Ratner bounces back to the Web

The one thing a retailer shouldn't do is to describe his own wares as "crap". Gerald Ratner learnt this the hard way, but is now planning to make a World Wide Web come back. Gerald Ratner will probably never live down his comment that undermined his jewellery empire, but he's attempting to put it all behind him and set up a new Web site that will sell - surprise, surprise - jewellery. ...more

Mac users get video with their Skype

It's been a long time coming for Mac lovers of Skype, but there is finally code for general consumption that adds video to the VoIP service. The fact that progress on the Mac and Linux versions of Skype appeared to be hobbling along, compared with their Windows counterpart, has been something of a bone of contention. So much so, that it has been one of the motivating factors behind Skype's release of its Video Preview. ...more

Tiscali joins 2Mbps broadband fray

2Mbps broadband looks to be the new front line for ADSL price wars, as Tiscali joins the fray by reducing its price to ?17.99 a month. This brings it in line with Wanadoo, which announced a 2Mbps service at the same price last week, and BT, which promoted all its Broadband Basic customers to that bandwidth a few days ago. ...more

Microsoft's Ballmer tells customers to stick with Windows

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO has emailed management and IT professionals in a fierce defence of Windows against Linux and Unix in the Enterprise. In the email he warns potential Linux customers, `the number of security vulnerabilities is lower on Windows, and Windows responsiveness on security is better than Linux; and Microsoft provides uncapped IP indemnification of their products, while no such comprehensive offering is available for Linux or open source.` Citing various studies, some of which were paid for by Microsoft - although all 'independent' according to Ballmer - he claimed that while Linux may appear 'free', training, consultancy and continuing support costs meant that over the longer term, Windows was less expensive. ...more

Amazon bags US patent on monitoring browsing history

Amazon has been granted a US patent on monitoring browsing history in order to suggest information or products which might be of interest. The online retailer can claim to have pioneered such technology with its 'people who bought this also bought' recommendations. Patent number 6,912,505, entitled 'Use of product viewing histories of users to identify related products', describes identifying a relationship between products that are frequently viewed and storing the relationship in data in a table that maps one product to another. ...more