Recordable DVD discs in short supply

According to Ritek, recordable DVD discs are in short supply. Both Ritek and CMC Magnetics are planning to transfer part of their CD-R discs production lines to recordable DVD disc manufacturing. Ritek said that it has already increased recordable DVD disc shipments to 10 million units per month in the first quarter, up from eight million units near the end of last year, but it still cannot meet the strong demand from its clients, according to the Economic Daily News. ...more

UK increases its appetite for broadband

If figures released today by Ofcom are any indication of the nation's appetite for broadband, Britain is still hungry for high-speed connectivity. More than 13 million UK homes and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are now broadband-enabled, compared with 9.9 million a year ago and an even smaller tally of 330,000 back in 2001, according to the regulator's Digital Progress Report. ...more

Strato banks on .eu domain speculation

European hosting provider Strato is moving into domain-only hosting for the UK. The company is only providing the service in the UK as elsewhere in Europe there is little market demand. The UK is anomalous in that there appears to be plenty of people wanting to register domains as a speculative venture. ...more

More PC doom and gloom from Gartner

Analyst Gartner Dataquest has marked another step downwards for the European PC industry with the announcement that the sector has experienced its first ever instance of a decline in shipments. The Q2 figures for 2001 show 6.02 million shipments, a four per cent drop over the same quarter last year. ...more

Yahoo! AOL sign deals to put their IM on Blackberry

Both Yahoo! and AOL have signed deals with Research in Motion to add their instant messaging services to the increasingly popular Blackberry platform. The wireless email device which has become a favourite of movers and shakers worldwide and is an obvious target for Yahoo! which has been pursuing an aggressive strategy of dominating emerging mobile web services. For example, RIM customers can already access Yahoo! Mobile Internet, including Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Sports on BlackBerry devices. ...more