While some consumer electronics manufacturers have cleaned up their act, making more energy-efficient gadgets with fewer toxic materials, others are continuing to make fine promises but no changes, according to Greenpeace. In response, the environmental pressure group is changing the way it scores companies in its Guide to Greener Electronics, placing more emphasis on their actions than their words, and measuring new aspects of their operations.
Jonathan Schwartz ended six months of silence on his Twitter feed on Thursday with the words "Started a new company."
All French government publications should be made available in OpenDocument Format (ODF), according to a report commissioned by the French prime minister.
In his report, On Equal Terms, National Assembly Deputy Bernard Carayon calls for a law making it compulsory for French government departments to use ODF when they create or distribute documents, and suggests France ask its European partners to do likewise when exchanging documents at a European level.
French IT consulting group Capgemini SA fired its chief operating officer on Friday, for thinking about taking another job.
ABN AMRO Bank NV will lay off about 1,500 staff and outsource its IT operations worldwide in a series of deals worth €1.8 billion (US$2.2 billion) over five years.
IBM Corp. will take the lion's share of that to run the bank's main data centers, develop applications and manage bank employees' desktop, laptop and handheld computers, it said.
The construction site of a new highway in northern France became, for just one day, one of the hottest wireless networking hot spots in the country. Minister of Industry Patrick Devedjian held a news conference there Monday to outline his plans for the attribution of four licenses to operate Wimax wireless services across France, and network operator Altitude Telecom SA demonstrated how it will use Wimax technology to deliver telephone calls beginning June 1.
Nokia Corp. announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. to deliver music and e-mail to users of its mobile phones, but ruled out the possibility of building Microsoft's operating system software into its products.
Software supporting Microsoft Exchange Server's ActiveSync protocol for synchronizing e-mail, calendar and contact information will be a feature of future Nokia phones, thanks to a deal announced by the two companies at the 3GSM World Congress in Cannes on Monday.
Microsoft is behind schedule in complying with a court order to document its proprietary communications protocols, according to U.S. authorities monitoring its behavior. It also plans to release the documents in a file format that cannot be annotated, and can only be used with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.
Microsoft will review the documentation format and suggest alternatives within 60 days, it said in a report authored with the U.S. Department of Justice, 16 states and the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs in the U.S. government's antitrust case against the company.
Apple Computer will begin shipping its new iMac G5 desktop computer worldwide in mid-September, the company's top marketing executive said Tuesday.
A steady stream of taxis grinds up the hill to the headquarters of the Athens Olympic Committee headquarters, on the northern edge of the city. In the lobby it's all bustle as visitors mill around the accreditation desk and pass through security controls. But on the second floor the glass-walled technology operations center sits idle -- most of the 135 seats in the control room are empty, and all but one of the screens on the video wall are dark.
At first glance, this year's Cebit looked more like an Ikea store than a high-tech trade show, with several of the stands featuring sofas, low tables and large TV screens.
But these were not mere chill-out areas for tired visitors at the Hanover, Germany, show: They were the main exhibit, as PC and peripheral manufacturers attempt to take PCs out of the home office and into the living room, where they are more likely to be used for playing music or watching HDTV (high-definition television) than for balancing the household accounts.
Enterprise software provider SAP AG reported a 25 percent year-on-year increase in net profit for the third quarter of 2003 Thursday, although total revenue changed little from the year-earlier quarter.
This year's CeBIT is going to be filled with huge, high-resolution, color screens and packed with wireless LAN base stations -- and that's before the exhibitors even get there.