High-tech giants back faster transport

Cisco, Sun and Apple are among a number of leading high-tech companies that have formed the HyperTransport Technology Consortium to promote that development and deployment of AMD's HyperTransport I/O Link specification. HyperTransport is a chip-to-chip communications technology that enables microprocessors within computers to "talk" to each other. As a universal connection, it allows manufacturers to 'mix and match' components with differing bus widths and speeds, reducing the number of buses within a system and enabling "highly scalable multiprocessing systems". ...more

WAP it in the back of the net

Top games software company, Codemasters, is to launch a WAP game based on its popular LMA Manager football game. The LMA Manager Quiz game been designed and developed by Codemasters and is endorsed by the League Managers Association. The title will be distributed by Digital Bridges, the company behind WAP channel wirelessgames. ...more

Philips ditches Aptura backlight tech for LED

Philips has canned the stroboscopic backlight in its flat televisions in favour of LED technology This puts an end to the technology designed to dramatically reduce motion blur and smear on flat LCD televisions, a notorious problem with those types of TV sets. Instead of emitting constant light, like in current LCD TVs, Philips' scanning backlight emitted bursts of light, which tricked the human eye into seeing sharper images. Philips had touted the technology called Aptura as a major innovation and a potential cash cow for the lighting division which has been repositioned as one of Philips' growth engines. ...more

Consumer Crimbo Net spending reaches $18.5bn

We all wisely nodded that the demise of Boo.com and other online clothing stores that succumbed to the dotcom bust up were easily foreseeable - nobody wants to buy clothes online as they can't try them on, right? Not according to the online Christmas eSpending Report from Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive, and Nielsen//NetRatings which notes online shops racked up a record $18.5bn in sales, predominantly on clothes. ...more

Record labels move in for Napster kill

A music industry group is to complain to a US court that Napster has failed to comply with an injunction over the swapping of copyrighted songs. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) will present its filing to a US District Court early next week. "It's clear that Napster is not complying with the court's order to remove copyrighted material on its site. ...more