Microsoft offers surplus IP for sale

Microsoft has opened the doors to its research labs a little and is offering what it says are 'hundreds' of innovations which can be licenced by start ups and venture capitalists. The announcement of Microsoft Intellectual Property (IP) Ventures was made to a gathering of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. 'Our research labs and efforts across the company have created a large portfolio of innovative technologies that extend the reach of personal computing today, with much of it going into Microsoft products,' commented Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. ...more

SCO announces new products for SCOx Initiative

SCO has released the first set of products surrounding its web services project which was announced in April under the name of SCOx Initiative. The company has announced a number of new products including the SCOx WebFace development environment, Ericom PowerTerm Host Publisher and the SCOsms Web Services and SCObiz Web Services APIs. SCOx is a technology framework, aimed at the development and delivery of inter and intranet applications. ...more

PC Pro price correction: Evesham Axis 64 37AXT

In the latest issue of PC Pro, the review of the Evesham Axis 64 37AXT was incorrectly printed with a price of ?1,799 including VAT. This should have been ?1,799 excluding VAT. As a consequence, its value for money rating drops to four out of six and it loses its Recommended award. ...more

AOL lays off 1300 staff

AOL is cutting 1300 of its staff with the brunt of the cuts falling at its customer support call centres. The cuts represent seven per cent of AOL's workforce worldwide. The official reason is that the nature of AOL subscribers has changed with today's customers being much more knowledgeable than at the height of its expansion in the mid 1990s. ...more

TDK spins CD-R/RW into triple performance

Forget DVD-RAM, the future is the humble CD, as TDK has gone into a joint venture with Calimetrics Inc to produce a new technology that will triple the capacity and write speed of CD-R/RW drives. The technology should enable write speeds of 36 and a storage capacity of up to 2Gb on special MutiLevel recording (ML) discs, as well as allowing you to write 700Mb to a standard CD-R/RW at 12-speed. The new ML CD-R/RW drives will only differ from standard drives in that they use new integrated circuits and will not therefore be much more expensive. ...more