Sharp puts LCDs into perspective with simultaneous dual displays

No smoke but a few mirrors. Sharp has been showing off its new LCD technology and uses mirrors to demonstrate the clever things that can now be done with viewing angles. As well as a monitor that can switch its viewing angle from wide to narrow - to ensure the private display of information - the Japanese electronics giant has also developed a screen that can display one thing when viewed from the right and another when viewed from the left. ...more

English, as wot she is spoke

IBM has released a "UK-accented English" version of its voice recognition software ViaVoice Pro Enterprise Edition. The holy grail for all speech recognition systems is the quick and transparent processing of natural speech. IBM claims that this latest edition of ViaVoice enables users to dictate "naturally and easily" into most text applications. ...more

Internet speed record broken

The Internet2 Land Speed Record has been broken by scientists in Europe and California. The European nuclear research centre (CERN), based near Geneva, sent 1.1 Terabytes (1,100GB) of data in 30 minutes to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) at an average speed of 5. ...more

Google snaps up Picasa

Search engine Google has bought up Picasa, a company which sells some highly rated digital photo management software. 'Picasa enables users to easily manage and share digital photographs, and its technologies complement Google's' said Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice president of Product Management. Founded in 2001, Picasa already has a relationship with Google's Blogger service to make publishing digital photos easier. ...more

A forte for Java

Sun releases Forte for Java 3.0. Sun's latest Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is for those working on the Java 2 platform, on an enterprise scale. ...more