IT salaries rise by 5.5 per cent

According to a study by recruitment firm CV Screen, salaries have jumped by 5.5 per cent for permanent IT staff in the UK over the past year. The average salary across 30,000 advertised IT jobs in the first quarter of 2007 was ?32,965, around ?9,000 above the UK national average wage. ...more

New Visors enter the PDA fray

Handspring has two new Visor PDAs ready to launch in October. They build on the huge success of its earlier models with their versatile Springboard expansion slot, which placed the company second only to Palm in market share. The first of the new models, the Visor Prism, boasts a 16bit colour screen and retails at $449 (?320). ...more

The father of Fortran dies

John Backus, the man who led the IBM team that created Fortran - the first widely-used computer language - has died. He was 82 and passed away at his home in Oregon. In 1953, Backus proposed to IBM a more efficient alternative to assembly language for programming mainframe computers. ...more

Panasonic teams with Loudeye for music downloads

Panasonic is to enter the crowded digital music downloads market with a new service powered by Loudeye, called Music Stream. Accompanying the launch are Panasonic's new wristwatch-sized MP3 players the SVMP120 and SVMP110 (pictured). The SVMP120VK is priced at ?129, has 512 MB of memory, a 4-line LCD, supports MP3 and WMA playback and has an FM Tuner. ...more

Fuji shrinks Post-It note sized digicams

Fuji have announced two diminutive digicams. The FinePix F440 Zoom and F450 Zoom boast four and five megapixel CCDs respectively and a decent 3.4x optical zoom. ...more