Ed Oswald

Ford on Tuesday demonstrated a truck that can double as an office at the Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show, an annual event for automotive specialty parts manufacturers in Las Vegas.

The company teamed up with Microsoft as well as Stargate Mobile to create a truck that would be useful for contractors who spend a good deal of their workday out in the field. The truck is a customized F-250 Super Duty and includes a GPS unit, wireless broadband connectivity, a printer and digital camera-enabled tablet computer.

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IBM and Sun plan to hold a meeting Friday to help advance the Open Document Format (ODF), and ensure its implementation in products from many software vendors.

According to the invitation, the two companies are hoping that the meeting will clarify some critical issues that some parties interested in implementing the standard have raised. Also, the note suggests that IBM and Sun may be looking into the viability of an "Open Document Foundation."

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Internet users are warned repeatedly about phishing, yet some still are careless as to whom they hand out their personal information. But the authorities are beginning to crack down on the growing problem. On Tuesday, 29 year-old David Levi of Lytham, England was sentenced to four years in jail for stealing money and committing identity theft through an eBay phishing scam.

Levi, along with six others, stole nearly $360,000 from over 160 people through a scam that asked them to update their bank information with eBay. The auction site never sends out such e-mails, and has repeatedly warned its customers about phishing scams that appear to be legitimate eBay communications.

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Nokia said on Tuesday that it had completed both voice and data calls using the Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) standard at a lab in the United States. UMA is a technology that will allow a cellular call to be handed over to a Wi-Fi network. Carriers see UMA as a way to more cheaply extend their wireless networks.

"UMA is poised to open up a number of new opportunities and choices for operators and their end-users," said Mark Louison, senior vice president at Nokia America. "We're one step closer to simplifying the end-user mobile experience to access voice, personal information, and multimedia services on one device irrespective of their location, whether at work, at home, or on the go."

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Nikon on Tuesday announced a new digital SLR camera known as the D200, which is aimed at the professional photographer and capable of a resolution of up to 10.2 megapixels.

The camera will come packed with features useful to pros, such as quick response time, 11-area autofocus, better battery life, and optional Wi-Fi connectivity through a separate add-on to be made available early next year.

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Wired Magazine said Tuesday that it plans to open a retail location in the Soho District of Manhattan, which would stay open from November 18 through December 24. The purpose of the store would be to give shoppers a chance to see the latest technology and gadgets up close. 65 products will be featured, including an auction for a trip into space, worth $102,000.

Customers will make purchases from kiosks around the store, and items would be shipped directly to their homes. In a further twist to the average shopping experience, those who make purchases during the weekends will also receive free shuttle service to their next destination in Wired Volkswagens. "Just as the magazine ushered in a new vision and voice for what's next, the Wired Store expands the boundaries of branded retail outlets," said Wired publisher Drew Schutte.

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Apple released the third update to Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on Monday afternoon. The upgrade includes over 60 significant fixes to various portions of the operating system including Finder, Spotlight, Safari, Mail and iChat, as well as updates to the networking and syncing features.

Among the notable fixes are speed improvements to finder Spotlight searches, a fix to allow sending of .Mac mail if port 25 is blocked, improved window scrolling, fixes for compatibility issues with Word and Excel 2004, better mounting of MS-DOS formatted volumes, and more detailed error messages for .Mac problems.

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The FCC on Monday approved two mergers that will shake up the telecom industry: Verizon's $8.45 billion joining with MCI and SBC's $16 billion acquisition of AT&T. The U.S. government agency said that consumers would benefit from both mergers.

Among the positives are the increased performance and reliability of what the government regulator called "complementary networks." The FCC also noted that both newly merged companies would remain U.S.-owned as another point in favor of the deals.

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While it had previously been announced that Office 12 would support a "Save to PDF" function, not much had been said for the company's answer to Adobe, known as XPS. But on Friday, Office program manager Jeff Bell disclosed that documents created in version 12 can be exported into either PDF or XPS.

XPS, formerly known as Metro, is an XML-based "electronic paper" format that will allow documents to be displayed as they were saved on any platform. Many of the features of XPS mirror those in PDF, and Microsoft is working with printer manufacturers to include native support for the format - much like Adobe PostScript.

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SBC has made it clear that no one will receive free access to its broadband lines. In an interview with Business Week, CEO Edward Whitacre said that some companies like Google, MSN and Vonage have pushed for free usage of the pipes owned by telecom and cable companies like SBC, which will soon become AT&T.

"I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," Whitacre said in the interview, adding that anyone who thinks the Internet should be free in that sense is "nuts." The opinionated CEO went on to say that he was not pleased with SBC's growth, calling it "terrible."

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Sprint launched its new high-speed entertainment offering on Monday, called Power Vision. The service will introduce a wireless music store, live and recorded television and multimedia downloads, the capability to transfer high-resolution pictures and video, and customized information channels.

The service is based on Sprint's new CDMA EV-DO network, which it had already launched in some airports and business districts across the country. According Sprint, the network averages speeds of 400-700kbps with peak rates to 2.0Mbps, close to home broadband speeds.

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Over one million videos have been downloaded through the iTunes Music Store since October 12, Apple said on Monday. Currently, only about 2,000 videos exist on the service, including music videos, short films from Pixar, and episodes of five television shows including Lost and Desperate Housewives.

As of Monday morning, the top five videos on the service were Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (appropriate considering Monday is Halloween in the United States), the first and most recent episodes of the television show Lost, Pixar's "For the Birds," and Fatboy Slim's video for "Weapon of Choice" with a dancing Christopher Walken.

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A Web security firm that specializes in IM and P2P security said on Friday that a new worm spreading through the AOL Instant Messenger network might cause more problems than the average IM worm.

According to FaceTime Communications, the W32/Sdbot-ADD worm includes an executable called a rootkit that would allow an attacker to monitor a computer, as well as upload and download files from it.

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Samsung will reportedly open a music store similar to Apple's iTunes in the coming months, according to an Associated Press. Choi Gee-sung, the company's digital media chief had said previously that Samsung's standing in the industry was hurt by the lack of a complementary music store like the iPod-iTunes marriage.

No announcement has been made as to an official launch date, however Samsung would call on its partners worldwide to help promote the service. Samsung said it expects to sell about 3.7 million players this year, but thinks it can do better. Despite potentially becoming a rival to Apple, Samsung's memory division has close ties to the Cupertino company and supplies the flash chips used in the iPod Nano.

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Not only software is going beta these days it seems -- but this beta is one you don't want to test. The Atlantic Ocean's 23rd named tropical system, Beta, headed toward the Nicaraguan coast Friday afternoon, and was expected to make landfall over the weekend as a Category 2 hurricane.

Portions of Nicaragua could receive up to 20 inches of rain, possibly causing life-threatening floods and mudslides, the hurricane center said. Beta is the latest storm in a season that broke a 72-year-old record for most recorded tropical storms and hurricanes. In 1933, 21 storms formed. Records have been kept continuously since 1851.

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