Sony tackles YouTube with its own video-sharing website

Sony will today launch a video-sharing site in Japan, marking the electronics and entertainment firm's first step towards challenging Google's YouTube service. News Corp, which owns MySpace, and NBC Universal said last month they would also launch a free online video site this year, as traditional media firms scramble to keep up with video sharing. Sony also hopes to introduce its service, called eyeVio, abroad, but said it first wanted to gauge the reception at home before drawing up an overseas launch schedule. ...more

Mobile Java - the Nokia edition

Nokia and Borland are getting together to help make sweet Java - for wireless applications, that is. The two corporations have announced a new set of Java tools for mobile applications, with the intention of extending Java's reach. The new release is the JBuilder Mobile Set, Nokia Edition, which is compliant with Sun's specification for the Java2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME, basically a subset of Java for embedding in devices). ...more

Bulldog to remain at master's side

Cable & Wireless' UK boss John Pluthero has scotched rumours that the company is about to sell the retail side of its Bulldog broadband service. Pluthero, who has just taken over as the head of C&W's UK business, said that the company is happy with the revenues from the LLU-based broadband provider. Bulldog has more than doubled its number of customers since August 2005, from 48,000 to 107,000, giving it around 30 per cent of the UK local loop unbundling (LLU) market. ...more

Apple stomps up the brand charts

Every year Business Week and Interbrand try to put a value on the brands of the world's biggest corporations and see how they compare. It is a ranking of 'The 100 Best Global Brands' by dollar value. For 2004, Apple and Samsung (as last year) are among those measured as being the fastest growing brands. ...more

Four-fold increase in online images of severe child abuse

Images of child abuse posted and sold online are rapidly becoming more graphic and more sadistic and involving younger children, an Internet monitoring group said today. In its annual report, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said in the last year there had been a four-fold increase in the number of images involving severe abuse. The group said nearly 60 per cent of all commercial child abuse websites now sold images of child rape. ...more