Ed Oswald

Nokia and Intel on Friday revealed plans to collaborate on WiMax technology to accelerate adoption among consumers. The far-reaching agreement spans all facets of the nascent wireless broadband technology, including deployment and development of WiMax capable devices.

The two companies also plan to push for a finalization of the 802.16e standard.

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Google has undertaken the task of mapping San Francisco: in 3D. According to a report in SiliconValleyWatcher, a specially designed truck is currently traversing the city, equipped with lasers and digital cameras in hopes that it will be able to create a realistic three-dimensional model of the city.

Google reportedly plans to expand this effort to other major cities if it is successful. Test runs of several streets within the city have yielded mixed results.

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A Harvard law student studying the effects of spyware accused Google of funding spyware earlier this week through its Google AdWords program. Benjamin Edelman said that Google's payments to these unscrupulous companies may be totaling millions of dollars per year, even if the ways these companies are making that money are flying directly in the face of Google's own policies.

Last year, Google published a set of guidelines for software that uses its advertising services within the programs themselves. "We believe that software should not trick you into installing it," the guidelines read.

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The FCC on Thursday said that television manufacturers must get moving on supporting digital television in new sets, and announced it was moving up the deadlines for compliance with a three-year old policy by the commission.

Sets between 25 and 36 inches must now support digital singals by March 1, four months earlier than the 2002 ruling had mandated. Along with the change in policy, the commission has proposed to move up the deadline for small TVs to the end of 2006, which would be seven months earlier than the previous date.

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Developers at the 2005 Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco have submitted benchmark reports of programs running under Rosetta -- the emulation layer that will help smooth the transition between PowerPC and Intel -- and early results show that quite a bit of work is still needed to bring the software up to speed.

At his keynote Monday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs demoed Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop running under Rosetta. To make it work, the program converts PowerPC to Intel code as needed in the background. Jobs says on faster systems, the user will barely notice a difference in performance.

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Disc manufacturers Maxell and Verbatim said they have found a way to successfully mass-produce HD-DVDs on standard DVD-recordable production lines, an important breakthrough that would help ease the transition to the next-generation format.

Toshiba developed HD-DVD, which is one of two formats vying for supremacy in the race to bring high-definition video to DVD.

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Sprint PCS mobile customers will now be able to use their Yahoo e-mail accounts much like they do on their home computers. This is thanks to a special download for PCS Vision handsets that was made available late Tuesday. The service, which costs $2.99 per month, gives access to a user's e-mail account and Yahoo address book.

The download will also allow a user to download his or her e-mail to the phone itself, meaning a customer will not have to stay connected to the Internet to read or respond to e-mails. Currently, Yahoo has the largest Web-based e-mail service, with 64 million monthly users. AOL and Hotmail are a close second and third, according to ComScore Media-Metrix.

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According to Web security firm Secunia, a seven year-old vulnerability has crept back into Mozilla-based browsers. The flaw allows someone to spoof the content of a Web site, enabling a hacker to make malicious code appear as if it's coming from an otherwise trusted URL.

The bug was originally reported to affect almost every browser on the market, however, including Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Netscape, and KDE's Konqueror for Linux. The latest Mozilla-based browsers were immune at the time of the initial report, but are now vulnerable.

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A survey conducted by research firm NPD Group suggests that Apple's iTunes may be more popular than some leading peer-to-peer file sharing networks. According to the survey, iTunes is now neck-and-neck with LimeWire, while beating out other services such as Kazaa and iMesh.

The survey also found that those who use legal music services tend to be over 30 years of age. They are much less likely to download music illegally off of a P2P service than younger users. Four in ten households with Internet access downloaded a song legally during the month of March 2005," NPD said.

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XM Satellite Radio and audio book provider Audible said on Tuesday that they plan to release devices next year that will be able to both play audio books as well as live satellite radio content.

Audible will also begin to offer subscription services to some of XM's most popular talk radio shows such as Opie and Anthony and the Bob Edwards show. Customers will be able to subscribe to the shows and download them onto a Audible-compatible device, which includes Apple's iPod.

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BellSouth announced on Tuesday that it would begin a deployment of a pre-WiMax technology across portions of Athens, Ga. later this summer, and then expand to several Florida cities by the end of 2005.

WiMax has been touted as a way to cheaply connect people to broadand Internet, and several cities including Philadelphia are already starting programs to turn entire cities into huge wireless hotspots.

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IBM's first new ThinkPad since Lenovo purchased the computing division was unveiled on Monday. Dubbed X41, the newest addition to the ThinkPad line is also the company's first foray into the Tablet PC market, as the notebook's screen can be turned and folded atop the keyboard.

China-based Lenovo purchased a majority stake in IBM's computer business in December of last year, a $1.75 billion dollar deal that initially was met with some trepidation by U.S. regulators over national security issues. The marriage created the third-biggest computer manufacturer in the world behind Dell and Hewlett Packard.

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American Express said on Monday it will soon begin to issue credit cards that no longer have to be swiped through a machine in order to make payments. Specially designed American Express cards will be offered to customers of its Blue card, and will work similar to ExxonMobil's SpeedPass service. Speedpass allows customers to wave a wand in front of a sensor in order to pay, and requires no signature.

CVS, Ritz Camera and East coast gas station chain Sheetz will all accept the new method of payment, which the company says is some 63 percent faster than paying by cash. 7-Eleven has also announced it will test out the service as well. For places that do not support the new technology, the card can act in the traditional manner and be swiped through a credit card machine.

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Maxtor said on Monday that it would bring to the market hard drives with half a terabyte capacities in the third quarter of this year. The company says that the new drives would feature "significant improvements" in security and performance. The new 500GB SATA and ATA 133 drives would run at a speed of 7,200 RPM.

"Maxtor continues to focus on storage solutions tailored for specific market needs," said David Reinsel, director of storage research at IDC. "The Maxtor 500GB hard drive underscores the company's emphasis on differentiation across all of its product lines, and reflects competitiveness within market segments demanding the highest capacity drives."

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced several upcmoning enhancements to Windows Mobile 5.0 on Monday, which the company hopes will put it on more equal footing with services offered by Research in Motion. With the update, Outlook Mobile will now be able to sync directly to Exchange Server without any additional software or equipment.

Windows Mobile 5.0 launched last month at Mobile & Embedded DevCon 2005 in Las Vegas. The release introduced persistent memory, which will retain data even in the event of battery depletion, as well as better security features to ensure that the recent spread of smartphone viruses do not make their way into Windows Mobile devices.

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