Broadband price cuts announced

Two ISPs have announced broadband special offers in the wake of BT's decision to half the price of ADSL connections during the early part of next year. Nildram are halving the set-up fee to ?25+VAT, starting 6 January. Nildram has been rated the fastest ADSL provider in the UK in the last three months by ADSLguide. ...more

Disney poised for $7bn Pixar buy

Disney is expected to announce later today that its board has approved a $7bn takeover bid for Pixar Animation. Once the deal goes through, and there is nothing to suggest that it won't, Pixar (and Apple) CEO Steve Jobs will become Disney's single largest shareholder and will take a seat on the board. Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter is expected to become head of animation at the enlarged company. ...more

RipGO! gets moving

Imation will launch a digital audio player that burns mini-CDRs. The RipGO! player, to be launched in the spring of next year, uses 185MB mini-CD-R discs to store data. The player supports MP3 and WMA formats and you can expect to get around three to six hours of audio on a disc (depending on the compression rate you opt for). ...more

BBC under fire for adverts

Hugo Drayton, Managing Director of Hollinger Telegraph New Media has voiced his anger amongst increasing criticism of the way the BBC is marketing its digital services. He said: "Those publishers and employees who are striving hard to make their businesses succeed are rightly appalled and angered by the blatant cross-promotion, particularly in television, of the BBC's website." The BBC argues that investing in its BBC Online division is in accordance with its original remit to give licence payers access to new technology. ...more

Vodafone turns to Sun for Linux-based computing support

Vodafone has signed a deal to use Sun's full software, hardware and services products. 'With this agreement with Sun, we anticipate significant cost and synergy savings over the next few years due to reduced support and deployment costs,' said Detlef Schultz, global supply chain director at Vodafone.' The deal will include corporate and customer network services delivered over Sun's Java Enterprise System (JES) and the Java Desktop System client on desktops. ...more