Mobile Phone penetration to exceed 100 per cent in Europe

The mobile phone market in Western Europe is already beyond saturation in some countries according to a new survey by market research company Analysys. Italy, Sweden and the UK have already seen their market penetration exceed 100 per cent in 2004 and the rest of the continent is likely to follow suit by 2007. However, rather than indicating that more than all of us have a mobile phone, the apparent statistical anomaly is due to many people buying multiple phones or SIM cards. ...more

Intel finally demos 80-core processor

Intel has finally put its money where its mouth is regarding the much hyped 80-core processor. At last year's IDF in San Francisco, the company showed a prototype design that could theoretically achieve teraflop speeds - that's a trillion floating-point operations per second. We were a little underwhelmed at the time since all that was shown was a non-working wafer which was merely being used for testing fabrication methods. ...more

Down in the CIA data mines

Data Mining is something you might associate with the "corporate data" department of some monolithic banking institution. But such is the volume of information it has to process, the CIA is also developing data mining technology for its own rather special purposes. The Washington Times reports that the CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology (AIT) has embraced data mining technology as means of coping with the flood of information to monitor. ...more

BSkyB tunes into broadband

BSkyB has hinted that it expects the Internet to play a significant role in the delivery of programming over the next few years. COO Richard Freudenstein told the Royal Television Society that services will be delivered over broadband as well as by satellite. 'New Ethernet connections will allow us to deliver services such as VOD (video on demand) over a broadband pipe as well as over satellite,' he said. ...more

Toshiba attacks the value end with new notebooks

The Portege A200 is Toshiba's new value ultra-portable notebook (pictured). The major reason for the light weight is that it has a 12.1in screen. ...more