Mobiles are safe, claims report

Using a cellular phone does not increase a person's risk of cancer, according to a broad study released on Tuesday involving more than 400,000 Danish cellular telephone users. A team of researchers used data on the entire population of Denmark to determine that neither short- nor long-term use of cellular phones, also called mobile phones, was linked to a greater risk of tumours of the brain and nervous system, salivary gland or eyes, leukaemia or cancer overall. It is estimated that more than 2 billion people worldwide use cellular phones. ...more

GarageBand.com fills coffers for iLike launch

GarageBand.com has secured $2.5 million financing to launch iLike, a new social music discovery service targeted at 'the iPod and MySpace generation'. ...more

Microsoft poised to open Times Square store

Microsoft is poised to follow Apple into the US retail market by opening a store in New York's Times Square. The New York Post reports that the company is currently 'on the prowl' for a suitable location in which to create a 'branding experience'. Microsoft declined to comment on the report, which said that real estate broker Jones Lang LaSalle has been asked to supply information about One Times Square, the building made famous every New Year's Eve. ...more

New optical disc standard steps out

Nine companies have signed up to a blue-laser high capacity optical disc format, paving the way for a unified next-generation DVD. The Blu-ray Disc specification is an optical disc format that uses a blue laser (current optical technology uses red lasers). The new specifications should result in capacities of up to 27Gb on a single-sided disc and up to 50Gb on doubled-sided discs along with far greater bandwidths for data transfer of 36Mbits/sec. ...more

Opera browser beta unifies platform support

Opera has released the first version of its eponymous Web browser to be consistent across all supported platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux, FreebSD and Solaris. Opera 7.5 beta 1 also extends the software's capability beyond browsing to include an email client and an IRC-compatible chat client. ...more