Technology News

DENVER (Billboard) - After 2006 -- a year when virtually no one managed to launch a digital music service in competition with Apple's dominant iTunes -- 2007 was a refreshing change of pace.

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. is working on a new Internet encyclopedia that will consist of material submitted by people who want to be identified as experts and possibly profit from their knowledge.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google is building its own version of communally-constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which consistently ranks among the most visited websites in the world.

WASHINGTON - The head of the Federal Trade Commission said Friday she won't remove herself from an antitrust review of Google Inc.'s purchase of online advertising company DoubleClick, rebuffing requests from privacy groups opposed to the transaction.

NEW YORK - In a Dec. 13 story about S5 Wireless, a Utah company that is designing a new wireless positioning system, The Associated Press listed the incorrect Web site address for the company. The correct address is http://www.s5w.com.

DENVER (Billboard) - The 2007 mobile music market could be summed up in one phrase: "It's the device, stupid."

CALGARY, Alberta - Piotr Staniaszek normally pays $147 a month for his cell phone. So he was more than a little surprised to learn his November bill had ballooned to $59,000.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS) said on Friday it will offer a "rain check" program to deliver the Wii in January to shoppers who can't buy the game console during the holiday season due to inventory shortages.

NEW YORK - To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video-game hardware and software jumped more than 50 percent in November, driven by record purchases of Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii console and several new blockbuster games, industry data showed on Thursday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS) said on Friday it will offer a "rain check" program to deliver the Wii in January to shoppers who can't buy the game console during the holiday season due to inventory shortages.

NEW YORK - To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video-game hardware and software jumped more than 50 percent in November, driven by record purchases of Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii console and several new blockbuster games, industry data showed on Thursday.

BOSTON (Reuters) - "w00t," an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

Slot machines are evolving to suit a new generation of gamblers. The new machines, targeted at gamblers under the age of 40 who grew up playing video games, require greater hand-eye coordination, with some models featuring joysticks in the works. Slot makers say younger gamblers also like clusters of machines linked together to allow for communal games. One manufacturer has teamed up with video game maker Atari to create a Pong-style machine and other skill-based slots.

DENVER (Billboard) - The 2007 mobile music market could be summed up in one phrase: "It's the device, stupid."

DENVER (Billboard) - After 2006 -- a year when virtually no one managed to launch a digital music service in competition with Apple's dominant iTunes -- 2007 was a refreshing change of pace.

CARACAS (Reuters) - A video of a Gucci- and Louis Vuitton-clad politician attacking capitalism then struggling to explain how his luxurious clothes square with his socialist beliefs has become an instant YouTube hit in Venezuela.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Dance musician Moby has launched a Web site that gives his music away -- to the right people, of course.

BRUSSELS, Belgium - The EU's top court should back a ruling that overturned regulatory approval for Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG's 2004 deal to combine their music units and form the world's second-largest record label, a legal adviser to the EU's highest court said Thursday.

It's hard to think of a higher-profile device than Apple's iPhone or one that has had more attention from hackers. In 2007, hackers broke Apple's security system by exploiting several vulnerabilities. Now, security researchers at Arbor Networks are predicting that the iPhone will be subject to "serious attack" in 2008.

San Francisco - During a weeklong period in mid-November, security experts with Symantec observed roughly 65,000 new applications being downloaded onto the computers of customers participating in a new research project -- based on their analysis of the software, as many as 60 percent of the programs were malicious.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Internet chatroom romantics beware: your next chat may be with a clinical computer, not a passionate person, trying to win your personal data and not your heart, an online security firm says.

NEW YORK - Some popular online retailers don't do enough either to inform customers how their personal information could be used or to give them control over it, according to a public interest research group.

A hole in Microsoft's Access database permits hackers to install software on vulnerable systems, the US-CERT team warns.

DENVER (Billboard) - The 2007 mobile music market could be summed up in one phrase: "It's the device, stupid."

It's hard to think of a higher-profile device than Apple's iPhone or one that has had more attention from hackers. In 2007, hackers broke Apple's security system by exploiting several vulnerabilities. Now, security researchers at Arbor Networks are predicting that the iPhone will be subject to "serious attack" in 2008.

Features include the ability to search for photos in albums or through community photos as well as add Google Gadgets.

Apple released an update on Thursday for QuickTime that fixes several security issues in the application.

Among technology companies, Apple is often perceived to have something that the likes of rivals Dell, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard lack—that indefinable element of cool. Apple carefully cultivates a specific image for itself, and a cornerstone of those efforts is its advertising, especially the 30-second spots that air on television.

As interest grows in the open source suite, Sun decides to offer back-line support for firms that distribute OpenOffice.org.

San Francisco - Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The Dutch government has set a soft deadline of April 2008 for its agencies to start using open-source software — freely distributed programs that anyone can modify — the Netherlands Economic Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

The source code for Adobe's messaging, data, and remote procedure call services will be packaged under a new open-source product called BlazeDS.

Open-source enterprise software developer OpenLogic wants open-source users to stand up and be counted in a worldwide census-- and is offering a new software tool to help the process.

NEW YORK - To deal with frustration among holiday shoppers hunting for its Wii game console, Nintendo Co. and retailer GameStop Corp. are launching a rain check program.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS) said on Friday it will offer a "rain check" program to deliver the Wii in January to shoppers who can't buy the game console during the holiday season due to inventory shortages.

NEW YORK - Online advertising jumped 25 percent this year, raking in a cool $20 billion, but Internet executives say that figure could have been even higher if advertisers had reliable and consistent ways to measure online audiences.

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Showtime Networks is partnering with Meebo, a firm that fuses video programming and chat rooms, to offer "Dexter" fans additional content after the serial-killer show airs its season finale on Sunday.

BOSTON - IBM Corp.'s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year.