Yahoo extends community strategy to shopping

Internet portal Yahoo! has introduced a new service to its shopping channel called the 'Shoposphere`. The new service allows Yahoo! members to provide a 'pick list' of their favourite products and where to buy them. A member simply creates their own 'pick list' of products along with a title, a description of the product and why it gets into the list. ...more

China tests US software to block Skype calls

China has begun testing software from a US company that blocks Skype Internet-based phone calls. In September we reported that China Telecom was looking to block eBay-owned Skype's VoIP service, worried about the threat to its own landline business. Atlanta-based Verso Technologies' NetSpective M-Class software is capable of filtering out both VoIP calls and peer-to-peer traffic, in addition to providing bandwidth and content management tools. ...more

Price check: TFT monitors

Time for a quick snapshot of TFT monitor prices and to check how things have changed since the last price check we ran back in February. A very quick summary would read: 15in prices static, 17in prices competitive, 19in displays for the price of 18in, and 20in static again.. ...more

Open-source DRM project reaches version 2

Open source DRM may sound oxymoronic, but following Sun Microsystems' decision last year to create a royalty-free copy protection technology, Mutable Media has unveiled version 2 of its OpenIPMP DRM software. The release of OpenIPMP's source code ends three years of inactivity for the project that began life as a user-authenticating technology for the MPEG-4 codec. The new version increases the number of standards with which OpenIPMP is compatible and supports a wider variety of codecs. ...more

UK broadband connections overtake dial-ups

The number of broadband connections in the UK has exceeded dial-up usage for the first time. BT figures show that there are now more than 7.4 million broadband users, with two million using cable and 5. ...more