iPhone is out, but not from Apple. It is Cisco who introduced web enabled telephone handsets designed to work with Skype and similar services. Cisco has owned the trademark on the iPhone brand since 2000 and now decided to use it. Read More

Users of the Yahoo and Microsoft instant messaging programs can now contact each other directly. The two firms have released software that ties the two networks into a huge community of 350 million users.The trial software allows people to swap text messages but will eventually let people talk to each other too. Even though they are talking about interoperating, they aren't promising a merger . Are we going to see a consolidation in the IM area ?

The Linux Store is giving away free disks of linux distributions.. This is to fulfill their mission to "To help spread Linux and open source software around the world". They provide disks of Suse, fedora, mandriva, gentoo, debian, knoppix for absolutely free.

AT&T and Yahoo! have launched a first beta version which allows user to catch a glimpse of the new interface design and functionality waiting to be implemented in Yahoo! Mail, one of the leading web mail services in the U.S. and around the world. The AT&T Yahoo! Mail beta provides enhanced functionality such as drag-and-drop e-mail organization, message preview and an integrated RSS reader with easy access to breaking news, blog entries and other feeds directly from Web mail. The AT&T Yahoo! Mail beta is available to a subset of AT&T Yahoo! Mail users today and will be available to all users in the coming months.

Webaroo, free offline web search software that enables users to download Internet content to mobile devices as well as PCs for later access, has been launched today. Once Webaroo's software is downloaded, users may choose from web-packs of their choice of subject to download to their machines. The company presently offers 18 web-packs, besides a news (5 GB) and a Wikipedia (20 MB) web-pack. These are upgraded every time the device accesses Internet. See the news item

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has revealed in an interview for the Financial Times that the company is considering plans to develop its own Linux operating system. The business software provider has studied an acquisition of Novell Inc., which after Red Hat Inc. is the biggest distributor of Linux.

UNIVERSAL serial bus cables, currently used to connect devices such as printers, scanners, mice and keyboards to personal computers, may become a thing of the past as much-improved wireless technology takes off. Using what's called ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, the next version of Bluetooth should be able to transfer digital data through thin air at up to 1Gbps, although 100Mbps will probably be the norm. This month's IEEE spectrum carries an article on this.

Business version is on time, but the company won't make the key holiday consumer sales season. After another delay in the release of its Windows Vista operating system, Microsoft last week put a new executive in charge of future Windows projects and replaced several other managers. The changes are designed to better align Microsoft's desktop and Internet software teams and get products to market faster. More

Today I noticed a new link in my Gmail page annoncing the introduction of virus scan capability. Google is adding features to its mail service one after the other. This is the news item I found on the web. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/120105-google-email.html