Tesco buys into American market

The UK's largest grocer, Tesco, is capitalising on the success of its UK Internet operation and has decided to invest in a US online shopping site and open up the world's largest home shopping market. The company has said that it will pay over ?16 million for a stake in GroceryWorks, the US online operation of Safeway (an American store that shares a name with the UK grocer), and for the money Tesco will get a stake of 35 per cent in GroceryWorks, as well getting access to technical resources and intellectual property from the group. Meanwhile, Safeway will still keep a 50 per cent share in the business, with the rest of the figure being met by other shareholders and private investors. ...more

LaCie plugs USB drives into TV for video playback

LaCie has introduced a portable USB hard drive that can be plugged into a TV to playback video or display JPEGs. The Silverscreen drive will play MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video via NTSC/PAL composite, S-video, analogue YPbPr, VGA or RGB via Scart; surround sound is supported via optical digital output with compressed Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS pass through. ...more

New exchanges added to Broadband Britain

BT has named 17 exchanges to be ADSL-enabled in July. Broadband will be available on these dates from the exchanges listed. ? 9 July: Stonehaven. ...more

3G will be a success, Motorola claims

Third-generation wireless services will not suffer from the failure of WAP, says Motorola. Speaking about the company's strategy in Amsterdam, senior vice-president and general manager Rick Darnaby said that mobile providers would have no problem making money out of ultra-fast mobile services. "I know analysts take WAP as an example of the possible risk to earning back the investments companies make in UMTS networks," he said. ...more

Netscape Navigator 9 taps into Web 2.0

Netscape has unveiled its new Web browser bearing an old name. According to Netscape, the new-look Navigator 9 has more than a dozen new features, and it is arguably the first Web browser to directly tap into Web 2.0, albeit in limited fashion. ...more