Macromedia powers up Contribute

Macromedia has updated its Contribute application, which enables the editing of website content without the need for specialist skills. Contribute 3.1 for Mac and Windows fixes half a dozen performance issues - see the release notes for details - and is available from www. ...more

NEC reveals mobile apps

NEC has announced mobile application software that should push forward content and services for European 2.5G and 3G networks. Along with a mobile Internet platform, the application software includes digital rights management, where files (for example games, music or publications) are encrypted and the customer purchases a decrypting 'ticket' in order to use them. ...more

80 per cent prefer email to phone

Eighty per cent of business people now prefer to communicate via email, rather than the phone, according to a new survey. The META Group found that the ability to communicate with multiple parties, speed and the retaining of a written record, were the top three reasons that respondents to the survey gave for preferring to type rather than talk. Seventy-four per cent added that they would be happier without a phone than they would without email. ...more

Google patents voice queries

Google has been granted a US patent for searching technologies using voice queries. First applied for in February 2001, patent 7,027,987 covers a 'voice interface for a search engine' and names Google co-founder Sergey Brin among the inventors. It covers methods for technologies to recognise a voice query and chop it up into its components which can then be manipulated to the form of a Boolean query. ...more

Intel rolls out four new mobile processors

Intel has rolled out three new chips for the desktop replacement and one for the low end segment of the mobile market. There are three new parts in the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 range aimed at the desktop replacement market. Intel says the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 processors 538, 532, and 518 include support for Hyper-Threading, a 1MB Level 2 cache, 13 new Streaming SIMD 3 Extensions (SSE3) and enhancements to the NetBurst microarchitecture. ...more