Microsoft loses Diva court battle

What happens when you run a website only to have a large corporation come along with a similarly named site? Do you roll over and play dead or do you take them on in the courts? This was the dilemma faced by Dana Whitmire who had run an online business for three years in the shape of her Digital Divas site. The site is aimed squarely at women who use the Internet for their businesses and is a source for practical advice and offers many other services. However, Microsoft has begun a Digital Diva site of its own, offering mobile computer advice in an attempt to end the digital divide. ...more

GNUPedia is launched

A freely available encyclopaedia, built from contributions collected over the Internet, is the latest goal from the people behind GNU. The philosophy behind GNU can be read, at great length, on www.gnu. ...more

Adobe announces Premiere Pro

Adobe has upgraded and renamed Premiere, its video editing application now tagged Premiere Pro. The software has been redesigned with powerful, productivity enhancing features and advanced professional tools including sophisticated colour correction, powerful new audio controls and multiple, nested timelines. It has also been optimised for multiple processors and hyper-threading to take advantage of the latest generation of Intel Pentium-based systems running Windows XP. ...more

Microsoft Live Writer beta released

Another piece of the Microsoft Live mosaic is slotted into place with the release of a beta of the Live Writer tool. This is an editor principally aimed at bloggers for Windows Live Spaces, although the company says it can also be used with other blogging services including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress It offers WYSIWYG authoring and Microsoft says that the software can adapt to the styles of a blog, including headings, fonts, colours, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes. It also supports embedding of photos and other images and can modify size, text wrapping, borders, and apply graphic effects. ...more

Vodafone haunted by ghost customers

The advent of pre-pay phone packages may have been a boon for buyers who want a cheap way to get a mobile phone, but it is causing headaches for the mobile phone companies. Vodafone are one of the companies facing such woes. The company has admitted that around 1 million registered customers may have not used their phone in the past three months, this figure represents 12 per cent of its 12-million customer base. ...more