe there are 30 or more now - in three years, there will be five that matter.”

The prize, as these startups see it, is the 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world, a number that far surpasses the number of Internet surfers. And their advantage over the computer-based communities, they believe, is the cellphones innate ability to know where it is, thanks to global positioning satellite and related technologies.

Informa Telecoms said in a report last month that about 50 million people are already using the cellphone for social networking, from chat services to multimedia sharing, or about 2.3 percent of the global mobile user population. The market research company forecast that penetration rate would mushroom to at least 12.5 percent in the next five years.

Most of the mobile social networks seek to capitalize on location information. Gypsii, for instance, will show you where your friends and other members are in real time on its SpaceMe service. If you do a Gypsii search, it will show you a map of your nearby environs dotted with photos, videos and information from other members.

Bliin, another network that started in Amsterdam, lets its users update and post their whereabouts every 15 seconds, a trail that can then be followed as dots on a map.

But for other networks, geography and “presence” information is not as critical. MyGamma, a social network run by the Singapore-based company BuzzCity, draws most of its 2.5 million users from developing countries in Asia and Africa, according to Lai Kok Fung, chief executive.

“These are countries with low Internet penetration - they are not PC-centric,” Lai said. “For our members, the mobile phone is the only way to get on the Internet.”

For that reason, Lai is not overly concerned with the big Internet names - like MySpace and Facebook - and their plans to invade the cellphone universe as well. AOL, Yahoo and Nokia have their own initiatives to create discrete communities out of mobile phone users.

“We dont think any of them will make a big splash in the mobile space,” Lai said. “They view mobile as an extension of the online site, while we know our members use mobile much differently.”

According to a BuzzCity study, for instance, members usually access the mobile social network from home or from work, not in transit, and they use their cellphone first, even if they can get to the network from a personal computer. For the majority of users (62 percent), each myGamma session lasts between 30 minutes and an hour.

Gypsii this week announced a version of its software for the Apple iPhone, and last month concluded a contract with China Unicom to launch Gypsii during the Beijing Olympics.

Harple, an American and a technology entrepreneur, does not consider it unusual that so many of the mobile social networks originate outside of the United States, which has dominated the Internet business.

“I moved to Europe because I thought the U.S. venture capital community - which I was a part of - was myopic,” he said. “I would explain it to U.S. venture firms, and theyd say, Huh? Id talk about the potential in China, and theyd say, Why would you do China, why dont you do Verizon?

“Thats when I decided they just didnt get it,” he said. “They cant see the global significance of what is happening.”

(03-05) 06:23 PST New York (AP) —

Saks Inc., the operator of Saks Fifth Avenue, reported Wednesday that its fourth-quarter profit almost doubled, helped by solid sales, cost controls and one-time gains.

The New York-based department store chain said that earnings rose to $39.5 million, or 26 cents per share, during the three-month period ended Feb. 2. That compared with $21.5 million, or 14 cents per share, in the prior-year period.

The results reflected a net gain of $10.4 million, or 7 cents per share, after taxes in the latest quarter. Items included a gain of $8.1 million associated with proceeds from an insurance settlement related to the New Orleans stores, which was destroyed in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

Sales rose almost 5 percent to $999.7 million in the fourth quarter from $955 million in the year-ago period. Wall Street analysts expected revenue of $993.61 million, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.

Saks shares rose 21 cents to $15.70 in premarket trading.

The company also said that same-store sales or sales at stores opened at least a year rose 3.4 percent in February. Same-store sales are considered a key indicator of a retailer’s health.

“I remain very positive about the long-term prospects for the luxury sector and specifically for our Saks Fifth Avenue business, ” said Chief Executive Stephen Sadove, in a statement.

But he noted, “notwithstanding our improved performance and the longer-term outlook for the luxury channel, we expect to continue to face an increasingly challenging macroeconomic and promotional environment in 2008 and are taking a more conservative approach to planning the business for this year.”

Sadove said he expects same-store sales growth of mid-single digits for the full year and he said that inventories will be more in line with the company’s sales growth expectations by the beginning of the third fiscal quarter. Sadove predicted that operating profit margin will remain “relatively flat” in 2008.

For the year, Saks earned $47.5 million, or 31 cents per share, compared with $53.7 million, or 40 cents per share, a year earlier. Sales rose to $3.28 billion, up almost 12 percent from $2.94 billion in the previous year.