07-04-2001 Essential news of the week

Brought neatly together and presented on a plate, here is a roundup of some of the week's main news stories from the world of IT. Pacific PC goes under The low-down on.. ...more

Roxio puts the burn into WinXP

Digital media company, Roxio, today announced that it has signed a deal to provide CD burning functions in to the Windows XP operating system. There has been much discussion about the functionality of XP with regard to CD burning, with early beta versions of Windows Media Player 8 (which provides the multimedia heart to the operating systems) having an inactive CD burning menu. Many pundits believed that Microsoft was going to ditch the feature, but it appears that they have been wrong-footed. ...more

EMI takes tentative steps to DRM-free downloading

EMI has dipped its toe in DRM-free water and begun selling a tiny number of songs in the unrestricted MP3 format. Norah Jones' new single 'Thinking About You' is among tracks available as 99 cent MP3s from Yahoo's US-only digital music service. Zach Hochkeppel , the general manager of Jones' label, the EMI-owned Blue Note, said the release was 'an experiment', adding that EMI's choice of an artist with a primarily adult fan base should mitigate against widespread p2p sharing of the song file. ...more

Search engines want your phone

The battle to colonise the mobile space for search is hotting up. Both Yahoo! and Google have announced plans to extend their presence in the UK. Following the launch of a similar personalised mobile service in the US at the beginning of the year, Google UK has followed suit and is now offering a number of its existing services through XHTML enabled mobile phones. ...more

Marijuana online

From next month an Amsterdam-based company will sell marijuana to its customers via its Web site and WAP service. In pizza-style fashion, iToke will deliver orders within 30 minutes, using couriers on bikes. Customers will be able to buy up to two grammes of marijuana at a time. ...more