One of the biggest news items this week, according to The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), could result in the biggest expansion to the Internet in forty years.

ICANN unanimously voted in favor of introducing new top-level domains, which will include internationalized forms, including in non-Roman alphabets. This could open the door for top level domains to be longer, more descriptive or ultra-specific: such as .free, .paris, or .spaß.

It is an obvious scramble by Yahoo's leaders to reassess a corporate structure that appears to have been shattered in recent weeks, and assemble a template that makes it appear the shards fell into place intentionally.

During the 1990s, Microsoft used to provide its customers and shareholders its vision of where the company was going by updating its running hypothesis for the future of Windows, always three years out or longer. The way Yahoo has performed the same task throughout the last three years has been by reorganizing and reshuffling its divisions.

At the Digital Experience show last night, Storage Appliance Corp. previewed a new 160 GB ClickFree Automated Backup device, not set for official announcement until July 3.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - In a meeting with BetaNews at Pepcom's annual press extravaganza, Storage Appliance Corp. President Ian Collins said that, aside from offering extra storage, the new $169.99 backup device will provide the same capabilities as ClickFree's already available 120 GB external hard drive.

With GPS becoming more common in people's everyday lives, new products are making use of the information gleaned from GPS to provide real-time tracking applications for cars, people, pets, and corporate assets.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - At the Digital Experience press event on Wednesday, two companies in the GPS tracking applications sector took center stage: While Zoombak seems focused on the consumer, FindWhere offered similar services aimed at the business set.

This week, AMD launched two new graphics cards that each give the Sunnyvale- based company two new firsts:. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 is the first teraflop graphic card, while the ATI Radeon HD 4870 is the first to feature GDDR5 memory.

Both cards in the 4800 series reportedly represents what AMD describes as a "2X performance jump" over the older Radeon HD 3800 generation; providing one trillion calculations per second, when the previous generation of cards could only offer up to half a trillion calculations. This marks one of the first times the speed of GPUs has been measured in teraflops.

Seagate's latest portable, external storage device -- a black desktop unit in a distinctive, semi-tapered shape -- was accurately described by Seagate's own representatives yesterday as a trapezoid.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) -- At Pepcom's "Digital Experience" event last night, Seagate rolled out Maxtor Central Axis, a rebranded edition of the earlier Maxtor OneTouch home network storage drive which adds a remote access capability, introduces a new form factor, and raises capacity to one full terabyte.

Download Hyper-V for Windows Server 2008 (x86) Release edition from FileForum now.

You will need to have already installed Hyper-V Beta, RC0, or RC1, as this release is an update to that version. See this Knowledgebase article for full details.

Last year, the BBC's iPlayer launched in beta, presenting UK license holders with over 400 hours of free BBC programming on demand. Today, the 2.0 beta version was rolled out.

The BBC's on-demand TV service called iPlayer has received an overhaul since its release in beta last year, offering several design and feature upgrades.

T-Mobile subscribers will soon join those able to use the Motorola ROKR E8 mobile phone, which initially debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

The new E8 model has an interesting mode-shift technology that lets it convert from a phone into a music player with a single touch. When the phone is sitting idle, it has a smooth screen without visible keys on its surface. But after powering up, a virtual number keypad appears, and then one touch of a button can transform it from a phone into a music player.

If you've ever dreamed of having KITT in your own car, GPS manufacturer Mio is about to make that a reality with its latest model coming later this year.

"Michael, so very good to see you."

The college rivalry cum legal brawl between ConnectU and Facebook that resulted in a settlement in April, has now been enforced by a California District Court judge.

As Harvard students, the Winklevoss brothers, Divya Narendra, and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg worked on a site called HarvardConnection, a campus dating site that eventually became ConnectU. According to the original suit filed in Boston Federal District Court in 2004, ConnectU accused Zuckerberg of stealing code from the project and using it in Facebook. Facebook volleyed the suit with a counterclaim that ConnectU had hacked into Facebook's user database.

The company on Wednesday released further details of its laser-based high definition sets that it first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Mitsubishi plans to release new models based on its new laser technology in 65" and 73" sizes, with the smaller version expected to be released in the third quarter of this year, the company said at a press event. If Mitsubishi makes that target, the 65" model would be the first commercially available laser television on the market.

There may not ever be a planned, collective migration of Intel's company clients to Windows Vista. But as Intel told BetaNews today, there doesn't have to be, since IT can make upgrade decisions on a case-by-case basis.

In response this afternoon to an enthusiast news site report last Monday that re-ignited an old rumor that Intel had decided it would be corporate policy not to deploy Windows Vista on its internal company network-linked systems, and that it might even consider a wholesale move to Linux, an Intel spokesperson gave BetaNews a more practical explanation. Rather than move everybody in its various departments from Windows XP or Windows 2000 to Vista in a massive exodus, the company reiterated what it has told us before: It deploys different versions of Windows based on specific user needs.

This summer, Sony expects to release a new edition of Vegas Movie Studio which will add high-def output capability, enabling users to burn their homemade digital videos directly on to Blu-ray disks for the first time.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Prior to the upcoming shipment of Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Edition, Sony's Vegas Movie Studio has allowed users to import video. "But it did not have any output capabilities for burning in any format," acknowledged a Sony spokesperson, speaking with BetaNews at Pepcom's annual "Digital Experience" press event where the product was announced last night.

In an unsurprising move but during a surprisingly short markup session this morning, the House Subcommittee on the Internet and Intellectual Property voted to recommend the Performance Rights Act to the floor of the House.

That act, if approved, would lift the long-standing exemption on terrestrial radio stations -- the kind you grew up with, that use transmitters and airwaves as opposed to the Internet -- to pay royalties annually to performance rights organizations, with some of the proceeds going to performing artists and musicians whose music the stations play. Stations already pay annual royalties to copyright holders; and Internet-based and satellite radio services currently pay annual royalties to both groups.