Ed Oswald

Although many are eagerly awaiting Microsoft next version of Windows, known as Longhorn, a recent study by AssetMetrix shows that many companies have not even upgraded to Windows XP, a full four years after its release.

The study reports that Windows 2000 is installed on 48 percent of all corporate PCs as of the first quarter of this year, only falling four percent since the last quarter of 2003. In comparison, usage of Windows XP rose from 6.6 to 38 percent during the same period.

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Boeing says that even though a large majority of the flying public is against it, the company expects to begin selling cell phone access by next year. In order for this to happen, however, Boeing must convince the Federal Avation Administration to not only ignore airline passengers, but also some cellular phone companies as well.

Wireless provider Cingular late last week came out in opposition to a lift of the ban, saying, "We believe there is a time and a place for wireless phone conversations, and seldom does that include the confines of an airplane flight."

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BetaNews has learned that Creative has pushed back the release of its highly anticipated Zen Micro Photo MP3 player to at least August, and now says that it cannot confirm retail prices for the unit even though it had publicly announced pricing in January at CES 2005 in Las Vegas.

The Zen Micro Photo won "Best of CES" at the annual consumer trade show, leading CEO Sim Wong Hoo to boast that "the success of the original Zen Micro has been so great that it was tough to deliver an encore in such a short period of time," claiming the judges "had never seen anything like it." Hoo told onlookers that the unit would be available during the second quarter.

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A supermarket chain in North Carolina has introduced a new way to pay for your groceries - with only the touch of a finger. Lowes Foods is the first retail store in the country to offer a biometric payment system, which will match the fingerprint of a customer to a linked checking account.

Lowes contracted BioPay, a company specializing in biometric payment systems, to set up the service.

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British Telecom on Wednesday unveiled BT Fusion, the first combined mobile and fixed telephone service. To make it work, specially designed phones will act as a regular mobile phone when away from home, but will switch to a VoIP phone using Bluetooth when the customer is at home.

The first wireless phone to be launched on the service will be the popular Motorola RAZR, which is just like the original version except for the addition of UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access. To connect itself to the home network, the phone includes Class 1 Bluetooth.

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Microsoft took action on Wednesday by filing four lawsuits against companies in Virginia and California, alleging that the companies were engaging in the sale of pirated copies of Microsoft software. The company was tipped off by calls from consumers to its piracy hotline, 1-800-RU-LEGIT.

Microsoft identified the companies as #9 Software, who had 112 complaints across 35 states and Canada, CEO Microsystems with 66 complaints in 20 states, and Super Supplier, with 18 complaints from people in 13 states.

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The New York Public Library (NYPL) system on Monday launched an online digital audio book collection that will be open to cardholders of the system to rent for three-week periods. Over 700 titles will be available in several different genres.

The launch of the audio books follows a successful debut last year of an e-book program, in which electronic versons of books have been borrowed more than 23,000 times. According to the NYPL, they are the largest circulating collection of e-books in the United States.

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Electronics maker JVC on Tuesday announced it will launch the largest hard drive based video camcorders available, which require no tapes and will record at near-DVD quality for around $1,000. The models will include either a 20 or 30GB hard-disk, capable of recording 7 or 10.5 hours of high-quality video.

"To put the storage capacity in context, it would take 22 DVD camcorder discs to hold seven hours of video," the company said in a statement. There will be two models of each capacity, a standard model, and another that adds a 1.33 megapixel CCD.

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Novell suffered a slight setback in its antitrust case against Microsoft as half of its lawsuit was thrown out last Friday, according to court documents released Monday. However, U.S. District Court Judge Frederick Motz let stand several key charges accusing Microsoft of harming Novell's business through monopolistic practices.

Novell has based its case on the Department of Justice suit that Microsoft settled in 2002. Judge Motz said that Novell's charges relating to the abuse of monopolies in word processing and spreadsheet applications would not be allowed in the court, because the allegations were not part of the original DOJ case.

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Sirius on Tuesday announced that it had reached an agreement with Sprint PCS to bring streaming audio content to its mobile handsets. While no specifics of the deal were announced, both companies said that they plan to announce what content will be available as well as a price for the service later in the year.

The channels will include pop, rock, hip-hop and country channels among others. "We are excited about this venture with Sprint," said Scott Greenstein, Sirius President of Entertainment and Sports. "One of our goals is to make this unique content available to as many Sprint PCS Vision customers as we can, over as many multimedia devices as possible."

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Sirius announced on Monday that it would be upgrading its network capacity by approximately a quarter, allowing it to offer more audio channels as well as data and video services by mid-2006. The company says that the audio quality of its current offerings will not change as a result of the upgrade.

Current Sirius radios will still work; however, for customers to take advantage of the new services a next generation radio will have to be purchased. "Our new modulation technology will use a very innovative approach to increase the number of bits we transmit...enabling us to increase the effective use of our currently licensed spectrum to add additional programming for the benefit of our subscribers," said Jim Meyer, Sirius' president of sales.

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Snocap, the newest venture headed by original Napster founder Shawn Fanning, announced on Monday it would open its service to independent artists and labels to allow them to register their songs to receive payment when they are traded over peer-to-peer networks.

Fanning's service allows P2P networks to curb illicit downloads by blocking unauthorized versions of songs and replacing them with a version that carries digital rights management and must be paid for in order to play.

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Following the lead of competitors Yahoo and Google, Microsoft has blocked the use of words such as "democracy" and "human rights" in some of its services for Chinese users - including its Spaces blogs. The move is likely to appease the Chinese government, which has strongly urged Web sites to self-censor themselves.

The censorship was most readily apparent on the Chinese version of the MSN Spaces Web log service. Users who attempted to use these words, as well as "Taiwan independence" or "freedom" among others were greeted with a message stating: "This item should not contain forbidden speech such as profanity. Please enter a different word for this item."

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For the first time, mobile and Wi-Fi provider T-Mobile USA released user numbers for the "Hotspot" side of its business, saying it had 450,000 paying customers use the service over the past three months. The company did not give any comparison statistics for last year, although it did say customers are using the service for longer periods of time compared with previous years.

Users were staying logged in for an average of 64 minutes this year, an increase of 19 minutes over 2004 and 41 minutes over 2003. 3 million logins have been recorded so far this year. The T-Mobile Hotspot service is available in airports and hotels, as well as in Starbucks, Borders and Kinko's retail locations. According to the company, the service has about 5,700 US hotspots, and 6,500 across Europe.

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In hopes of leveling the playing field with Adobe, Microsoft on Friday released a beta of Acrylic, a professional graphics creation tool. The program is based on Expression, which the company acquired the rights to through its 2003 purchase of Hong Kong company Creature House.

Microsoft describes Acrylic as the "codename for an innovative illustration, painting and graphics tool that provides exciting creative capabilities for designers working in print, web, video, and interactive media."

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