Ed Oswald

Oracles chief financial officer and co-president Greg Maffei will leave the company to pursue a "terrific professional opportunity," the company confirmed late Thursday. Maffei's abrupt resignation confirms weeks of speculation that he was leaving Oracle after only a four-month tenure.

Maffei was hired by Oracle in late June, and his selection was announced with much fanfare. He had previously worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s as chief financial officer.

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Amazon said on Thursday that it was developing a new program to allow customers to purchase the rights to view either portions of or an entire book online.

The effort could be viewed as a response to Google's announcement that it had significantly expanded its online book searching service, while taking an approach that is more acceptable to authors and publishers.

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Microsoft has begun advocating for privacy legislation at the federal level. In a speech to the Congressional Internet Caucus, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith argued that such legislation was needed to protect consumers and provide businesses with clear guidelines on how to protect sensitive data.

Three factors have contributed to Microsoft's decision to get behind federal legislation. A mish-mash of laws at the state, federal and international levels creates confusion, Smith explained. While the laws mean well, they can overlap or be inconsistent from state to state, and, in some cases, not be strong enough.

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Internet service provider NetZero entered the highly competitive VoIP market Thursday, introducing a new service called NetZero Voice that it says opens the technology to dial-up users. According to research, an estimated 45 million dial-up users still exist in the United States.

The service will allow for free computer-to-computer calls between NetZero Voice users, similar to the way Skype operates. The company will also offer a calling plan that includes free domestic long distance for a $3.95 or $14.95 USD monthly fee - depending on the amount of minutes desired.

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Google announced Thursday the first expansion of its Google Print library service, but the books included will mostly be in the public domain due to several outstanding lawsuits from publishers and authors over copyright infringement.

10,000 works will initially be available for viewing. Some examples include Henry James' "Daisy Miller," government Rhode Island volunteers in the Civil War.

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Microsoft on Thursday announced that it had acquired Switzerland-based media-streams.com AG, a VoIP applications provider. The company plans to integrate the media-streams technology into its business services, such as Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.

While Live Communications Server already has PC-to-PC VoIP capability, the media-streams acquisition would add phone-to-phone service, as well as PC-to-phone and vice versa, Microsoft says.

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AOL entered the online music business on Thursday, announcing it had acquired digital music company MusicNow. The service will replace AOL's pre-existing MusicNet@AOL offering, and allow the company to offer subscription as well as a-la-carte downloads. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AOL has launched a preview version of the service at aolmusicnow.com. MusicNet customers will be gradually upgraded to the service, which had previously been owned by electronics retail chain Circuit City.

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Samsung's digital media chief Choi Gee-sung said that media reports of Samsung opening an online music store similar to iTunes earlier in the week were incorrect, and there had been a misunderstanding.

"We are not at all interested in a music service," Choi said to reporters outside of an analyst meeting. Instead, he said the company plans to offer technical assistance to pre-existing music stores in order to enhance the experience for users, and at the same time increase its own hardware sales.

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The Motion Picture Association of America sued a Wisconsin grandfather on Tuesday for allegedly downloading several movies to his home computer. However, there's one small problem with the case: the man doesn't like to watch movies, nor does he have any intention of downloading them.

Fred Lawrence, 67, of Racine says that his 12-year-old grandson apparently downloaded four movies from the P2P file service iMesh in December 2004. The family actually owns three of the four movies, and Lawrence says his grandson had no intention of breaking, nor knowledge of copyright laws.

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Although one prior N series phone has still not reached store shelves, Nokia pushed ahead on Wednesday, announcing three new phones it will market as convergence devices. The N series phones focus on multimedia features, and the new upgraded handsets are no exception.

The predecessor of one of the new devices, the Nokia N91, remains unreleased. The 4GB N91 music phone was pushed to a 2006 release following issues regarding content and problems with Microsoft's DRM. The Nokia N70 and N90, however, are now available in Europe.

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In an effort to put its service in front of more customers in an increasingly competitive and consolidated market, Sprint is turning to the nation's cable operators. The company announced Wednesday that it had reached agreements with four of the largest cable providers to form a joint venture to converge television and wireless technologies.

Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Advance/Newhouse Communications are the four cable companies involved in the deal.

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Browser market share statistics from Web analytics firm OneStat.com indicate that usage of Mozilla Firefox has surpassed the 10 percent milestone, reaching 11.51 percent globally in its most recent survey released Wednesday.

However, the data somewhat conflicts with previous information that indicated usage numbers of the alternative browser might have been inflated due to Netscape reporting itself as Firefox. That survey, from NetApplications.com, placed Firefox's market share at around 8 percent.

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Sun on Tuesday added two new offerings to its Grid Utility service in an aim to attract more customers to company's fledgling computing-on-demand initiative. The service will now allow customers to convert proprietary productivity suite files -- like those from Microsoft Office -- to the OpenDocument format, and convert text files to audio.

The applications are part of Sun Grid, a $1 per CPU-hour utility from the company that it says puts affordable supercomputing power in front of more users.

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In a first for any of the major television networks, NBC announced that starting November 7 an online version of the day's nightly national newscast will be available online. At 10pm ET, a 21-minute version of NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams will be offered to visitors of MSNBC.com.

The program would be the same that aired earlier in the night, but without the commercial breaks. MSNBC.com would insert one commercial break during the show. NBC also plans to archive past newscasts for later viewing, however it was not specified as to how long previous shows would be kept on the site.

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Microsoft on Tuesday took the lid off its highly anticipated line of online services, called Windows Live and Office Live. The company has been quick to say that the new products are not meant to replace traditional desktop software, but instead are intended to enhance the Windows experience.

Using a phrase from rival Apple, the company says the goal of the Live initiative is to bring together all Microsoft technologies in a way that "just works," according to company CTO Ray Ozzie.

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