DVD sales reach new heights

It seems that the British public has embraced the DVD format, with millions of the silver discs being snapped up throughout the UK. The British Video Association revealed that a total of 16.6 million DVDs were sold in 2000, this was four times the amount sold in 1999, which totalled 4 million discs. ...more

Rendezvous opened

Apple has made its Rendezvous networking technology and an updated OS X core free to developers. The decision to make Rendezvous open source was no secret having been pre-announced last month. The official confirmation merely adds a few details, including the release of software to support Linux, Unix, and Windows-based systems and devices. ...more

The low-down on... Broadband

If there's one subject that's bound to get an IT journalist irate, it's broadband Net access. Why? Because we've been waiting for it for so very, very long and now it's shown up, only a very small proportion of us can actually get it and even then it seems to take an age to install and is very expensive. But why do we need broadband anyway? Recently Matt Peacock, director of corporate communications at AOL said that unless the UK catches up with the rest of Europe and the US in broadband we will become a second-rate nation. ...more

Google news by email

Google has launched a beta version of a service that emails you whenever a news story matching specified search terms appears on Google News. To receive the emails you simply visit Google News Alerts, enter the search terms you want tracked, add your email address and state how often you want to be notified - either as the stories appear or once a day. You can create as many News Alerts as you wish. ...more

Yahoo! releases new Messenger

Yahoo! is to formally unveil the latest version of its instant messenger communications applet today. The latest version of of Yahoo Messenger which the company released as a beta a month ago features 'audibles' - kind of audio equivalents of emoticons, which are bound to annoy offices everywhere - and avatars. The service also offers such things as Launchcast radio, photo sharing and address book. ...more