Google steams ahead

Google continues to be the king of search. The runaway success of the company has seen more stellar growth over the past year with revenues rising by three quarters compared with the equivalent quarter last year. In contrast, the main rivals in search and contextual advertising are being left behind with Yahoo!'s share price hit by so-so results and the delay in its new ad software and Microsoft is struggling to keep up with its release schedule. ...more

Microsoft and Apple face patent lawsuit for auto Web updates

Microsoft and Apple are looking down the wrong end of a patent suit over infringements of a patent on web-enabled software updates. UK company BTG is the worldwide exclusive licensee for the patent, owned by New-York-based Teleshuttle Technologies, whose president and founder Richard Reisman is claimed as the inventor. BTG says that the software giants' operating systems, as well as Microsoft Office, infringe patent number 6,557,054, which was granted 29 April 2003 (although the patent claim originated in the early nineties). ...more

Yahoo! buys into the music downloads business

Yahoo! has become the latest big beast of the internet to make a play for the legal music download business with the acquisition of Musicmatch.com. The internet portal paid $160 million in cash for the service. ...more

Freeserve becomes Wanadoo, confirms ?17.99 service; PlusNet cuts ?1 off sub-512 services

Freeserve officially becomes Wanadoo today and as anticipated marked the occasion by announcing a capped 512Kbit/sec ADSL package with a 2GB monthly cap, which as we as noted yesterday compares favourably with similar products from other ISPs. Despite the name change, existing Freeserve customers will be able to carry on as before with email addresses and so on as they were. Wanadoo can be found at www. ...more

Keeping the Web stats sane

One for the Webmasters - Sane Solutions has updated its NetTracker software, which tracks and analyses Web site usage. Version 5.0 of the browser-based program is claimed to be of industrial strength, its scalability coping with high traffic e-commerce sites. ...more