Virgin to join music downloads market

The Virgin Group is planning to launch into the increasingly crowded music downloads market with a new venture, Virgin Digital. The company is said to be developing its own digital jukebox and online music store and is working with Musicnet to develop the service. The company is said to be planning a wide assault on the market with plans to offer the product across a wide range of devices including mobile phones as well as other consumer devices. ...more

The set-top box giveaway (for Microsoft TV developers)

Microsoft makes moves to support development of next-generation television services. Microsoft has taken advantage of the National Association of Television Program Executives Conference in Las Vegas to announce that it is teaming up with Motorola to provide advanced set-top boxes to registered developers. Developers involved with the new Microsoft TV Content Builder Initiative (CBI) will receive Motorola's DCT-5000+ set-top box for development and testing. ...more

Mozilla welcomes prospect of XP-only IE 7

The Mozilla Foundation is anticipating that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 release will convince a great many businesses to switch to Firefox. The reason, according to the foundation's Asa Dotzler is that while IE7 will require at least Windows XP, many organisations are happily running Windows 2000 with no reason to change. 'We're excited about Microsoft launching IE 7,' he said, 'it will remind a lot of people that if they want better features they have to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading'. ...more

Yahoo forms consortium to digitise world's archives

Internet portal Yahoo! has finally made its response to the Google Print initiative. Together with Hewlett-Packard and Adobe, a number of the world's top libraries and archives have come together to form the Open Content Alliance. Initially, the material for the archive will come from the University of California, the University of Toronto, the British National Archives, O'Reilly Media, Inc. ...more

HP retains PDA pole position over palmOne, RIM in rear view mirror

HP is just ahead of palmOne in PDA shipments to the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region according to research published by Canalys. Meanwhile Nokia retains its formidable lead in mobile phone shipments, taking almost three quarters of the market. Overall mobile devices are showing a 62 per cent growth over a year ago. ...more