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/ 26 October 2007
Apple’s upgraded Leopard operating system will be set loose on Friday as trend-setting iPods and iPhones cause the ranks of Macintosh computer lovers to swell. Eagerly-awaited by Apple’s notoriously cultish followers, Leopard’s release was delayed so the company’s engineers could devote their time to getting iPhones to market in the United States in June.
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/ 18 October 2007
News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch said his recently-launched Fox Business Network cable channel is off to a good start and joked that its rival, top United States business news cable network CNBC, was ”half-dead.” Fox Business launched in 30-million homes on Monday featuring a programme lineup that seeks to make business news palatable to the average viewer.
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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
Embattled internet portal Yahoo! reported a slight drop in quarterly net profits on Tuesday as increased spending offset increased revenue. Yahoo! earned ,3-million, or 11 cents per share, compared with ,5-million, or 11 cents per share, in the year-ago quarter.
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/ 16 October 2007
Google has introduced a long-promised video filtering system for its YouTube website. The system is designed to help owners of copyrighted videos crack down on pirated versions distributed over the video-sharing site. The tracking and identification system was developed in response to complaints by large media companies.
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/ 11 October 2007
Online video search service <i>blinkx</i> took on <i>Google</i> with the launch on Wednesday of a video advertising platform to challenge one released by the internet giant a day earlier. The <i>blinkx</i> AdHoc platform lets people embed ad-laced videos in their websites and then share in advertising revenues.
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.
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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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/ 25 September 2007
Microsoft is negotiating to buy a stake in social networking site Facebook that could value the company at -billion or more, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The report said that Microsoft is keen to buy a 5% stake in the company, but is facing competition from Google.
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/ 21 September 2007
The dozens of entrepreneurs gathered for an exclusive high-tech conference in San Francisco this week all hoped to dazzle the crowd with their ingenuity. But one start-up, Powerset, is pursuing a particularly challenging goal: it is aiming to outshine the internet’s brightest star with a new search engine built to outsmart Google.
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/ 18 September 2007
Nevada authorities are scaling down the search for United States adventurer Steve Fossett after an intensive two-week effort, officials said on Monday. ”It arrives at the point when the mission has to evolve,” Major Cynthia Ryan of the Nevada civil air patrol told Reuters.
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/ 14 September 2007
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin park their jet just a stone’s throw from their offices, paying $1,3-million a year for rights at a federally maintained airfield, the <i>New York Times</i> reported Thursday. Why put up with bothersome local traffic when you can shell out a princely sum for take-off and landing rights just a few minutes from your office?
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/ 13 September 2007
Apple may bid for the rights to a wireless spectrum auctioned by the United States Federal Communications Commission, a risky but intriguing move that would help carry the consumer electronics company into the telecommunications realm. The auction will take place in January.
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/ 4 September 2007
Internet search leader Google has begun hosting material produced by the Associated Press and three other news services on its own website instead of only sending readers to other destinations. The change that started last Friday affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day.
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/ 2 September 2007
Apple is expected to unveil revamped iPods at a special event on Wednesday in San Francisco. The internet is buzzing with speculation sparked by enigmatic Apple event invitations bearing an image of a silhouetted iPod-wearing figure dancing above the words ”The beat goes on”.
A new email urging recipients to watch a video of themselves on YouTube actually directs them to a fake site that infects their computers and turns them into spam machines, security experts have warned. A hacker group known as ”Storm Botnet” began dispersing the emails over the weekend.
Yahoo! has introduced new features for its popular web-based email program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone’s cellphone. The enhancements make it easier to send email, instant messages or SMSs from a single website.
A United States web firm is preparing to launch an ambitious internet search
engine that it hopes will eventually track down the names of the world’s six billion people. Spock.com says it has already indexed 100-million people and is adding a million names per day on the invitation-only, beta version of its website
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said on Friday he is putting the building blocks in place for a community-developed web search service that would compete with search engines such as Google or Yahoo! The new Wikia search service will combine computer-driven algorithms and human-assisted editing.
When internet consultant Giovanni Gallucci first joined the professional networking site LinkedIn two years ago, he felt like a pioneer. Now he’s one of millions. The 10 biggest social networking sites had more than 200-million visitors in March. Together, their users blogged, tagged, uploaded, messaged and viewed a staggering 34-billion web pages.
Internet search giant Google said on Monday it has agreed to buy web security firm Postini for $625-million in cash, expanding its business software applications. Google plans to operate the company as a subsidiary in its Google Apps (applications) unit, which includes its email, calendar and documents applications.
Apple and AT&T sold about 500 000 iPhones over the weekend, according to a report from research firm Piper Jaffray. The phones, which include a fully integrated web browser and digital media player, went on sale on Friday night following months of excitement. The iPhone has been hailed as the future of cellphones.
Thousands of United States gadget fans flocked to stores on Friday to be the first buyers of Apple’s iPhone, a music-playing and web-browsing device expected to shake up the mobile industry. Crowds lined up at some of Apple’s outlets cheered as their doors opened at 6pm local time.
Hundreds of gadget fans, or their paid stand-ins, lined up on Friday to be among the first buyers of Apple’s iPhone, a music- and video-playing phone that seeks to reshape the mobile industry. Just after dawn, nearly 200 people were waiting outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York City for the device.
Apple’s founder and saviour Steve Jobs has revolutionised culture, up-ended the music world and set his sites unabashedly on the ”smart phone” industry. With the United States launch of iPhones on June 29, Jobs aims to transform the ”smart phone” industry in ways that iPods did to music and Macintosh computers did to lifestyles.
Firefighters were on Monday battling to contain a forest fire near California’s Lake Tahoe that destroyed as many as 220 homes and forced the evacuation of 1 000 people, officials said. The blaze, which officials said was probably caused by humans, erupted on Sunday near the southern tip of Lake Tahoe, 304km north-east of San Francisco.
Teenagers have online cliques at MySpace; students star in Facebook; LinkedIn is an internet networking stage for professionals; and dogs and their human counterparts run with the pack at Dogster — a flourishing social-networking website for canines, referred to as "animal companions" instead of "pets".
Faced with concerns by European online privacy advocates, Google is promising to obscure information about people’s internet searches after only 18 months. Google’s global privacy counsel revealed late on Monday the Mountain View, California, firm’s policy change in a letter to the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party in Belgium.
Apple launched a version of its Safari web browser for Windows-based PCs on Monday, pitting it against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. The free program is the latest move by Apple to expand its reach beyond its Macintosh computer while attracting converts to its products.
Apple has not yet sold a single iPhone, but investors are driving up the company’s shares to record highs as they bank that the combined telephone and media player will be a major hit. A slew of brokerages are raising their targets on Apple’s stock to as much as — equivalent to about 40 times its expected fiscal 2008 profit.
Computer-game makers and industry analysts agree that the Wii is trouncing rival video-game consoles due to a captivating blend of ease, fun, family, friends and affordability. Demand for Wii consoles has outpaced supply since they debuted in November last year.