Sony announced that it had developed a battery strong enough to power electronics solely through the chemical reactions of sugar, raising the possibility of truly ecologically friendly power sources.

Photonic technology, which uses light to transmit data, is the key to networks with terabit-per-second speeds. But silicon, a mainstay of the electronics industry, has been largely useless for photonics because of its poor optical properties. Photonics researchers have had to rely on exotic semiconductors such as indium phosphide, which emit light easily but are expensive and hard to work with. But in 2004, Paniccia's group showed that silicon could be used to make a modulator that encodes data onto a light beam at one gigabit per second.

The owners of the DivX video codec have produced a prototype media streamer, one which appears to challenge the likes of the AppleTV.

The Trojan responsible for stealing more than 1.6 million personal records from Monster.com uses that information to build targeted spam that offers recipients money laundering jobs, said Symantec.

Following an preliminary announcement earlier this year, Sony has officially unveiled PlayTV, a new service that transforms the PS3 into a digital video recorder.

...Wireless connections between PCs and peripherals and the Web will become more important in the market than wired connectivity options because of the rapid growth of PC and other mobile consumer electronics devices...

Seagate, currently the worlds largest manufacturer of traditional hard drives, has decided to enter the solid-state disk market. It is aiming at the enterprise first....and the CEO of Seagate had some rather harsh words to say about existing SDD manufacturers, claiming their supporting technology is outdated..

...the Japanese industrial giant could be on the hook for up to 138 billion yen (US$1.2 billion), according to calculations by Nikko Citigroup analyst Kota Ezawa. That is equivalent to 28% of Matsushita's 2008 operating profit forecast and nearly five times the yearly revenues of its entire battery business for the fiscal year that ended in March, Nikko Citigroup estimated.

Viacom's MTV Networks said on Tuesday it struck a digital music partnership with online music service RealNetworks and Verizon to compete against Apple's iTunes.

Vendors now have almost 70 products certified for compliance with Draft 2.0 of the 802.11n standard, according to a list dug up by MIMO + N News.

Google launched the latest addition to its Google Earth application. This time, instead of zooming from space to street-level view on Earth, users will be able to zoom from Earth to the stars. Called Google Sky, it's part of Google Earth 4.2.

Three billion song downloads later, someone is finally ready to take on the market dominance of Apple's iTunes....Wal-Mart is launching an online music store that will undercut iTunes prices... (and) stripping away the pesky DRM (digital rights management) restrictions that limit the functionality and portability of purchased tracks. In other words, these are genuine MP3 files that can play on any digital music player – including iPods – as well as be burned to CDs without limitations.

...Since 65nm came out late in 4Q, and at the time Barcelona was due in late 2Q07, that gave any 65nm Opteron a shelf life of about six months. Server vendors like predictability and long lives and six months is not a long life. It was deemed not really worth it to do a 65nm Opteron with 1MB caches, it would be replaced in short order, and 90nm parts would be enough to see them through. (However) the window between 65nm introduction and Barcelona introduction slipped from six months to 10 and counting...

...Many channel observers see Dell's best chance to win over a large number of solution providers is by turning to distributors who could act as a buffer between the vendor and solution providers. Bates wouldn't rule out signing a distributor, but he didn't make it sound like a priority either. "We're talking about everything, but we're hearing a lot about the benefits on focusing our direct relationship with the channel," he said.

Starting Wednesday, YouTube plans to feature semi-transparent "overlay" ads at the bottom of selected video clips.

Wal-Mart announced the launch of "DRM-free" MP3 music downloads at only US$0.94 per track and US$9.22 per album.

Canon has introduced its new EOS-1Ds Mark III digital SLR (DSLR) camera, a new top-tier professional DSLR camera expected to hit stores in November for US$7,999.

Dell customers may have to wait until October for some of their new machines to be delivered, thanks to supply chain problems and trouble perfecting new paint jobs at the struggling computer maker.

Companies that want to bid in the FCC's upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction had better be prepared to pay up. The agency has just released a first draft of its detailed auction rules, which include reserve prices that must be met before the auction becomes valid. The coveted C block licenses (which feature the new open access conditions) will require bidders to meet a US$4.6 billion reserve; for all licenses combined, the reserve is US$10 billion.

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks animation gave HD-DVD a boost in the race to become the dominant home entertainment format, announcing they would release all their new titles in HD-DVD.

Nine executives at Inventec Appliances could face jail time for failing to reveal plans by Apple to reduce iPod orders to the company in a timely manner.