iPod Christmas overwhelms iTunes Store

The number of Christmas Day visits to the iTunes section of Apple's website was 413 per cent higher than 2005, according to Hitwise. The Web statistics compiler attributes the rise to new iPod owners hurrying to download the iTunes software. iPod sales also appear to have led to a surge in iTunes Store purchases. ...more

AOL buys video search company

If any further proof was needed that online video is the next gold rush on the web, AOL has bought up the privately held Californian startup Truveo. The announcement follows a week in which Google launched its video store and Apple announced stunning growth of the video content of iTunes with a million videos sold in its first month of operation. AOL has been tempted to buy Truveo because of its proprietary web crawling technology called 'Visual Crawling'. ...more

From the cradle to the mobile phone

Believe it or believe it not, but it seems that that electronics company Siemens is targeting its latest mobile phone at toddlers. News has trickled in via a report in the Sydney Morning Herald, which quotes a report in Danish newspaper Berlingske Tiden that the company is testing a handset in Germany which features big, child-sized buttons and weighs 200g. The new Leonie phone could hit European shelves next year and backs up the trend that youngsters are more interested in technology than playing with their toys. ...more

Driving video

Hollywood-based Seagate Technology has announced a new 'V' optimised code for its disk drives sporting a 16Mb cache, designed to improve performance and reliability when reading and writing bandwidth-intensive data, such as digital video. The V drives will minimise read/write fluctuations allowing for the smooth and quick transfer of large uncompressed video files that can be stored, retrieved and edited without fear of dropouts, screen freezes or data loss. Brian Dexheimer, executive vice president, Worldwide Sales, Marketing and Customer Service at Seagate Technology, said: "As digital content continues to proliferate, the ability to keep data moving at faster rates with greater consistency is increasingly important. ...more

AMD saddles up Athlon 64 FX-53 at tech show

AMD has used the CeBit show to announce the release of its AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor. Aimed at 'power-hungry enthusiasts, gamers, and prosumers', the FX processor runs at 2.4GHz and comes with a total cache of 1,152 KB (128KB L1 + 1024KB L2). ...more