EasyEverything plans to float Internet cafes

The owner of budget airline EasyJet, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, plans to float his EasyEverything chain of Internet cafes. EasyEverything is valued at around ?100m, and has received an injection of ?20m from Hewlett Packard and venture capital firm Apax Partners. The company currently has five cafes in London and a number of outlets across Europe, and will open a cafe with 850 Internet terminals in New York's Time Square in November. ...more

Microsoft launches Live Messenger

Microsoft has officially launched the Live Messenger service. Live Messenger, a new version of MSN Messenger under a new brand, is one of 20 or so 'Live' services that Microsoft intends to roll out over the coming year. The new version is aimed at capitalising on the 'social networking' phenomenon by allowing users to share their online experiences and to establish a Microsoft bridgehead in the VoIP marketplace. ...more

New Web standard for graphics ratified

W3C promises "new possibilities for Web-based interface design" as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.0 becomes an official W3C Recommendation. The World Wide Consortium, which is the body that controls the standards used on the Internet, declares that SVG provides "accessible, dynamic, reusable, and extensible vector graphics, text, and images", for the easier delivery of multimedia applications. ...more

Facebook schools success with iTunes giveaway

The world's number two social networking site is giving away 250 million iTunes downloads in a back-to-school promotion. Facebook will hand out one million sampler packs each week for 10 weeks, each pack containing 25 songs pre-selected from a variety of genres. The site currently has around 13 million unique users, around a quarter of the figure for the leading networking site, MySpace. ...more

Wi-Fi free for all in UK's first wireless broadband week

The Wireless Broadband Alliance, an industry group aiming to promote the use of Wi-Fi, has announced that the week of 26 January will be Wireless Broadband Week. As part of the hype, which will doubtless involve accosting bemused commuters at railway stations, BT Openworld has announced that users with Wi-Fi enabled laptops or PDAs who register with BT Openzone during that week will get seven days' worth of free unrestricted access. BT, which is determined not to repeat the laggardly performance of its broadband rollout with Wi-Fi, currently has some 1700 hotspots in the UK with a target of 4000 by the summer. ...more