Record industry takes P2P advertising

The record industry, having spent the best part of the last five years trying to destroy peer-to-peer networks, has now realised that file sharers are also their biggest customers and has started to insert adverts into shared files. The Wall Street Journal reports that a Jay-Z video has been inserted into decoy files which are then uploaded to file sharing networks. 'The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us,' said Jay-Z's attorney, Michael Guido. ...more

Microsoft preempts leak of SAP merger plans

A merger between Microsoft and SAP, the massive German business process software giant? This rather astonishing development was the subject of exploratory talks between the two companies. Microsoft has revealed today. The talks took place a 'few months ago' according a Microsoft statement on the matter. ...more

First look at the LOOX

Fujitsu Siemens reveals the first details of its PocketPC 2002 PDA. And there's not much to tell, or at least to differentiate it from the host of other PocketPC 2002-based PDAs that launched alongside the OS. Fujitsu Siemens' Pocket LOOX does however, we are told, come with integrated Bluetooth, and supports 802. ...more

Palm OS - now we are five

Palm has released the next version of its operating system for handheld PDAs to hardware and software developers. Palm OS 5 marks a crucial stage in the development of the Palm platform - used by handheld makers such as Palm itself, Handspring and Sony - as it comes under increasing pressure from Microsoft's rival PocketPC system, favoured by the Compaq for its popular iPaq. This release abandons support for the 68000 processors used in current devices in favour of faster ARM processors. ...more

Acrobat 5.0 released

Acrobat 5.0 will be somersaulting its way to a browser near you following the latest release of Adobe's document viewing program. The new version features better integration with the Web and support for the vendor-neutral database standard ODBC, for linking PDF documents back to databases. ...more