The Newspaper Shop -- Monday edition

[walktalker]

LCDs boom while price hikes loom
Will there be enough flat-panel monitors to go around in 2002? Sales of PCs and other tech products have limped along since August 2000. But flat-panel monitors -- which are built around LCDs (liquid-crystal displays) -- are selling at rates that remind tech product managers of PC sales in the mid-1990s. Last year, consumers bought 13.5 million flat-panel monitors, more than double the 6.4 million shipped in 2000, said Rhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at Stanford Resources-iSuppli.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp01

Free MS Office pack hooks into .Net
Microsoft on Monday launched new tools for linking its Office desktop software into its growing .Net Web services plan. The company posted two tools for free download on its Web site: the Office XP Web Services Toolkit and the Smart Tag Enterprise Resource Toolkit. Both tools let developers link Office, which controls more than 90 percent of the desktop business software market, into Web services developed using .Net. .Net is Microsoft's overarching plan for Web services.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Will digital TV give cable TV the boot?
A new low-cost digital television chip from Philips Semiconductors is likely to give cable TV a run for its money -- without monthly bills. Philips on Monday introduced the new chip, dubbed SAA7108A/09A HD-CODEC. The codec acts as a translator, decoding digital TV signals and allowing them to be viewed on a television or computer displays. The chip is the first to combine the two standards for digital television, known as standard definition and high definition, or SDTV and HDTV.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Segway scooter hits bump in Japan
A self-balancing scooter billed as heralding a revolution in the way people travel could run into an obstacle in Japan, where a robotics professor wants recognition for inventing a nearly identical machine 15 years ago. The claim comes a little more than a month after U.S. inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the Segway Human Transporter, ending a year of speculation and secrecy over the invention that kept the high-tech world in thrall.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

Is Silicon Valley climbing out of slump?
Productivity is still trucking along in Silicon Valley even as the tech capital suffers from the worst economic doldrums in nearly a decade. In its annual report released Monday, Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network included some silver linings in its look at the state of the region -- findings that could indicate the area has hit bottom and is poised for a comeback. The organization, which is dedicated to studying trends among Silicon Valley workers and residents, said the region has experienced at least four economic expansion waves -- in defense, integrated circuits, computers and the Internet -- that have flown high and then contracted.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Piracy raids turn up suspects, more sites
Federal investigators have turned up roughly 30 suspects and continue to raid college campuses a month after moving to shut down a massive software piracy ring, a Customs Service official said Monday. Federal agents have not arrested any members of the "DrinkOrDie" piracy ring, but roughly 30 people, including an executive of a major company, have retained lawyers to negotiate settlements with the government, said Allan Doody, who is overseeing the anti-piracy effort.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Adobe may ditch China sales
Graphics software giant Adobe Systems may leave the Chinese market and other Asian regions due to rampant piracy there, according to CEO Bruce Chizen. Adobe could stop producing versions of its products in Chinese and other Asian languages if governments in the region don't crack down on software piracy, Chizen said in a weekend article in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post. Adobe representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200...html?tag=mn_hd

Modern gadgetry looks like something from Star Trek, but...
In the 1960s, faith in technological progress came easily, since most of the equipment was still in the hands of the guys in the white lab coats at NASA and MIT. And Starfleet embodied the idealism of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. Today we live, day in and day out, with technologies that have been shipped before being adequately debugged, which can shut themselves down or wipe our e-mail archives without notice. The newer the technology, the less likely it is to do what it promises, and as for getting reliable service, forget about it.
http://www.techreview.com/articles/jenkins0102.asp

Microsoft taps start-up for MSN streams
Scale Eight has won its biggest customer to date -- Microsoft -- which is using the company's global storage system to send streams of audio out from its MSN site, the companies plan to announce Monday. The deal is worth at least $1 million to the San Francisco company, said Patrick Rogers, Scale Eight's executive vice president of marketing and business development. And it's an important endorsement for a company trying to get started in a sector that's been punished by the collapse of Internet business models. The MSN site launched over the course of several months in 2001 and now sends out about 20,000 simultaneous streams of audio -- both songs and Internet radio stations.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

BT to pay ISPs to run broadband ads
BT Wholesale, a unit of British Telecommunications, is preparing to give millions of pounds to its Internet service provider customers to help the companies advertise their high-speed Web services. The move is an attempt to boost the use of broadband in the United Kingdom, which has been extremely disappointing so far. By encouraging ISPs to advertise broadband services that they offer, BT is hoping to stimulate demand for ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Lines).
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Burger King cooks up Web rewards
Borrowing a concept from the airlines, Burger King is rewarding its loyal Whopper fans with the fast-food version of frequent flyer miles they can cash in on the Internet. In the first such loyalty program, the Miami-based company has launched a multiyear partnership with online auctioneer eBay, enabling customers to bid on CDs, tickets and other rewards using points earned in the impulse-oriented world of burgers and fries.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

French retailer to offer music downloads
Virgin Megastore France is the latest company to join the digital music fray, with plans to launch a Web site early this year that allows French Internet users to download MP3 music files, the company said Monday. The site will be produced in partnership with British technology company Tornado Group, which will handle payment and music delivery functions, the companies said. British entrepreneur Richard Branson sold Virgin Megastore France to French conglomerate Lagardere last year.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=ch_mh

Jeeves adds arms with Octopus acquisition
Internet search service Ask Jeeves said Monday that it acquired the technology assets of Octopus, a software maker that it says will help offer additional services and capture a larger market. The purchase builds on the launch last September of JeevesOne, a question-answering analysis product designed for corporate customers. Ask Jeeves also offers a free consumer search service, but is finding that some of its best revenue opportunities lie in the corporate market. Terms of the deal were not included in an Ask Jeeves news release Monday.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Listen.com adds Sony tunes to music service
Listen.com has signed a licensing agreement to add a collection of Sony's copyrighted song catalog to its fledgling Rhapsody subscription service. The deal with Sony Music Entertainment, a division of Sony, comes after last week's announcement that BMG Entertainment and EMI Recorded Music, also two major record labels, would license songs to Listen.com's Rhapsody service. San Francisco-based Listen.com becomes the only subscription service unaffiliated with the record industry to sign licensing deals with three major record labels.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

IBM spinoff takes global view of patents
IBM patent research spinoff Delphion said it is licensing its software to Patolis, formerly the Japanese Patent Information Organization. Delphion said Patolis, which became a private company last year, will use its technology to expand its online patent information service, dubbed Patolis-Web. Prior to the deal, Japanese corporations only had access to Delphion's Japanese patent data. Through the new agreement, they will have full access to Delphion's database, including U.S. and European patent and intellectual property information.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200...html?tag=cd_mh

Korea migrates 120K civil servants to Linux desktop
The Korean government is to buy 120,000 copies of Hancom Linux Deluxe this year, enough to switch 23 per cent of its installed base Microsoft user to open source equivalents. By standardising on Linux and HancomOffice, the Korean government expects to make savings of 80 per cent, compared with buying Microsoft products. This should be regarded as a big setback for Microsoft in Korea, for many years one of the few countries in which it was not the dominant player in all of the desktops app business.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23667.html

UK Parliament broadcasts live on the Web
Today marks the start of a 12-month experiment in which proceedings from both houses of Parliament, plus some Select Committees, will be broadcast live over the Web. Parliamentlive.tv can be viewed by people using a standard dial-up modem, the government says. The site offers four channels, viewable through Windows Media and Real Player, and is designed to support up to one million concurrent connections.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23659.html

Borland demands users pay for license audit
Kylix - the Linux version of Delphi - comes with very reasonable terms for proprietary software: you don't pay Borland a cent, so long as you use it to make GPL software. But in an editorial at FreshmeatT J Duchane draws attention to an extraordinary demand made by Borland: Borland reserves the right, for one year after the license expires, to enter your home and access your system and accounts to perform an audit.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23658.html

More news later on