The weekly roundup - Friday 20 April

Keep abreast of the news with our weekly roundup of the week's main tech stories. The week is dominated by processor news, from the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing. Among the developments we reported from China was a new class of chips for ultramobiles, a variant on its Santa Rosa platform for laptops, and a mobile gaming 'extreme' processor. ...more

Adobe denies legal action against Microsoft

Adobe has issued a statement denying that it has decided on legal action against Microsoft. Earlier this month a Microsoft employee claimed that Adobe was threatening to sue Microsoft if the company went ahead and included a 'Save as PDF' function in the new Office 2007 productivity suite. Clearly irritated by Microsoft's revelations of what are supposed to be private negotiations, Adobe has reaffirmed that it is 'committed to open standards' and the published specification and is seeking to protect the PDF from fragmentation. ...more

Google betas personal search

Following Google Video - and its searching of video, which we reported yesterday - comes Google's Personalized Search. To be found at www.google. ...more

YouTube in music label talks

YouTube has begun talks with record labels in the hope of beginning to offer music videos alongside the home videos, viral ads and bootlegged clips that have propelled it to the top of the Internet popularity ratings. The site's founders are currently working to develop a commercial model that will allow it to provide the videos for free, in all likelihood supported by advertising currently conspicuously absent from the site. 'What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube,' co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters. ...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