Ed Oswald

Google is finding itself increasingly having to explain its planned acquisition of DoubleClick, and is now being asked to testify in September as part of a broader Congressional inquiry into advertising industry consolidation.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hold hearings in September, and the House Commerce Subcommittee on consumer protection will question the two companies in the fall, focusing more on privacy concerns.

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Sprint will work with fellow WiMax provider Clearwire on building its national "4G" network, the two companies said on Thursday.

The deal includes a roaming agreement between the two companies, and will lessen the strain on Sprint to quickly cover a large portion of the country. Sprint will focus on major markets, while Clearwire will build out in the smaller ones.

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Wal-Mart began selling $298 PCs from Everex on Wednesday that use Windows Vista, are free of so-called "bloatware" and feature open source software.

The system features a 1.5GHz Via C7-D processor, which contains energy-saving features. Instead of using Microsoft's Office suite, the system ships with OpenOffice.org version 2.2.

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Microsoft said Tuesday that it is offering a subscription-based payment option for Office 2007 in South Africa, continuing a test it had been running with the previous version of the productivity suite.

The option is aimed at making the software more affordable to generally less affluent consumers in emerging markets. It had been offering a similar program for Office 2003 in Mexico and Romania as well as South Africa, and has the FlexGo program for Windows.

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Data from several researchers indicate that Blu-ray may be beginning to falter as HD DVD builds momentum thanks to price cuts on its standalone players.

NPD Group and Nielsen/NetRatings reports along with point of sale data indicate that overall HD DVD hardware sales were up 37 percent from the first to second quarter, which is a 183 percent increase in standalone HD DVD players. More than 180,000 players have now been sold.

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Intel expanded its line of "Extreme" processors to include chips for notebooks, as well as a new flagship desktop processor on Monday.

In addition, the company also disclosed its plans to debut battery-friendly quad-core processors for laptops by next year. The announcements come as Intel celebrates its one-year anniversary of introducing the Core microarchitecture.

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Without much warning, customers of VoIP provider SunRocket found themselves without phone service Monday as the company shut its doors.

Calls to the Vienna, Va. based company's customer support line were greeted by the message, "We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye."

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The RIAA has been ordered to pay over $68,000 in attorney fees for an Oklahoma woman who won a piracy case against the music industry organization in July of last year.

Judge Lee West had called RIAA disingenuous in its motives to attempt to get out of paying the fees earlier this year after the case was dismissed and ruled in the woman's favor. In total, the RIAA will be responsible for $68,685.23 in fees.

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Sunday's deadline for netcasters to begin paying royalties has come and gone without much fanfare, with many still broadcasting on Monday.

In early May, July 15 was set as the date when Internet radio stations were to pay for 2006 royalties and also agree to a new royalty structure that is much like that of satellite radio. The change was universally opposed by the industry that said it would effectively put the format out of business.

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Residents and visitors to London will now be able to access the Internet from parts of the city for free thanks to a new Wi-Fi network now live along a 13.6-mile stretch of the River Thames.

MeshHopper began offering a pay version of the network last year, and the free version is available through a partnership with free-hotspot.com. Service is available from Millbank southeastward through the city to Greenwich.

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With YouTube dominating social video, Sony has decided to exit the sector and refocus its efforts on helping online video creators develop their content.

Grouper, which Sony purchased for $65 million last year, will be renamed Crackle, and will become a streaming entertainment network with connections to traditional methods of media distribution. Essentially, it would move from a distribution model to one that focuses on the creation of content.

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IBM said Thursday that it had launched an open beta for AIX 6, its in-house UNIX-based operating system. The latest version will be able to take advantage of the Power6 processor, as well as several other enhancements.

The beta program will be open to all users, with the OS packaged into CD-ROM and DVD images for burning by beta participants. More information on the program could be found on the AIX Web site.

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Over the next month, NTT DoCoMo plans to test a Super 3G, or LTE (long-term evolution) cellular system capable of sending data at 300Mbps.

The test will take place indoors and initially send data using one antenna for the receiver and one antenna for the transmitter. Eventually the researchers will utilize up to four MIMO antennas for data transmission.

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Apple released an update to its QuickTime media player on Friday, patching eight security flaws in the application including code execution and information disclosure risks. Both Mac OS X and Windows are affected.

The first four flaws involve specially crafted H.264, movie, .m4v, or SMIL files that could lead to an unexpected application termination and/or arbitary code execution. The first two involve a memory corruption issue, while the latter two are caused by integer overflow vulnerabilities.

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Sony Computer Entertainment Europe president David Reeves may have let something slip that American consumers weren't supposed to know: there really is no "price cut" for the PS3.

Instead, production on 60GB models in North America has apparently been halted in favor of the new 80GB version. When supplies run out, consumers would be left only with the new PS3 model, which retails for $599 USD, same as the old price of the 60GB model.

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