Expensive IP pursuit pushes SCO $2 million into the red in Q1

SCO has reported a net loss of $2,253,000 for the first quarter of 2004, stumping up $3,440,000 to pull in just $20,000 from its initiatives to licence Unix intellectual property. The company made $11,392,000 on its core Unix business, compared to $13,540,000 in the same quarter of 2003. 'Our revenue and results of operations for the first quarter were consistent with our expectations,' said Darl McBRide, President and CEO. ...more

Japan fingers unauthorised phone use

Japanese telco NTT DoCoMo is to begin selling the first mobile phone to incorporate fingerprint authentication. The mova F505i has a built in a fingerprint sensor to prevent unauthorised use. A user can lock or unlock the phone simply by placing a pre-registered finger on the sensor. ...more

Parallels updates Desktop virtualisation

Parallels has released an update to its Desktop virtualisation software that enables Mac users to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems alongside OS X. The update adds: USB improvements, including USB support for Windows Mobile 5 and Web cameras and a much broader list of supported devices; substantially improved OS X performance with the option to switch off Mac hard disk cache for a virtual machine, improved graphic performance; complete keyboard support, including the Eject button and right and left shift mapping for non-English layouts; and Unicode path support that lets users name files and paths in any language. Parallels also gave its thoughts on this weeks' two major announcements regarding virtualisation software, namely VMWare's announcement of the imminent release of its eponymous emulator and Microsoft's decision to drop Virtual PC. ...more

Blackberry maker faces new lawsuit

The makers of the Blackberry are being sued over an alleged infringement of a patent on text input. Specifically, US company Eatoni Ergonomics claims that the Blackberry 7100's predictive texting technology, SureType, infringes the patent that it registered to protect its own predictive technologies: LetterWise and WordWise. The patent, Eatoni claims, covers the deployment of predictive text using a keyboard on a mobile device although the wording is not quite so precise. ...more

Intel takes $600 million hit on Wireless Group

Chip giant is to write down $600 million from its Wireless Communications and Computing Group from its fourth quarter results. The 'goodwill impairment charge', as it is called, is because the company estimates that long term growth is not expected to be as bullish as previously estimated. The write down is despite the fact that Intel has put a huge amount of marketing effort into boosting WiFi this year following the launch of the Centrino technologies in March. ...more