Akila Mendis

Microsoft launches Windows 7
Microsoft's much-heralded Windows 7 went on sale around the world as the US software giant seeks to reboot after the disappointment of its previous generation operating system Vista

Windows 7 made its global debut on 22^nd October to generally good reviews with most technology analysts and users who tested a demo version praising it as a significant improvement on the much-maligned Vista.

"We think our customers will enjoy the new capabilities, the speed, the performance," Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said at a Windows 7 launch event in New York. "There's more you can do with this system. The range and diversity of the application software is unsurpassed", he further added.

Source: Yahoo News

Apple beats Microsoft to market with multi-touch mouse

Apple on Tuesday released its new multi-touch Magic Mouse, which supports a number of touch gestures much like MacBook trackpads do. While not the most significant product release of the year, the Magic Mouse represents yet another instance in which Apple has beaten Microsoft to market.

Prior to that Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group had unveiled five multi-touch mice which are currently in development. They are hard to be called as mice, because not all of them are designed like traditional mice.

Microsoft Mouse 2.0

Read more on Seattlepi.com

Internet set for change with non-English addresses

The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said Monday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — the non-profit group that oversees domain names — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul. Domain names are the monikers behind every Web site, e-mail address and Twitter post, such as ".com" and other suffixes.

One of the key issues to be taken up by ICANN's board at this week's gathering is whether to allow for the first time entire Internet addresses to be in scripts that are not based on Latin letters. That could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic — in which Russian is written.

Read more on Yahoo Tech

Yahoo GeoCities no more
A service that gave many people their first taste of building and owning a web page was set to close.

Yahoo-owned GeoCities once boasted millions of users and was the third most popular destination on the web. The free site has since fallen out of fashion with users, who have switched to social networks.

Yahoo, which acquired the site for $3.57bn (£2.17bn) in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom, said sites would no longer be accessible from 26th October.

However, many of the pages have been archived and will still be available to view via the nonprofit Internet Archive project. The giant digital library, which has been archiving the public web since 1996, has set up a special project to archive GeoCities before it is lost forever.

Source: BBC News

Microsoft Deals With Twitter and Facebook to Put Status Updates in Bing

Microsoft’s latest effort to gain relevance in the search wars is about to get a whole lot more interesting. According to All Things Digital, the company is set to announce deals with both Twitter and Facebook to integrate status updates into its Bing search engine.
Details are expected to be announced later today at the Web 2.0 Summit, but the stage has been building for this for some time. Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebookback in 2007, and has since signed search and advertising deals with the social network.

Read more on Mashable

Nokia 'seeking Apple royalties'
Mobile phone maker Nokia is suing Apple to try to extract royalty payments, an analyst has suggested. Nokia has said that it was suing Apple for infringing patents on mobile phone technology for the iPhone.

Analysts estimate that the Finnish company might be looking to force royalty payments of 1-2% on every iPhone sold. With more than 30 million sold, that would work out to $6 to $12 per phone sold, or as much as $400m.

Source: BBC News

Japan debut for mobile fuel cell
An alternative to batteries that uses methanol and water to recharge gadgets is to go on sale in Japan.

Made by electronics giant Toshiba, the Dynario fuel cell is now on sale and will only be available in a limited product run of 3000 units.

Toshiba said the unit, which costs 29,800 yen (£195), can triple the battery life of portable gadgets such as mobile phones and music players. If demand proved high enough it said it would produce more units.

Toshiba has been working on fuel cells since the 1990s but has held back from putting its prototypes on shop shelves before now. Fuel cells from other firms, including Medis Technologies in the US and SFC in Germany, have been available for some time.

Source: BBC News