Vantage shuts up shop

Vantage Computers has gone into liquidation following weeks of unanswered calls at the Kent-based PC maker. Doubts were raised over the company's future when it was expelled from the Professional Computing Association (PCA), for repeatedly failing to respond to the Association's attempts to solve customer disputes. It has also reportedly failed to refund at least one customer's pre-payment. ...more

Intel hands out gongs for innovative design

Intel has held its annual Innovative PC Design Awards designed to recognise innovation in consumer desktops, business desktops and mobile PCs. Using Pentium processors, of course. First awarded in 1999, this year's ceremony was in San Jose at the Intel Developer Forum, Fall 2002, with Acer, IBM and Panasonic among the roll call of winners. ...more

'Tremendous' response to iPod shuffle, Apple says

Apple is buoyant about its sales for the Christmas shopping season, following the first shipments of the new, tiny iPod shuffle and yesterday's unveiling of Core2Duo MacBooks. Philip Schiller, Apple's head of worldwide product marketing, said that the matchbook-sized shuffle is proving highly popular. 'Response to it has been tremendous,' he said. ...more

Glasgow tops the bandwidth charts

Glasgow has superseded London as the UK's leading city when it comes to broadband bandwidth provision. An average 2,395Kbps are available to each Internet user in the Scottish city, a figure that is significantly higher than the average 1,943Kbps on offer in London. The figures, gathered by Dutch research firm iPing, show that despite an overall 23 per cent increase in bandwidth, the average available download speed per subscriber in the largest conglomerations is steadily decreasing. ...more

Netvibes opens up the personalised portal

Netvibes is bidding to put the power to create all-you-need-to-know Web portals in the hands of individuals. Eighteen months ago, the Paris-based company pioneered the creation of personalised home pages with live news feeds that update instantly instead of the static, occasionally updated pages common on blogs, social networks and older Web portals. In its new incarnation, Netvibes is giving users, for free, the power to publish their home pages as personal Web portals. ...more