As reported first by Computerworld's Eric Lai this afternoon, the head of the International Standards Organization committee JTC 1 has given her official approval to giving consideration to Microsoft's Office Open XML document standard under a fast-track process. This approval comes as opposition to the standard's discussion, which at one time was believed to have been fierce and widespread, may actually have been much more limited and tempered, according to Lai's own survey of JTC 1 members.

While ISO officials had earlier confirmed reports of as many as 19 nations opposing Microsoft's and ECMA's move for the world's largest standards body to ratify OOXML, the response to Lai's survey -- a kind of exit poll, using ISO-approved questions -- indicates that only six nations may have lodged their formal disapproval of fast track consideration, while another five may have expressed concerns but not objections.

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Samsung has begun shipping samples of a new 8GB NAND flash chip, which could be integrated into phones to eliminate the need for a separate memory slot. This would allow for smaller devices, the company says.

Called moviNAND, the technology consists of four 50-nanometer 16-Gigabit NAND flash memories along with integrated MultiMediaCard support for companies who still wish to add expandable memory.

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Almost a year to the day following the acquisition by Fox Interactive Media of startup social news aggregation service Newroo, the company appears to be gearing up to integrate it with a certain service it acquired since that time. After a blog post last week in which celebrated former local TV news director Terry Heaton cited industry insiders as revealing FIM's intention to preparing to launch a MySpace news portal around Newroo technology in the second quarter, FIM officials this morning - very clearly and ostentatiously - declined comment.

This as the parent company's careers site today actively advertises for positions such as a software engineer for its Newroo Labs project, describing it in the same paragraph with MySpace as providing "social interaction and communication around user's personal interests relating to news."

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The Commerce Department approved a plan Monday that would allow every U.S. household to be eligible for two $40 coupons that could be used towards the purchase of a digital-to-analog converter box beginning in January 2008.

Such boxes will be a requirement for any analog television set to continue receiving signals past February 17, 2009. At that time, all full-power television stations would end analog broadcast transmissions.

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Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said Monday that he was turning his attention to online video, announcing the launch of Vuguru, an independent studio that will focus on online video content. Its first project would be Prom Queen, which will be released on April 2. Instead of long-form episodes, the program will be split into about eighty 90-second long clips more suitable for online video.

Vuguru video will be not only distributed from its own Web site, but on a variety of platforms as well. YouTube, Veoh, and its sponsors will also gain rights to distribute the video. Although the exact plot of Prom Queen was not disclosed, it appears to be somewhere in the murder-suspense thriller genre that has become popular for filmmakers targeting the same demographic as Vuguru.

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On the eve of the announcement of a new Europe-wide consumer protection program, whose stated aim is to ensure consumers' ability to return products purchased online for refunds if they're not satisfied - regardless of what country they were purchased from - the lead architect of that program, EU Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, hinted to the German newsweekly Focus that Apple's iTunes service could be directly impacted.

One possible cause for consumer dissatisfaction may be the realization that music tracks purchased from iTunes are not portable across all digital devices or CD players. Last January, officials in Norway (not an EU member) declared iTunes illegal in that country for a multitude of reasons, the alleged non-interoperability of the underlying system being just one of them.

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While Google Earth has primarily been touted for its uncanny ability to take users on a tour of the world's most beautiful sights right from their desktop, a new feature added Monday highlights the immense destruction human beings leave in their wake.

Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth.

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After a beta test last year, NVidia on Monday released the final version of Gelato 2.1, the company's GPU-accelerated 3-D rendering software. The tool was originally developed for film and animation, but has been expanded for game development, industrial design, and general CAD use.

Gelato 2.1 features texture baking, enhanced raytracing performance, and improved lighting functionality for 3-D rendering. The software ships for Windows XP and Linux with plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max. The basic version of Gelato is available at no cost, while Gelato Pro adds advanced scalability and support features for $1,500 USD.

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Apple finds itself in a peculiar situation after a MacBook in Australia catches fire, apparently from a malfunctioning battery. However, the battery was not on the list of recalled units.

The report, first posted on the Australian Mac enthusiast site MacTalk, indicates that the user awoke in the middle of the night to find the laptop on fire. According to witness accounts, before the fire started, a hissing sound and large amounts of smoke poured out of the device.

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Add the hospital as another place where cell phones may soon become even more common: a new study contradicts claims by some that the devices create interference with hospital equipment.

Not all electronic equipment fairs the same, however, according to researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. A portable CD player did cause interference to an electrocardiogram device when used nearby.

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Seagate is shipping two new models in its Momentus line of laptop hard drives - one that includes built-in encryption software to protect data integrity, and another that offers better protection of data if the laptop is dropped.

Both drives will begin appearing through the company's retail channels over the next month, the company said in a statement. Seagate's announcements also reflect an acknowledgement by the company that consumers are increasingly turning to laptops as their primary computer.

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During last Wednesday's hearing before the Special Master in the AMD v. Intel antitrust case, attorneys for Intel acknowledged that company CEO Paul Otellini, chairman Craig Barrett, and executive vice president for sales and marketing Sean Maloney, were among more than 300 company employees who apparently did not back up their e-mails and important documents personally.

The senior employees may have been under the impression that their IT departments were performing the backups; and indeed, those departments may have also thought backups were performed or under way.

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This week's Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco was mainly about the art of game design for consoles and PCs; but another very equally important development was going on there as well: The world's leading software designers (minus Microsoft) formally accepted and ratified a provision to the OpenGL graphics standard that will make it feasible for game designers to create shader components and game assets for handheld devices just as easily as they do for PlayStation 3.

Members of the Khronos Group formally ratified OpenGL ES 2.0 for embedded systems, which utilizes the same rendering principles as OpenGL for other platforms, though it's geared for communicating with new classes of handheld hardware that have frankly been ready to take rendering to a new level since 2004.

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3M filed suit this week in Minneapolis, Minn. against computer makers Sony and Lenovo, along with a handful of other firms, for allegedly infringing on its patents related to rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The company also asked that imports of the batteries be blocked.

At issue is the cathode materials used inside the batteries, which 3M claims makes them last longer and give off less heat. The company says it spent 10 years developing the technology, and says it is a $700 million business.

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A rash of users of Microsoft's new Windows Live OneCare service, launched last January 30, have been reporting on Microsoft's support forums that virus scans performed by the service have resulted in the deletion of their OUTLOOK.PST files - the local, centralized repositories of e-mail, scheduling, and collaboration data used by Outlook.

"This new version of OneCare did the damage to my computer no virus had ever done before," wrote one user last January 25. Since that time, a volunteer Microsoft MVP was struggling to help users cope with not only their deletions, but suggestions and advice from phone-based Microsoft support personnel managed to exacerbate many users' problems, in some instances rendering their Outlook files non-recoverable.

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