Alexander Wolfe

Consumer electronics giants Philips and Sony have linked up with cellphone powerhouse Nokia in a bid to forge a standard for swapping multimedia content between mobile phones and home-entertainment systems. The standard will be developed by the NFC Forum, the brainchild of the three companies. NFC, which stands for Near Field Communication, refers to the […]

Microsoft is providing its most detailed glimpse to date of features in “Avalon,” the media-presentation technology component of its next-generation Longhorn operating system. The new information arrives as Microsoft prepares to roll out an updated beta release next week of its “Whidbey” Visual Studio 2005 toolset, which will serve as the development environment for creating […]

Continuing the movement of the recently released 2.6 kernel into the mainstream of the open-source world, Novell today rolled out its SuSE Linux 9.1 operating system. Novell unveiled the OS at CeBit 2004, the major European trade show held annually in Hanover, Germany. Two spins of the OS were released — a personal and a […]

Discussions aimed at reaching an antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the European Commission have fallen apart, which means the world’s largest software company is facing penalties and fines in the landmark antitrust case. “I would just like to inform you that a settlement on the Microsoft case has not been possible,” Competition Commissioner Mario Monti […]

Seeking to capitalize on the rising popularity of Linux in Asia, Hewlett-Packard now plans to sell desktop PCs equipped with the open-source operating system in Japan, China, Korea, and nine other countries in the region. The PCs will be shipped with pre-installed copies of Turbolinux, which has long been one of the most popular Linux […]

Move over, R2D2. Toyota is developing a family of “partner robots” that are designed to function as “personal assistants for humans.” The car maker has so far built three prototypes: a walking model on two legs, one on wheels, and a “mountable,” or passenger-carrying design, which it will demonstrate this month at Expo 2005 in […]

Embedded software house LynuxWorks is poised to give another boost to Eclipse next week, when it unveils a new suite of tools built around the open-source framework. LynuxWorks will make its announcement at the 2004 electronicaUSA show in San Francisco, which will run from March 29 through April 1. Lynuxworks’ new tool, which will run […]

The Open Source Development Labs, the Beaverton, Ore.-based group dedicated to advancing platforms like Linux, announced this week that Japanese software house IP Telecom K.K. has signed on. IP Telecom will participate in OSDL’s effort to promulgate both the enterprise-oriented Data Center Linux and telecom-centric Carrier Grade Linux implementations in Japan. “IP Telecom will work […]

Driven by strong replacement demand, the worldwide market for mobile phones saw higher than expected growth in 2003, according to a study released today by research firm Gartner . Worldwide handset sales in 2003 totaled 520 million units, a hefty 20.5 percent increase over 2002. “This unprecedented demand is set to continue in 2004, with […]

Chief Information Officers assessing IT spending in 2004 foresee both good news and bad, according to a just-released survey of leading CIOs conducted by market researchers Gartner . The good news is that CIOs are confident that the overall marketplace will be boosted by a 1.4 percent increase in IT spending this year. However, on […]

The first official release of the open-source alternative to Microsoft’s NetMeeting PC videoconferencing software has just rolled out of GnomeMeeting.org, the small open source group. Version 1.0 of the GnomeMeeting software package is a H.323 videoconferencing application for Linux PCs that allows users to make audio and video calls over the Internet, as long as […]

SCO Group has fired back at Novell in their legal tussle over copyright claims to parts of the Unix operating system code, arguing in a detailed motion that its lawsuit against Novell should go forward. The two companies have been embroiled in a legal battle since late January, when SCO sued Novell in a “slander […]