Ed Oswald

Seemingly undeterred by its recent lawsuit fight with patent holding company NTP, Research In Motion said Friday it would acquire Ascendent Systems, a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of software to connect cell phones and corporate phone systems.

The purchase would enable RIM to connect its BlackBerry devices in a similar fashion. Ascendent would become a wholly owned subsidiary of RIM. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Skype announced a new offering on Thursday in hopes of increasing the popular VoIP client's use among small business.

Called Skype for Business, the service would offer a dedicated Web site to manage communications for up to ten employees; the introduction of new Skype hardware from partner Plantronics and others; and new features in Skype Groups to simplify management and prepaid services, now called the Skype for Business Control Panel.

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Sources near Amazon say that the company may be close to offering downloadable movies, with discussions ongoing between the online retailer and movie studios Universal, Paramount and Warner Bros. The service could open its doors by this summer.

Amazon has already toyed with the idea of online DVD rental, and is looking into a digital music service of its own. With the success that Apple has seen by adding video content to its iTunes Music Store, some companies are looking into ways to monetize online video content.

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IBM on Thursday announced that it had scored a breakthrough in file system technology that increases the speed of data access by seven times. Researchers were able to attain a 102-gigabyte per second transfer rate on the ASC Purple supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in a recent test.

The file system was an astonishing 1.6 petabytes in size, the largest ever in the world, and performance was maintained even as 1,000 clients pushed workloads into the file. The project used 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes and 416 storage controllers, IBM said in a statement.

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Microsoft plans two fixes as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday updates to be released next week, the company said Thursday. An update marked for Office has been rated as "critical," and another for the Windows operating system is marked "important."

As is normal with advance security bulletins, Microsoft did not disclose what vulnerabilities the patches would address. This is done to prevent hackers from taking advantage of flaws before customers have a chance to download the updates.

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Microsoft finally unveiled its much-hyped Origami Project, now called Ultra-Mobile PCs, early Thursday at CeBIT in Hanover, Germany. While many pundits saw promise in the new platform, a palpable sense of disappointment has been a common theme among many consumers.

Was the device overhyped, and did Microsoft under-deliver? What do you think?

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Google's anti-phishing technology will make it to the trunk Mozilla code for the popular Firefox browser, and the company has confirmed some type of anti-phishing technology would be included with Firefox 2.0, according to press reports Thursday.

The second version of the alternative browser is scheduled for the third quarter of this year, close to the expected release of Internet Explorer 7. Microsoft has also added its own anti-phishing technology to IE 7, promoting it as one of the most significant additions to the market leading browser.

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A Senate panel has opened the doors to possible government action over violent video games by approving a study on the matter Wednesday.

Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) persuaded the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to recommend such an action by approving the Children and Media Research Advancement Act. While the bill itself does not necessarily restrict violent video games, it would look into doing so as part of a larger study.

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Novell unveiled at the CeBIT Electronics Show in Germany Thursday its next-generation operating system, called SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The release is the successor to Novell Desktop Linux, and the company has hopes it will lead to more widespread adoption of the platform.

Advanced power management, integrated desktop search, and GUI and application improvements are all central to the new release. Novell says that these enhancements also make the Linux platform a much more viable alternative to Microsoft at a tenth of the price.

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Google will pay $90 million in order to settle a nationwide class action lawsuit over accusations that it was overcharging advertising customers by billing them for false clicks. The class action suit comes from an Arkansas state court case filed last year.

While the company is attempting to settle all "click fraud" claims going back to 2002, similar claims are still ongoing on other courts across the country.

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TiVo announced Wednesday that it would begin offering TiVo boxes as part of its subscription price in return for a long-term commitment from the customer. Depending on the term of the contract, the monthly fee would range from $16.95 to $19.95 USD per month.

With each plan, an 80-hour TiVo box would be shipped to the subscriber at no cost. The company had previously offered its base 40-hour model in tests of the pricing plans, which received an overwhelmingly positive response. Its service-only plan would still remain, which currently retails for $12.95 USD per month.

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Thanks to a newly negotiated settlement, XM Satellite Radio will no longer be able to claim its music channels are completely commercial free. Four of its channels, programmed by media giant Clear Channel Communications, will now include advertising as part of the deal.

Commercials are not completely foreign to XM -- it does run ads during breaks on its talk radio stations, as does Sirius. However, the addition of commercials to music stations is an anathema to a policy instituted by the company two years ago.

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The French government has become more aggressive in moving to block attempts by its legislature to legalize peer-to-peer downloads, with the country's Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy having harsh words for file sharers after a meeting with popular French artists.

The original bill aimed to punish those who break laws by copying CDs and DVDs and then uploading the content to the Internet. However, legislative debate quickly turned contentious when several members of the body added amendments that would essentially make P2P networks legal, as long as a small fee is paid as a tax.

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Intel said Tuesday that its planned release of Wi-Max compatible cards had been moved up to this year. The technology is widely expected to replace Wi-Fi in many situations such as cities when it sees wide-scale release later this year and in 2007.

Wi-Max has a much longer range than Wi-Fi, varying from a few miles in urbanized areas to as much as 10 miles in open country. The technology could be used to build out wireless networks in a much easier fashion than the current mesh technologies being used by EarthLink in its municipal Wi-Fi deployments.

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Nokia on Wednesday announced the Wireless Audio Gateway, a new Bluetooth enabled add-on for its multimedia phones. The device would allow the user to stream music between their compatible phones, stereos, PCs and wireless headsets.

The gateway can connect via RCA cables or through Bluetooth. It's compatible with any other device that supports the Bluetooth Advanced Audio Distribution (A2DP) profile, which is currently available on the Nokia 8800 series phones.

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