Surf's up for Tiscali

After shares in Italian ISP Tiscali SpA and French ISP Liberty Surf SA were suspended yesterday, an announcement revealed the former had bought the latter in a €617m stock and cash deal. This puts Tiscali in the premier league of Europe's top four ISPs and furthers the possibility of it lining up LineOne as its next acquisition. Tiscali bought shares in France's second largest ISP for €9. ...more

IBM expands on-demand processing with 'Virtual Servers'

Virtual Server Services are IBM's latest boost to its support for on-demand computing. The idea is that users tap into 'virtual servers' running on IBM eServer xSeries, pSeries and iSeries systems - in a separate hosting environment - and pay only for the computing power and capacity they require. IBM claims that it is the first vendor to offer a choice of Intel-based, Unix-based, or Linux-based systems for the on-demand delivery of server and network capacity. ...more

Canon unveils portable, Bluetooth-compatible printer

Canon has introduced the latest addition to its printers line-up, the portable, Bluetooth-compatible Bubble Jet i80. The compact, 4,800x1,200 device prints up to A4 at a maximum speed of 14ppm mono and 10ppm colour, with a 2pl droplet size to ensure good type quality. PictBridge and Exif support is provided for direct from camera photo printing, although this device is keyed more to the business traveller than the amateur (or professional) photographer. ...more

MGM backs Blu-ray

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the latest movie studio to back the Blu-ray consortium headed by Sony. The studio is behind the James Bond and Pink Panther franchises. It is also of course the copyright holder of some of the biggest movies and TV programmes of the last 100 years and its archive will give a huge boost to the number of titles available on the new format - many of which will be in high definition for the first time. ...more

Oracles slashes price of its 10g DBMS

Oracle has cut the price of its 10g database system down to $4,995. The move is an attempt to become more competitive with Microsoft at the smaller business end of the database market. The database giant has cut the headline pricing by $1,000, a reduction of 17 per cent which now makes it directly comparable with Microsoft's SQL Server 2000. ...more