Topic: News

Apple Computer blew away Wall Street expectations Wednesday by reporting its second-quarter earnings soared six-fold to $290 million thanks to booming sales of iPods and computers. Revenue rose 70 percent.

British sources have confirmed that the next generation Xbox is indeed called Xbox 360, that the logo is a simple, round nexus, and that the console itself has a concave design - and a platinum white finish.

The recording industry intends to sue hundreds of college students accused of illegally distributing music and movies across Internet2, the super-fast computer network connecting leading universities for researching the next generation of the Internet, industry officials said Tuesday.

Music fans could soon be able to download their favourite tunes over digital radio under plans from UBC Media. The owner of Classic Gold analogue and digital stations is investing in technology to let listeners push a button on their radio and transfer songs to their computer.

The US Congress is pondering laws to force digital music companies to use a single, unified DRM system, in order to allow songs purchased from any download service to run on any hardware.

In the Blu-ray/HD-DVD battle, it looks like the Blu-ray side has been the first to blink. Ryoji Chubachi, Sony's president-elect, said at a news conference last week that he would be open to talking to the DVD Forum to merge Sony's Blu-ray format with the Toshiba-developed and Forum-backed HD-DVD format.

Ritek and CMC Magnetics are preparing to begin production of HD-DVD (High-Density Digital Versatile Disc), a blue-laser DVD standard of the next generation developed by Toshiba and NEC, discs in the third or fourth quarter of this year, according to the two companies.

Microsoft have said it would unveil the next generation of its Xbox video game console in a May the 13th special on cable music and entertainment channel MTV.

Police have recovered more than 1,000 pirate DVDs after searching two cars following observations at a car boot sale in Yorkshire.

The Opto-Electronics & Systems Laboratories (OES) of the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) have debuted Taiwan's first self-developed blue-laser DVD pick-up head (PUH) at an OES press event in Hsinchu, Taiwan.

Clover Systems has announced the release of the new DVX DVD Analyzer. This new version of Clover's popular low-cost quality control tool can measure DVD error rates at up to 16X on DVD-ROM and DVD±R, including dual layer discs, and CDs at up to 40X. It can also measure Beta and Jitter, and check the quality of blank media.

LG Korea have released a utility that enables users to automatically check for new firmware. Unfortunately the tool does not work with all LG optical drives but the company is planning to add support for more.

Sony's PSP is turning into a great tool for Web browsing, comics reading and online chat -- and it also happens to play video games, movies and music, if you prefer that sort of thing.

Sony will this month ship its latest hard drive-based personal digital music player, this time adding a removable battery to the feature set and an anti-impact system to the unit's hard disk.

TCL, a large 3C (computer, communication, consumer electronics) manufacturer in China, plans to expand its monthly DVD+R/-R disc production capacity to 50 million discs by adding a total of 80-100 additional production lines, according to suppliers of polycarbonate (PC) and manufacturing equipment of optical discs in Taiwan.

Second-tier manufacturers of blank optical discs in Taiwan, seeing top makers successfully raising OEM prices by 10%-15% for this quarter, would also like to do the same, but so far have only been able to raise prices 3%-5% due to immediate financial needs and therefore have had to accept low-price orders to bring in revenues quickly.

Comcast is working with TiVo on an advertising system that will insert new, updated commercials into already-recorded programs, the company said.

In the US the first million of the widescreen movie-, music- and game-playing $250 (£135) PSPs were expected to be gone within hours of the launch March 24, but a survey a week later found that two-thirds of stores still had them in stock.

The race to be first with commercial perpendicular based storage devices is hotting up. Hitachi claims today that it will cram 230 gbits per square inch meaning it will produce a 1 inch 20gb drive.

The internet's transformation into a really dodgy public access cable channel continues a pace. Google co-founder Larry Page has announced that the company wants the public to send in its homemade videos - and he doesn't mind how mucky they are.