Ed Oswald

Yahoo solidified its stake in the mobile services space across both Asia and Latin America on Tuesday, with the company announcing deals and new services for consumers in both regions.

In Asia, the company struck deals with nine carriers to provide Yahoo-branded services to customers, as well as debuting a version of its Yahoo Go offering in Traditional Chinese to users in Taiwan.

Continue reading →

Microsoft debuted its redesigned Zunes on Tuesday, hoping to make inroads into a market that it has so far little affected.

Overall, Zune players account for around three percent of the entire portable music device market. Up until now, the company only sold hard drive-based devices, which have long since fallen out of favor with consumers.

Continue reading →

The Open Handset Alliance released its software development kit on Monday, giving developers an early look at the user interface behind the so-called "GPhone."

"Android" is built on the Linux 2.6 kernel, and is built to take advantage of the mobile internet. The OHA also said it wanted to make development for it easy by providing components that are extendable, replaceable, and reusable.

Continue reading →

Northeastern University sued Google last week, claiming the search giant misappropriated patented technology regarding database architecture.

The school's patent covers technology that allows a database query to be split up and handled by multiple computers. This results in queries being handled much faster than they would otherwise by a single machine.

Continue reading →

Microsoft said Monday that it had entered into an agreement that will lead to the acquisition of mobile music provider Musiwave.

The company says that the buy builds upon its commitment to deliver a vision of 'Connected Entertainment' to consumers. It adds a mobile component to music services that are already offered through its Zune music device, Windows Mobile, and on the desktop.

Continue reading →

Microsoft isn't waiting for Vista Service Pack 1 to push some important operating system updates to users.

Several updates will make their way to users this week through Windows Update, Windows Vista team member Nick White wrote to the official Vista blog on Monday. If users decide to pass on the updates, they will be included in SP1.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has been overruled as the OS supplier for Intel's Classmate PCs in Nigeria, InfoWorld reported Friday.

As earlier reported by BetaNews, Microsoft had apparently wrestled away the contract to supply the operating system for shipments of the Classmate PC to the central African nation. However, the government is having none of it.

Continue reading →

Apple's iPhone went on sale in Europe on Friday, with at least 10,000 of the devices sold already in Germany. Sales are said to be brisk in the UK as well.

Sales of the phone in Germany, where T-Mobile is the partner, began at midnight local time (6pm ET Thursday) at some locations. UK would-be buyers could not get their hands on the iPhone until just after 6pm local time (1pm ET).

Continue reading →

Apple has been repeatedly rumored to be close to offering movie rentals from the iTunes Music Store, and one blogger claims to be holding the answer as to when this may happen.

Evan DiBiase, a student at Carnegie Mellon University, says that while doing a dump of the strings from the old version of iTunes to compare them with the new ones, he discovered several new strings.

Continue reading →

comScore's report that only 40 percent of Radiohead fans paid anything for the band's album download is now being challenged by the band itself.

In a statement provided to MTV and without giving exact figures, the band described comScore's findings as "wholly inaccurate." Since the sale was done on a private site, there would have been no way for anyone to know truly how the album sold.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has begun advising customers on planned changes to IE now that it has licensed technology from Eolas, however it may have accidentally let slip a release window for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 to boot.

UPDATED The Redmond company said Thursday that it will release an update in April 2008 as part of its regular cumulative update for Internet Explorer that month. Microsoft will make the functionality available via a preview release in December.

Continue reading →

Despite its continuing legal troubles, Vonage was still able to add new customers and is on the verge of settling a suit brought against it by AT&T.

The two sides have agreed to terms in principle that have Vonage pay AT&T $39 million over five years to settle all claims. Both sides will dismiss any legal actions outstanding.

Continue reading →

The Federal Trade Commission showed that it was serious about prosecuting those who did not follow the Do Not Call list, announcing six settlements totaling some $7.7 million in fines.

Since the law was enacted in 2003, the FTC has filed some 34 cases against violators, and nearly 134 million numbers have been placed on the list. Altogether some $16 million in penalties have been collected, the largest of which was a $5.3 million fine levied on DirecTV in 2005.

Continue reading →

A posting on the popular social news networking website Digg Wednesday morning caused Mozilla to pull the release candidate of its first beta of Firefox 3 from its servers.

On Digg, the release was reported as the first official release of Firefox 3 Beta 1, which it was not. This caused a problem for Mozilla since the release had not been properly checked by quality assurance nor had it followed the steps necessary for the beta release.

Continue reading →

Some five years after the concept of a so-called "$100 laptop" was proposed, the first devices began rolling off a production line in China this week.

The first official order for the device came from Uruguay, which wanted 100,000 laptops. It's likely that many of the first PCs produced will be shipped to the central South American country.

Continue reading →