Latest Technology News

Despite reports to the contrary spreading like wildfire around blogs and mainstream news sources Monday, Toshiba said it has not made any decision to halt production of HD DVD players, while acknowledging it is evaluating its strategy moving forward.

The hubbub over HD DVD's demise began on Friday, when a brief article published in Hollywood Reporter cited an anonymous source claiming that Toshiba was making plans to exit the HD DVD business, spelling an end to the format that has been locked in a bitter war with Sony's Blu-ray format. Reuters spread the story around the world due to its syndication agreement with the Hollywood paper.

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Motorola expanded its mobile music reach into the Asia-Pacific region with the completion of the Soundbuzz buy.

Terms were not disclosed. Motorola said that it will help to expand Soundbuzz's current offering beyond China, and will put MotoMusic in 13 countries across the region. It also gains licenses from the four major music labels, and about 45 independent labels.

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San Francisco-based company Second Life has opened up its virtual world to the mobile phone, and is looking for interested beta testers to put the application through its paces.

Functions are mapped to the keypad of the phone, and the experience has been reformatted to work on the smaller screen of these devices. Obviously due to the bandwidth requirements, a 3G handset is needed.

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Like Microsoft and IBM, Novell is also moving its groupware and messaging in a social networking direction, a Novell executive told BetaNews.

Novell this week acquired SiteScape, founder of the ICEcore open source collaboration project, with plans for close integration between SiteScape-created crossplatform Linux/Windows' collaboration software and the next edition of Novell's GroupWise groupware and messaging environment, codenamed Bonsai.

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British Telecom, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, three of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Britain, have joined together to create a new network that will offer targeted advertising to UK Internet users.

Using software built upon Phorm's ad serving technology, the three companies will become members of the Open Internet Exchange (OIX), designed to offer advertisements depending on the search and browsing habits of Internet users. Specifically, the service will provide information on users' browsing and search habits. Web sites will offer space to place the ads targeted toward those users, and advertisers will provide the revenue when an ad is clicked on.

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Red Hat is using JBoss World 2008 in Orlando as a launching pad for a new service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform designed to accelerate the deployment of open-source middleware by larger enterprises.

SOAs are system architectures of collaborating services that can be used to allow software resources to be addressed using standardized request/response protocols through a network. Because SOAs are not monolithic operating constructs that are rooted to old, inflexible infrastructures, it's often more cost-effective for businesses to construct new and more adaptable applications around simpler, more discrete protocols.

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A GSM version of Palm's Centro is apparently on tap for the AT&T network for release next Thursday, according to a report in popular mobile blog The Boy Genius Report. Although details are scant, it appears that the phone carries much of the functionality that its CDMA counterpart has.

Palm released the Centro for the Sprint network last October at Digital Life in New York City, aiming to put all the functionality of the Treo into a smaller form factor. The Centro received generally positive reviews.

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As if Yahoo didn't have enough uncertainty to contend with right now, three of the largest newspaper chains in the country have launched a new company called QuadrantOne, which may both compete and overlap with Yahoo's online ad network.

Spearheaded by the Hearst, New York Times Corp., Tribune, and Gannett newspaper companies, QuadrantOne will reportedly focus on selling display advertising, one of the very strengths Yahoo is touting for itself in an attempt to ward off acquisition by Microsoft.

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Everex's Cloudbook ultra mobile PC has seen another delay in widespread availability.

The company's site previously had an announcement to customers that the 9-inch, 2 pound laptop would be available at Walmart.com and ZaReason.com on February 15. Today, that date was pushed back just under a week to February 21.

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Settlement is the furthest thing from the mind of Oracle, which now contends that the wounds it suffered through SAP's alleged IP infringement cut deeper than at the time it filed its lawsuit.

Oracle today denied published suggestions that the company is on the verge of settlement talks with SAP in a lawsuit alleging intellectual property. Instead, the company says it will now file an amended complaint alleging infringement beyond its original complaint that SAP's TomorrowNow unit hacked Oracle's Web site, an Oracle spokesperson said.

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The chief executive officer of SCO will leave once it reorganizes through a deal with Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners.

McBride's exit will be effective as soon as the restructuring plans take effect. The company said Thursday that it was offered $100 million to go private and reorganize by SNCP, which would take it out of bankruptcy.

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Nvidia has announced its APX 2500 processor, taking the multimedia handset processor into its second generation, and in a game-changing prototype design.

The effort began more than a year ago with Texas Instruments' introduction of the OMAP3430 mobile architecture. Then, Broadcom answered by showing off its VideoCore III multimedia processor. They promised sophisticated graphical processing with low power consumption.

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While frustrated retailers claim that the failure rate for Microsoft's next generation console is near 30 percent, Microsoft has said it is likely closer to five percent. So who's right?

The first unbiased measurement comes from SquareTrade, whose business is in handling warranties for electronics. Using a sample of about 1,000 systems, it found that the 360 had about a 16.4 percent failure rate.

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5:45 pm ET Feburary 15, 2008 - The question of which unilateral promise from Microsoft is supposed to apply to its Office Open XML format suite was supposed to have been clarified this morning by the company. At least that was the plan, and in the end, the matter may actually be settled, but in the middle, at least, there was more than a little confusion.

Here is the story as we now understand it: Microsoft's position, according to a spokesperson with whom BetaNews spoke this afternoon, is that the company did indeed originally release OOXML under the Open Specification Promise (OSP) in September 2006, as indicated by this blog posting at the time from the company's director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow.

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Europeans traveling abroad will be able to send text messages and use mobile Internet services with reduced prices just in time for the summer travel season, thanks to the European Union's chief telecom lawmaker.

During the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona yesterday, Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding gave mobile phone carrier executives a stern warning regarding the pricing of text messages and data plans when consumers are roaming in other nations. Comm. Reding spoke with executives of several major European telecom companies about the pricing issues.

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