UK student makes pixels pay

A UK student has found an innovative way to pay his way through university by selling pixels on a website. The one million pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage are being sold in 10x10 sections for $1 per pixel. Purchasers can then use the space to display an ad or logo which is linked to their own site. ...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

Newsagents to sell Napster top-up vouchers

Napster is to make 'top up' vouchers for its online music service available throughout UK newsagents. From 25 November, customers at shops owned by TM Retail - such as McColl's, Martin's, and Forbuoys - will be able to buy subscription time on Napster, or simply a set value to spend of track downloads. Blue vouchers offer two or four months' subscription at ?20 or ?40 respectively while bundles of 10, 22 and 33 downloads can be had for ?10, ?20 and ?30 respectively. ...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

Iceland leads the world for broadband

Iceland is ahead of South Korea in the broadband stakes according to the OECD. The latest report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that 26.7 of every 100 Icelanders had a connection in 2005 - and almost exclusively via DSL. ...more