Iomart sells Madasafish

Scottish ISP Iomart has bailed from the consumer market by selling Madasafish for ?3m. The firm will now concentrate on providing business services. The identity of the investors who bought Madasafish remains unclear, but according to Iomart's financial director David Harrison, they are buying a "viable business". ...more

Pathe publishes to the Net

British Pathe makes all 2,000 hours of published newsreel available online In a project funded by the National Lottery, British Pathe has put all the newsreels and cinemagazines online as digital videos. The archive offers 2,000 hours of footage, more than 90,000 individual items, spanning 60 years from 1910 to 1970. What is available now is everything that was shown in cinemas, which includes the the Wright brothers' first flight and footage of the Titanic. ...more

Motorola claims display breakthrough

Motorola has unveiled a new video technology, which, it claims, will enable the manufacturing of large, flat panel displays with superior quality, longer lifetimes and lower costs than current offerings. The company's research arm has demonstrated a 5in colour working prototype based on its proprietary Carbon Nanotube (CNT) technology. Carbon nanotubes are extremely thin (one nanometer in diameter, about 10,000 times smaller than that of a human hair), hollow cylinders made of carbon atoms. ...more

Microsoft contract win put down to Linux skills shortage

Microsoft may find a monopoly on developers will help it maintain its grip on the software market in the face of Linux alternatives. Redmond is currently touting the roll-out by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) of Microsoft's server and back-end technology in its e-commerce driven online portal as a win over Linux, the platform on which the site originally ran. But Richard Carlson, Head of Business Systems, RICS, said that the decision to go with Microsoft was taken very early on before the job was put out to tender - on the basis that RICS' in-house developers were in the main Microsoft coders. ...more

Sony and Ericsson join forces in mobile venture

Sony and Ericsson hope to beat the drop in mobile phone sales by combining forces. A new company, called Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and based in London, will be run equally by the two companies in order to produce reference designs for handsets and mobile organisers. Katsumi Ihara of Sony will head up the operation, due to start in October, and the first products should be ready next year. ...more