Dot com disaster dishes out dogs' dinner

Are you fed up reading about how yet another Web site has bitten the dirt? Well, some good has come out of one dot com crash. When online pet superstore Pets.com collapsed after lack of funding at the beginning of November, no one would have thought that a little ray of light would come out of the darkness of financial ruin. ...more

Toshiba first to 90nm volume production

Toshiba will launch 90nm system-on-chip (SoC) volume production this spring, well ahead of its global rivals, Dow Jones has reported. Intel and Samsung are slated to kick off 90nm production in the second half of 2003, said the report. Toshiba hopes its jump ahead of the game will help it win orders and raise Japan's competitiveness in the worldwide semiconductor market. ...more

Kaspersky speeds Anti-Virus 5.0

Kaspersky has announced version five of its antivirus software, claiming greater efficiencies and performance boosts as well as a more user-friendly environment. The Russian company has integrated new file processing technologies it calls iChecker, iStream and iCache. These optimise the way in which the software talks to Windows so that it can determine the integrity of files and avoid wasting resources scanning files that are known to be clean. ...more

Navman captures photo tracking capabilities

GPS specialist Navman has launched a mobile phone kit that allows users to take photos with their mobile and allow others to navigate to that point. Navman's SmartST Mobile S60 Edition for Series 60 Symbian phones boasts NavPix technology. With this, a user can find their way back to a place by simply taking a photo of it with their mobile: ideal for travellers in an unfamiliar city trying to find their way back to their hotel, for example. ...more

Internet virus updates patented

Network Associates, whose McAfee division develops the Virex anti-virus software, has patented technology that enables anti-virus software to be automatically updated over networks including the Internet. The Method and System for Providing Automated Updating and Upgrading of Antivirus Applications Using a Computer Network patent covers two distinct areas: the uploading of updates from source to a server and then onto another server and hence to individual desktops; and the retrieval of information from a desktop computer to determine whether the anti-virus software on that computer is up-to-date, and - if not - uploading the latest version to that desktop. The patent does not appear to prevent individual users from downloading virus updates from Web sites. ...more