Budgens gives up on Net shopping

UK supermarket chain Budgens will shut down its online service on Monday. The retailer, which has stores throughout the South and Midlands, found that there wasn’t sufficient customer interest to justify a Net service. Budgens will instead concentrate on serving the local community through its own stores and through supplying goods to local retailers who will trade under the name Budgens Local. ...more

A sign of the times from HP

In my day "back to school" shopping was about all about grey v-necked pullovers and blue shirts. These days, courtesy of HP, it's apparently PCs and peripherals. It seems that HP has "polled" a number of kids and their parents and found that they believe technology related products "can enhance learning and personal development". ...more

NTL signs 'exclusive' deal with Napster UK

The British cable operator NTL is to add Napster to its portfolio of broadband services. From the start of July, customers of the company's Broadband Plus can sign up to Napster for a free 30 day trial. Broadband Plus is available to subscribers of NTL's 600Kb and 1Mb broadband services. ...more

Ask Jeeves buys Excite

Ask Jeeves has bought Interactive Search Holdings, the owners of the Excite search engine and Web portal. Under the terms of the deal, Ask Jeeves will issue 9.3 million shares of common stock and options and pay $150 million in cash, which values ISH at $343 million, based on Ask Jeeves' closing price on 3 March 3 2004. ...more

Mozilla pitches first release candidate for Thunderbird 2

Mozilla has announced the Release Candidate 1 of the next version of its Thunderbird email client. Following on from the last beta release in December, the release candidate establishes new features including Message Tags that enable the creation of custom tags for organising email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags that can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organise email. ...more