Microsoft wins eBook award

News from the world of electronic books: Microsoft has been awarded the inaugural Alan Kay Award for eBook Innovation. Mibrary, a company producing "digital library software" made the award at BookTech West 2000 in San Francisco. It's to recognise "the largest contributor to the advancement and popularisation of electronic books in the past year". ...more

Cutting the cost of ASDL installation

ISPs quick to pass on the savings to consumers. From 1 October, for three months, BT Wholesale is to halve the setup costs for IPStream, the broadband service it makes available to ISPs. The installation fee for its USB modem version of ADSL will be cut from ?150 to ?75, enabling ISPs to provide cheaper broadband offerings to the public. ...more

Dell buys Alienware

Dell Computers has agreed to buy Alienware, the manufacturer of funky high performance computers and notebooks beloved of the gaming community. The deal, which has been doing the rounds of the blog rumour mill for the past week, was finally confirmed yesterday. Both companies were quick to reassure customers that the Alienware brand approach, and the bling that the company is famous for, will not disappear into the Dell corporate culture. ...more

Motorola unveils second iTunes-compatible phone

Motorola has unveiled its second iTunes-compatible phone, ditching the ROKR design for the RAZR-inspired SLVR L7. The Bluetooth phone is less than half an inch thick and weighs a mere 3.5 ounces. ...more

Microsoft to support RSS in Longhorn and IE 7

Microsoft has revealed that its next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, will support the RSS format. The new version of Internet Explorer is also expected to support RSS when it appears later this year. The moves are expected to give a sizable push to the technology particularly when Longhorn appears next year. ...more