Latest Technology News

Oracle made a major contribution to the open source community today, announcing it has contributed the XQilla XQuery engine code to the open source community under an Apache 2.0 license.

XQilla is a technology built upon XQuery and XPatch 2.0 for developers who need to create XML-based applications. XQuery is the language originally created for querying XML data, and can be used to combine documents, Internet content, databases, and Web-based content. It removes the need for developers to produce large amounts of C++ of Java code, and can be used to gather information for use in an online Internet community or to convert information from XML to XHTML.

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Santa Clara-based Sun Microsystems has never really had a strong lineup for the small-to-medium-business market. And with a stronger reliance upon open source, it's been difficult for Sun to compete in a field where someone else already has a corner on "free."

So during a low-key event at its San Francisco office yesterday, Sun held a Tech Chat to discuss how the company plans to earn real revenue from free and open source software, including in market segments where it hasn't yet made the dent it would like to: for instance, in the field of open source applications servers.

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The all stock transaction calls for the purchase of every outstanding share of Groove, and gives LiveWire a larger presence in the mobile music download market.

Prior to the transaction, Groove offered services across the mobile music and video spectrum, including ringback tones, ringtones and music downloads.

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TiVo has slowly been expanding the scope of its service to include the commonly available content the Internet has to offer. Last week, the company finally announced support for YouTube content, and today announced an update to its Desktop Plus software supporting most video codecs.

Windows software TiVo Desktop Plus 2.6 converts various formats to .tivo files, playable on Series 3 or TiVo HD DVRs, supporting resolutions up to 720p. The software also converts programs recorded on the user's DVR to files playable on PCs or portable media devices.

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How can an advertising platform best target its readers without knowing something personal about them? Today in the UK, there's a growing public outcry for the details on what, from one coalition's perspective, may be a trade secret.

A cooperative advertising platform being built by three of the UK's largest ISPs, including British Telecom and Richard Branson's Virgin Media, has become the target of intense scrutiny by rights advocacy groups there, and lately by government officials. What was first presented to the public as an anonymity protection measure for ads that can be targeted to individual browsers, is now being called into question as a potential tool for spying on their users.

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This iPhone doesn't use the cellular network, instead it allows users to connect to their SIP and VoIP networks to make calls wirelessly.

The WIP 310 is the third phone available under Cisco's iPhone brand. As some may remember, Cisco sued Apple in January 2007 over use of the name, but reached a licensing agreement only a month later.

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Data from NPD Group indicates that Macs accounted for about one out of every eight computers sold during the month of February in the US.

Apple garnered a 14 percent unit share during the month, a 60 percent year-over-year increase. Apple also took a quarter of all dollar revenues during February, NPD says. This higher percentage of dollar sales is due to Apple's generally higher prices than its competitors.

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Despite analyst predictions that a Microsoft buyout is inevitable, Yahoo today aimed to drive up shareholder opposition by unveiling a three-year financial plan of independence. This while Yahoo continues to find new revenue sources.

This week, Yahoo has been busy demonstrating it has the most valuable destination on the Web, in an effort to prove the company can -- and should -- stand on its own. This morning, Yahoo followed up that proof with a three-year financial plan for nearly doubling its operating cash flow and generating $8.8 billion in revenue in 2010.

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In a major blow to the struggling satellite TV provider, a new EchoStar satellite destined to expand the HD lineup of Dish Network failed to reach proper orbit over the weekend. Meanwhile, the company asked a judge to rehear its patent dispute with TiVo.

HD is the new competitive battleground, as cable, satellite and IPTV operators vie to attract more customers by offering the most high-definition channels. Most companies, including Dish Network, are playing catch-up to DirecTV, which has over 90 HD channels.

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Apple on Tuesday released version 3.1 of its Safari Web browser for both Windows and Mac. The incremental update does little in the way of introducing new features, although the company is using it to usher in the next generation of Web standards.

Safari 3.1 is the first browser to support some of the features of HTML 5, the new standard that was released in January. That update to the base coding of the Web includes new video and audio tags, which allow for built-in support of media without proprietary technology.

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A man dubbed the "king of spam" pleaded guilty last Friday to federal charges of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and tax evasion, not to mention sending millions of pieces of spam over a four-year period.

Seattle resident Robert Soloway, the owner of Newport Internet Marketing Corp. (NIMC) pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Seattle. In 2005, Soloway made $309,725 in revenue, but did not file an income tax return.

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited with inventing the World-Wide Web (the concept of hypertext documents being readable through a browser) recently spoke to the BBC voicing his opposition to ISPs tracking user habits.

Berners-Lee thinks each user's browser history is property of the user, and if a company wants to use that information in the creation of, for example, customized advertisements, that needs to be negotiated with the user directly. The user needs to understand how others can benefit from his information.

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After receiving an unsolicited and "inferior" buyout proposal from data storage company EMC, Iomega promptly dismissed it. Now the company has upgraded its offer, and Iomega is reconsidering.

EMC's original offer amounted to roughly $178 million, which Iomega felt was an undervaluation of the company. Today's offer to buy out all outstanding shares in Iomega amounts to roughly $205.5 million.

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Disruptive Media Publishers today announced a Nokia-sponsored Content Creation Challenge aimed at giving artists the opportunity to have their work offered through the Microsoft Xbox Live Marketplace.

Disruptive Media is best known to gamers as a company created to market photos and themes to the main demographic of young, male gamers who play the Xbox 360 online.

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Advancing its architecture at what most independent observers would now agree is a breakneck pace, Intel offered further details today on how soon it would begin phasing out the Core Microarchitecture it introduced in the summer of 2006.

With the second phase of its 45 nm generation microprocessors -- what it calls "tock," using a metaphor that drives rival AMD mad -- Intel will move to a processor design that utilizes scalable cores, from two all the way to eight, it will introduce another new microarchitecture for processing instructions, and it will phase out the front-side bus as a component of its architecture. We've known these facts based on bits and pieces of information compiled from Intel hints over the past six months. Now we know this as absolute fact, confirmed by senior vice president Pat Gelsinger during a special presentation this morning.

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