Latest Technology News

After months of diminishing market share in the search industry, Microsoft may have found the answer to competing against Google and Yahoo: Chicktionary. The addictive game, which is available on the Live Search Club site, rewards users with prizes such as software.

Microsoft's troubles in the search market date back many years. The company previously utilized Google and Yahoo to handle its search results, not launching its own engine until late 2004. At the time, Microsoft said it would put forth considerable effort and resources to regain ground on its competitors and boost its search share above 9.5%.

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Sony on Wednesday bolstered its support for Apple's iPod by introducing a new boombox and clock radio that enable customers to plug their iPods directly into the devices. Once a fierce rival of Apple, Sony is now taking the position that the iPod is like a CD and has decided to embrace it.

"Consumers are treating the iPod as a format, like the compact disc, which is why Sony is now delivering audio products to support it," said Sony director Andrew Sivori. The $100 ICF-C1iP clock radio works like other iPod-based clocks, offering a docking connector at the top. Also $100, the ZS-S2iP boombox includes a radio and CD player, and a retractable dock tray for the iPod. Both produces will be available in August in black and white colors.

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Those business users who can't make the leap to Apple's iPhone may be happy to hear that Research in Montion has unveiled a new BlackBerry model that offers quad-band GSM support and Wi-Fi connectivity in the company's thinnest form factor yet. However, like the iPhone, it lacks 3G support.

The BlackBerry 8820 will be sold through AT&T next month and includes GPS capabilities for navigation, along with RIM's latest media player software. It also will support making calls over a Wi-Fi network, saving customers their wireless minutes. Currently, T-Mobile is the only provider to offer such a service, called UMA. Pricing for the 8820 and required plans has not yet been announced.

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Adobe’s Creative Suite has reached its third iteration, and CS3 brings with it quite a few changes - some minor and some remarkable. This review will cover the new editions of both Photoshop and Illustrator, the two programs I use the most frequently.

I (Karl Kwasny) am the lead designer for BetaNews (new site is coming soon!) and primarily an illustrator by trade, so I hope that my somewhat unconventional perspective (that is to say, I am not a photographer) might give a fresh angle to the reviews already out there.

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Microsoft said Tuesday that it is offering a subscription-based payment option for Office 2007 in South Africa, continuing a test it had been running with the previous version of the productivity suite.

The option is aimed at making the software more affordable to generally less affluent consumers in emerging markets. It had been offering a similar program for Office 2003 in Mexico and Romania as well as South Africa, and has the FlexGo program for Windows.

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UPDATED Less than a day after he chastised Sony for failing to be successful in Japan with the PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox chief Peter Moore has abruptly resigned from Microsoft. Moore will become president of EA's Sports division.

Succeeding Moore at Microsoft will be Don Mattrick, who was formerly president of game development Electronic Arts. Mattrick will become senior vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, which includes the Xbox and Games for Windows groups.

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Data from several researchers indicate that Blu-ray may be beginning to falter as HD DVD builds momentum thanks to price cuts on its standalone players.

NPD Group and Nielsen/NetRatings reports along with point of sale data indicate that overall HD DVD hardware sales were up 37 percent from the first to second quarter, which is a 183 percent increase in standalone HD DVD players. More than 180,000 players have now been sold.

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Microsoft's Office Open XML format, which were introduced in Office 2007 and already certified by European standards body Ecma International, hit a speed bump Friday on its "Fast Track" process to become a worldwide ISO standard.

A technical committee called V1 established by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to submit a recommendation on the format to the INCITS Executive Board, which decides the official United States position on proposed standards, failed to reach a consensus before its July 17 deadline.

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Intel expanded its line of "Extreme" processors to include chips for notebooks, as well as a new flagship desktop processor on Monday.

In addition, the company also disclosed its plans to debut battery-friendly quad-core processors for laptops by next year. The announcements come as Intel celebrates its one-year anniversary of introducing the Core microarchitecture.

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Without much warning, customers of VoIP provider SunRocket found themselves without phone service Monday as the company shut its doors.

Calls to the Vienna, Va. based company's customer support line were greeted by the message, "We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye."

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Google has thrown another bone to critics of its privacy practices, announcing it would no longer set cookies to expire in the year 2038. Now, Google will set cookies to expire two years after a user last visits the site, with the expiration date auto-renewing to two years after each visit.

The search giant says the decision to make the cookies renew is so that users would not have to re-enter their basic preferences. Google does not require visitors to log in to store search preferences, using cookies to retain the data. The move follows a recent announcement that Google would anonymize its server search logs -- including IP addresses and cookie IDs -- after 18 months.

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The RIAA has been ordered to pay over $68,000 in attorney fees for an Oklahoma woman who won a piracy case against the music industry organization in July of last year.

Judge Lee West had called RIAA disingenuous in its motives to attempt to get out of paying the fees earlier this year after the case was dismissed and ruled in the woman's favor. In total, the RIAA will be responsible for $68,685.23 in fees.

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Building on the Custom Search Engine it introduced last October, Google on Tuesday took the wraps off a new hosted search site designed for businesses, which offers greater flexibility for a small, yearly fee. The service targets small to medium-sized businesses and will surely ruffle the feathers at Microsoft.

The basic premise is pretty simple: Google is able to provide the best search results for the vastness of the Web, so it could do the same for a company's own Web site. The Mountain View, Calif. company has long offered hardware solutions including the pricey Enterprise Search Appliance and more-affordable Google Mini, but the setup cost involved was still too high for many.

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Seeing as it was late to the game with Web 2.0, Microsoft is making a preemptive effort to be ready the next time around. The company has pledged $500,000 in research grants toward what it calls "Intelligent Web 3.0," in which the Web becomes more aware of where and how it's being accessed in order to custom tailor information.

In total, Microsoft pledged nearly $6.5 million in research grants to colleges and universities. $1 million will cover utilizing cell phones in the healthcare industry, $700,000 for genome studies, $500,000 each for multi-core and sustainable computing, and another $500,000 for human-robot interaction. In addition, $1 million will be put toward academic computational research, and another $1 million provided to five new faculty members to be put toward their research.

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The European Court of First Instance has set a date of September 17 to rule on Microsoft's appeal of a 2004 antitrust verdict that forced it to pay over $600 million in fines and make changes to its Windows operating systems. Microsoft has maintained it did nothing anti-competitive.

As the Court of First Instance is the EU's second highest court, its ruling can be appealed by both sides to the European Court of Justice, but the long-awaited decision is being closely watched. Microsoft's spat with the EU has continued, and the company was fined another 280.5 million euros for not complying with the original order, a decision the company also plans to appeal.

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