Topic: General

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, September 26, 2005 - 09:59 AM

BANGALORE, India - Under pressure from business leaders, authorities in Bangalore, India's technology hub, on Thursday detailed new plans to spend billions of rupees (millions of dollars) to improve the city's potholed roads and sporadic electricity supply. Word of planned upgrades to Bangalore's sagging infrastructure first came last week after some members of the city's $6 billion software outsourcing industry and its main trade body, the Bangalore Chamber of Industry and Commerce, threatened to boycott the government-sponsored annual technology convention in November if the improvements were not made.

Posted by : trraju on Sunday, September 18, 2005 - 02:49 AM

The original Palm Pilot was the iPod of its time: a must-have pocket-size gadget that defined techno-chic in the mid-1990s. The Palm conferred more than membership in club digerati. It connoted professional success, signaling that you're one person who is simply too busy to keep all those appointments and contacts in your head and way too hip to write them on dead trees. And so it was a bit sad when PalmSource, the Sunnyvale company that makes the Palm software, announced last Friday that it was selling itself off to a Japanese outfit for a relatively paltry $324.3 million. Just to compare Apple to operating systems, Steve Jobs' company sold $1.1 billion worth of iPods in just three months earlier this year. The fire-sale of PalmSource left us wondering: Where did all the Zen go?

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, July 24, 2005 - 01:21 AM

After 11 blistering months as a public company, during which its stock climbed 269%, to $313 per share, Google (GOOG) finally failed to live up to investors' sky-high expectations. The search leader on July 21 unveiled second-quarter net profits of $343 million -- a 334% jump over last year's quarter, but slightly below analyst estimates. Investors trimmed Google's shares by 5%, to $299, in after-hours trading. Google's numbers cap a disappointing week for Internet search players. Yahoo! (YHOO) on July 19 undershot second-quarter sales estimates (see BW Online, 7/20/05, "A Big Boo For Yahoo"), causing its shares to fall by 13% over the next two days. Google had blown past profit estimates by an average of 28% in its first three quarters as a public company, making its second-quarter shortfall all the more surprising. Jefferies & Co. analyst Youssef Squali, for instance, had expected Google to beat profit estimates by 5% to 10%.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 11:59 PM

NEW YORK - Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.
Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, July 16, 2005 - 11:59 PM

NEW YORK - Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.
Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Posted by : Anonymous on Monday, July 04, 2005 - 06:17 AM

A Fremont man has been arrested in a nationwide FBI sting that penetrated the secretive world of "warez" that the agency describes as a national conspiracy to pirate movies, video games and expensive computer software. The larger investigation -- including possible additional arrests -- is scheduled to be announced today by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and until then FBI officials said they could not discuss the case. But Wednesday, a search warrant affidavit that outlines the investigation was unsealed in San Francisco.

Posted by : Anonymous on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 02:40 AM

Desktop Linux software company Userful has introduced its Desktop Multiplier, a software product designed to lower computing costs in call centres.
Desktop Multiplier is claimed to turn one computer into ten, enabling the user to deploy or expand a call centre by plugging in ten ordinary monitors and keyboards into the single central computer box, using extra video cards.

Posted by : trraju on Saturday, March 05, 2005 - 03:40 AM

The creator of the Napster file sharing system, Shawn Fanning, has reportedly signed a deal with record label Sony BMG for the use of his Snocap music tracking system. The new system is a copyright management and filtering system that allows users to legally trade music over peer-to-peer networks. Universal has already signed up for the system and EMI is also in talks with Fanning. Snocap will allow songs to be identified as they are swapped online, which then allows record companies to charge for them.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, January 13, 2005 - 06:41 PM

Research in Motion (RIM) has unveiled the latest in its range of slimmer BlackBerry devices which mirror the form factor of mobile phones. The company said it will continue to build its traditional 'slab' style devices, but will experiment with other designs. The 7100x has Bluetooth built in as standard, and comes with a hands-free headset and integrated speakerphone for conference calls.

Posted by : Anonymous on Thursday, January 06, 2005 - 12:15 AM

SAN FRANCISCO -- Reflecting the tech industry's recovery, venture-capital investing is ending its first up year since the boom ended in 2000. Venture capitalists, who invest in young businesses on behalf of pensions and other institutions, plowed an estimated $20 billion into start-ups this year, say preliminary figures from the authoritative MoneyTree Survey. That's up from $18.7 billion in 2003, and it's the first annual increase in four years.''We clearly have turned the corner,'' says Tracy Lefteroff of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which tracks VC investing for the survey.