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/ 14 January 2008
Two firms are racing to map the world as the internet goes increasingly mobile with ever more sophisticated gadgets for people on the move. Netherlands-based Tele Atlas and Navteq, which has its headquarters in the United States, criss-cross countries around the world to gather information about what is where and how to drive to it.
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/ 10 January 2008
What’s in store for tech fans in 2008? Plenty. If the stirrings of the present are any indication of what’s on the horizon, technology buffs can look forward to products that are better, faster, and less expensive than those we rely on today. The best news of all is that some of the most exciting products should appear earlier in 2008 rather than later on.
The booming popularity of Nintendo’s Wii console and DS handheld sent the combined sales of game machines and gaming software in Japan to a record high last year, according to research by a Japanese publisher. The results underline the stellar success of Nintendo, the company maker behind Super Mario and Pokemon games.
After Microsoft founder and chairperson Bill Gates gave what he said was his last keynote address to the Consumer Electronics Show late on Sunday night, it’s worth bearing in mind that he has often been dramatically wrong about where he thought technology was heading.
Nintendo’s Wii outsold rival Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) three-fold in Japan last year, helping the country’s multibillion-dollar video game market to notch up its best-ever year, a survey showed on Monday. Nintendo sold about 3,63-million Wii consoles in its home market in 2007 while Sony sold 1,21-million PS3s, according to magazine publisher Enterbrain.
Toshiba said on Sunday its HD DVD high-definition video format is not dead despite being dealt a big setback by Warner’s decision to exclusively back Sony rival Blu-ray technology. Akiyo Ozaka, president of Toshiba America Consumer Products, told a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that HD DVD "has not lost".
Microsoft chairperson Bill Gates took centre stage at the world’s largest technology show for the last time on Sunday and predicted that his industry was on the cusp of the next "digital decade". Gates said computing will become a pervasive part of everyday life through devices like televisions and cellphones.
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/ 26 December 2007
Online social-networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar in 2007 as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities. Seven out of the 10 hottest topics that triggered Google internet queries during the year involved social networking.
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/ 18 December 2007
Social networking websites saw their ranks swell and values soar this year as everyone from moody teenagers and mellow music lovers to mate-seeking seniors joined online communities. Google’s freshly released <i>Zeitgeist 2007</i> reveals that seven out of the 10 hottest topics which triggered internet queries during the year involved social networking.
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/ 30 November 2007
Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies. Users will have greater control over whether they want to participate in a programme that circulates information about their online purchases.
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/ 27 November 2007
If the experience of the world’s largest software vendor is any guide, the industry’s best hope for reducing piracy rests with anti-copying technologies rather than in policing the legalistic user agreements that restrict how software can be used. Microsoft is locking software down through a programme it calls its Genuine Software Initiative.
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/ 27 November 2007
Singapore has banned an Xbox video game because it contains a sex scene between a woman and a female alien character, the city-state’s censors said. Mass Effect, a futuristic space adventure published by Microsoft, has been banned from sale because of ”lesbian intimacy” between two characters.
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/ 18 November 2007
The 11th edition of the Pick ‘n Pay 94.7 Cycle Challenge delivered the expected drama when Neotel’s Nolan Hoffman crossed the line first but was immediately demoted to 10th position after being motor-paced back to the peloton following a tyre puncture with 5km to go.
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/ 15 November 2007
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told Google employees on Wednesday his meteoric rise in politics mirrored the company’s emergence as the lifeblood of the internet and he surprised his hosts by answering a geeky engineering question.
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/ 9 November 2007
When a blogger revealed earlier this year that Microsoft wanted to pay him to fix purported inaccuracies in technical articles on Wikipedia, the software company endured online slams and a rebuke from the web encyclopedia’s founder for behaving unethically. But why is it so bad to pay someone to write something on Wikipedia?
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/ 8 November 2007
BHP Billiton has made a long-awaited bid approach to Rio Tinto in a move aimed at creating a $350-billion-plus mining giant, but Rio rejected the all-share proposal as too low. Rio shares leapt as much as 30% in London to a record high on Thursday after it said BHP had proposed offering three of its shares for every one Rio share.
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/ 7 November 2007
Google on Monday spelled out long-rumoured plans to enter the cellphone market in 2008 by building software that could help the industry make the internet run more easily on phones. The web search company is looking to expand the range of internet services it now offers through computer browsers to the far larger cellphone market.
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/ 5 November 2007
As investors bet on the future of social networks, some of the biggest players in the field are due to unveil this week ways of piping in advertising to the most personal of media formats. MySpace, the world’s largest social network, is releasing details on Monday of how it is building discrete audiences out of nearly 110-million users.
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/ 30 October 2007
A computer developed for the world’s poor children, dubbed ”the laptop”, has reached a milestone: It is now selling for . The One Laptop per Child Foundation, founded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte, has started offering the lime-green-and-white machines in lots of 10 000 or more for apiece on its website.
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/ 29 October 2007
Microsoft, seeking to expand in the medical sector, has agreed to acquire the assets of a privately held, Thailand-based health information system company, the software giant announced on Monday. Global Care Solutions specialises in creating software modules for hospitals’ clinical and administrative operations.
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/ 26 October 2007
Apple produced a stunning set of financial results on Monday, with one big surprise. In a quarter that has been dominated by talk of the iPhone and new iPods, the Macintosh computers were the stars of the show. Apple sold 2,16-million units, which is more than in any other quarter in its history.
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/ 26 October 2007
It is interesting why so few of us use one of the breakthroughs of recent years: the ability to search the web from wherever we are with a cellphone. This ought to be hugely empowering. There are a number of reasons why this hasn’t happened and why it may be about to change.
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/ 23 October 2007
Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter profits jumped 67% to cap a year that saw unprecedented momentum in its Macintosh computer business, continued demand for iPods and the successful launch of the iPhone. For the three months that ended September 30, Apple said on Monday it earned -million, or ,01 per share.
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/ 22 October 2007
Microsoft ended three years of resistance on Monday and finally agreed to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust decision by the European Commission. The defeated software giant announced it would not appeal against a decisive European Union court ruling two months ago that backed the commission.
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/ 18 October 2007
Spending on computer technology will top a trillion dollars this year as the industry grows increasingly vital to national economies worldwide. An analysis of 82 countries and regions found that information technology (IT) businesses are major generators of jobs, companies and tax revenues.
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/ 17 October 2007
Like a gourmet chef who rarely eats out, Google feeds advertising services to hordes of other businesses while skimping on its own marketing. The recipe has been extremely fruitful. While the internet search leader has sold more than -billion in advertising since 2001, Google has become a household name without buying expensive ad campaigns.
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/ 17 October 2007
Vietnam’s Communist Party plans to switch its 20 000 desktop computers nationwide to open-source software next year, avoiding problems with copyright infringement, state media said on Friday. In Vietnam, an industry group has estimated more than 90% of all software is counterfeit.
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/ 11 October 2007
Sample addresses in nearly a dozen languages will be added to the internet’s central directories as early as this week, paving the way for web surfers around the world to get online without knowing any English. At this point, the 11 domain names are meant primarily for software developers and website designers to test the new system.
Yahoo! has retooled its online search engine to make it more helpful and engaging, joining an industrywide wave of improvements that so far haven’t dented Google’s dominance. It regards the upgrade announced on Tuesday as the most significant change to its search engine since it reclaimed control of the underlying technology.
In spite of its global popularity, internet telephony (voice-over-internet protocol, or VoIP), which is almost free for users, has not become a gold mine for its pioneers such as Skype and Vonage. Popular online auction firm eBay, which bought Skype two years ago for ,6-billion, affirmed that message in a costly way on Monday.
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/ 29 September 2007
Microsoft is to extend the availability of its Windows XP operating system, the company announced on Friday. Industry analysts said that the move reflected hesitancy by buyers to adopt XP’s replacement, Windows Vista, especially in the business community.
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/ 27 September 2007
Social networking site Facebook, which signs up more than a million new fans every month, has changed tack and begun to list publicly members’ profiles on search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. It is, in fact, aiming to get in early in the race to build a global — and potentially lucrative — online people directory.