Ed Oswald

Microsoft has confirmed that a high-ranking manager in the MSN division has left the company in order to start his own business. Hadi Partovi, who was behind the MSN.com revisions and the Start.com portal, has left the company before to pursue personal projects, the Seattle Times first reported.

After the cooling off of the browser wars in the late 90s, Partovi left Microsoft in 1999 to start Tellme Networks, but then returned in 2002 to help Microsoft launch several new initiatives including MSN Music.

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Aiming to increase its base of business users, VoIP provider Skype on Tuesday launched Skype Groups, a new option where one person will be able to purchase premium services for multiple accounts. The service will be aimed at business customers, which Skype says makes up 30 percent of its users.

A group administrator would be able to distribute credits among its members, and there is no limit to the number of people in a particular group. The company found through its studies that 63 percent of customers use the service to conduct business abroad, and 46 percent use it to conduct conference calls. "No longer do managers have to juggle multiple communications plans among multiple providers," Skype CEO Niklas Zennstrom said in prepared remarks.

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Eight storage device makers announced on Tuesday plans to form a group known as Aperi that will look to develop a platform for managing storage devices. The group includes IBM, Sun, Cisco, Fujitsu, McData, Computer Associates International, Brocade Communication Systems, Network Appliance, and Engenio Information Technologies.

Aperi will attempt to settle on an open source standard for storage, and will use preexisting work done in the arena, such as that from the Storage Networking Industry Association's Storage Management Initiative Specification. IBM will also make a donation of technology to the group; other members may do so at a later time, but no announcement had been made as of yet.

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Internet Explorer 7 will come with several security enhancements to HTTPS connections, a Microsoft program manager said on the IE Blog over the weekend. Chief among the changes is the disabling of the SSLv2 protocol by default in favor of the stronger-encryption available through TSLv1.

"Generally, IE users will not notice any difference in the user-experience due to this change; it's a silent improvement in security," program manager Eric Lawrence wrote. He said that few sites still require SSLv2, and upgrading to SSLv3 or TSLv1 is generally a simple migration on most sites.

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Becoming the first official legal peer-to-peer service, iMesh on Tuesday announced it was taking the sixth version of its software into public beta. The company says it is the only globally active P2P network that maintains the experience of file sharing while assuring the copyright holders are fairly compensated.

The original iMesh was founded in 1999 and enjoyed several years of success before it was sued in September 2003 by the RIAA. Since then, the company has been working on a way to stay viable as a P2P service, yet assure the record labels that it was serious about offering compensation for its members' file-sharing activities.

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After months of delays, Apple on Tuesday launched its 21st music store in Australia, containing over one million songs and a thousand music videos. The launch had been rumored for nearly a year, but disagreements with a major record label apparently held up the launch of the service.

Songs will be priced at A$1.69 ($1.27 USD) each, A$3.39 ($2.55 USD) per video, and most albums at A$16.99 ($12.76 USD). Apple has also gained exclusive rights to offer the songs of several popular Australian artists, including Missy Higgins, Bernard Fanning, Paul Mac, Evermore, Gyroscope and The Dissociatives.

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Settling a nearly two year-old dispute over the redirection of unused domains, VeriSign on Monday announced it had reached an agreement with ICANN regarding the group's attempt to stop the company from sending Web surfers to a VeriSign owned search service back in 2003.

The service, called "Site Finder," angered network administrators due to its potential to disrupt spam filters that discard messages from invalid hosts. Privacy issues were also raised, as VeriSign logged all of the error traffic that came its way.

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If you own an iPod, it's likely you are more apt to spread consumer-generated media as well as be more technologically savvy than your non-iPod brethren, a survey released on Monday said. Intelliseek, a Internet research firm, said it expects the trend to continue with the recent release of the video iPod.

iPod users are more likely to own digital video recorders, personal digital assistants, digital cameras, laptop computers and cell phones than non-iPod owners. 59 percent of them use text messaging and 45 percent take camera phone pictures, versus 24 and 15 percent respectively who do not own a MP3 player.

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Microsoft's Xbox Live service went offline Monday, promising: "we'll be back soon with a whole new look and amazing new features." During a 24-hour period, the service will be upgraded with features aimed at Xbox 360 users, which will become available after the launch of the console on November 22.

New features to be added include an Xbox Live Marketplace, as well as a ranking system where gamers will be able to see their score in games compared with other Xbox Live users. Gamer information will also be integrated into other MSN properties, such as the company's Spaces blogging tool.

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Cingular is struggling to sell the much-hyped iTunes phone as data indicates return rates are as much as six times higher than launches for other new phones. However, Motorola is determined to fix the marketing issues and make the phone a success, CEO Ed Zander said in an interview with Bloomberg News Service.

News of high return rates is the latest setback for Motorola's ROKR, which received a cool reception at its launch and has been criticized for its non-Apple feel.

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Cingular on Monday introduced two mobile applications that users will be able to download to their phones in order to access their e-mail and instant messaging accounts. The effort is designed to provide standard phones with features normally found on high-end handsets. Both applications will be a free download.

Mobile e-mail will work on the following devices: Motorola's V180, V220, V400, V551 and RAZR V3. Cingular expects to add more phones soon. Mobile IM will work on Nokia (6230, 6620), Motorola (V180, V220, V400, V551, RAZR V3) and Sony Ericsson (Z500 and S710a) handsets. The IM client will have the capability of connecting to the AOL, Yahoo and MSN Messenger networks. Service charges are based on usage.

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If you heard a loud thud over the weekend, it may have been Tiger Telematic's Gizmondo finally launching in the United States. The device, whose sales in the UK -- where it has been available since March -- have been somewhat disappointing, has received a cool response from US reviewers as well.

The handheld Gizmondo retails for $229 USD, and includes a 400MHz processor, a VGA camera, GPS, GPRS, and a 2.2-inch color LCD screen. It has a half-circle shape and comes in a black and silver casing. The operating system is a customized version of Windows CE, the company said.

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Bertelsmann AG, the company that owned the original Napster, is preparing to launch a legal peer-to-peer download service in Germany for music and movies. Called GNAB, the service will debut first in the company's home country and then expand to others throughout 2006.

A company spokesman told the Associated Press Friday that most of the service is complete, and could offer access to 1 million songs at launch. Bertelsmann says the premise behind the P2P-like structure of the service is to prevent overloading of the servers.

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Wikimedia announced on Thursday that it had reached a deal with Answers.com to offer users answers to queries from content included in the Wikipedia. Called "1-Click Answers, Wikpedia Edition," the site is expected to go live in early 2006, after a 60-day trial period in beta. The service will be promoted on the "tools" section of the Wikipedia website.

"We are pleased to partner with Answers.com, encouraging software that improves access to Wikipedia," said Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder and Wikimedia Foundation President. "Bob Rosenschein and his team have created an innovative technology which helps users click on any word in any application to look it up in Wikipedia. We expect that our users will appreciate the extra convenience."

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Level 3 Communications experienced what it called "widespread network instability" early Friday, causing problems for numerous ISPs and hosts that depend on Level 3 to serve traffic. According to posts on the NANOG mailing list, the issue may have centered on faulty maintenance in one of the Internet backbone's service centers.

The outage began at roughly 2AM ET, and lasted for several hours. Some reported problems with their connections up to seven hours after the initial failure. Level 3, which is one of the largest providers of Internet service in the country, offers dial-up and broadband at wholesale prices to its customers. Level 3 was most recently in the news for its spat with competitor Cogent over network traffic.

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