Dan is still the man

Dan Technology has been bought out and plumped up with ?2.5m of private investment. A new management team has bought out the company and broadened its remit, aiming its products at the education and public, as well as the consumer sectors. ...more

Microsoft reports its success in billions

This is the week that technology giants report their quarterly results. Following on the heels of Intel, IBM, Sun, and Handspring, among others, come the figures from Redmond. And the figures are rather large. ...more

BT charges users over its mistakes

British Telecom is to bill thousands of Internet users after discovering that it had been inadvertently providing them with truly free Internet access. Some of BT's telephone exchanges had failed to recognise the 0845 numbers used by subscribers to connect, and instead registered them as dialling a free 0800 number. Despite admitting that the whole affair has been due to its own mistakes, the telecom company still "needs to recoup the money", which is estimated to amount to around ?5 million. ...more

Humans, in XML form

It sounds vaguely Sci-Fi, with a twist of bureaucracy: the OASIS HumanMarkup Technical Committee has been created to develop "a specification for conveying human characteristics through XML". The day of the avatar is obviously getting closer - we have already covered virtual assistants for online shopping and "emoti-photi-cons" for adding emotion to emails - and maybe HumanML will help standardise the process. The "human characteristics" they are interested in include "cultural, social, psychological and intentional features", and targeted applications include AI, virtual reality, advertising and even psychotherapy, art, workflow, advertising, cultural dialogue, agent systems, diplomacy and business negotiation. ...more

HP targets small busineses in the printer market

HP is to focus its printer group on the SMB market in the coming months. Michael Hoffman, HP's EMEA VP for imaging and printing, said that HP's own research showed it has a strong opportunity to grab a significant portion of this growing market. It found that four in five SMBs aren't just small, they're tiny, with staff numbers between five and 25. ...more