With today's rollout of the Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, Adobe is unabashedly targeting a product specifically at movie studios, big corporations, and content providers anxious to protect their IP.

But Adobe first adopted digital rights management not too long ago, with the addition of new technologies in Flash Media Server 3 and the Flash 9 player. So how will Media Rights Management Server be any different?

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When Microsoft really is on track with something, it likes to march to a very loud drumbeat. This time, it appears the Hyper-V virtualization platform project is going well, and with the latest milestone, the company's trumpets are blaring.

Holding true to its schedule of final release within six months of the launch of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft this morning advanced the first genuine release candidate of Hyper-V, the built-in virtualization hypervisor for the OS that utilizes the new, underlying virtualization platforms in both AMD and Intel server CPUs.

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Limewire, formerly a popular Gnutella-based P2P file-sharing service, has opened the beta of its DRM-free download store.

Though the store was announced in August of last year, Limewire's DRM-free download shop has only now opened in public beta, offering tracks on an a-la-carte or subscription basis.

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iAnywhere has developed a way to allow users of Lotus Notes to check their email without having to wait for the iPhone SDK.

While the company did receive some guidance from Apple to ensure that its development was going in the right direction, iAnywhere's system uses the device's mail client. Contacts are accessible through the web browser.

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Although 45-to-64-year-olds constitute 29.1% of the Web browsing community, less than one-third of them feel its content applies to them. Accordingly, Burst Media today rolled out Web sites organized into ad networks for non-adolescents.

Almost three-quarters of users aged 25 to 34 believe that online content is focused on people their age. The remainder, who constitute perhaps the brunt of the population, disagree significantly.

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It's official, so now the process can finally begin for a national licensing system for terrestrial broadcasters that exclusively service mobile devices.

This time, it actually happened: The European Commission has formally decided that DVB-H is Europe's official national standard for digital mobile broadcast television. This affects how broadcast and transmission licenses are handled throughout Europe, where viable alternatives to DVB-H now have a significantly diminished chance to compete.

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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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