The first beta release of Canonical's next Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' is now available and promises a more refined desktop and netbook experience in preparation for the final release in October.

Nvidia on Friday announced seven new GeForce 400M series graphics cards for laptops, which could provide parallel-processing capabilities to accelerate Web browsing and 3D image rendering.

Telstra Corporation Ltd says it will sell its 50.5 per cent share in SouFun Holdings when the Chinese real estate website has an initial public offering (IPO) later this year.

Australia’s major telcos remain unperturbed despite news that rival ISP, Internode, will be zeroing in on enterprise customers, after setting up its new Brisbane office.

Telecommunications wholesaler AAPT has settled a dispute with dark fibre provisioning company, Digital River Networks, out of court, with each party bearing their own proceeding costs.

A technical problem has kept an undetermined number of Windows Live Hotmail users locked out of their e-mail accounts for hours on Thursday.

Hewlett-Packard and 3Par have signed a definitive agreement for HP to buy the California storage vendor for US$2.35 billion, the companies said Thursday.

Ping is Apple's music-centric social network that is integrated into iTunes 10. From a privacy standpoint, it's pretty straightforward--as opposed to Facebook's multitude of privacy settings--but then again, Ping is also very limited as to what services it offers. In either case, here's a quick run-down of the privacy features present in Ping.

VMware customers attending VMworld are taking a look at Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization software, but say the Microsoft technology falls a bit short and that it would be problematic to start over after investing heavily in VMware.

It's official. iOS 4.1 is "coming soon" for iPhone and iPod Touch users.

SAS Institute on Thursday announced a new toolset aimed at giving business users the ability to work with predictive analytics software, which has historically been the province of specialized statisticians.

A hosted application for securing shared corporate documents is being extended to handheld devices. With WatchDox, mobile users can view and even selected documents, but be prevented from saving, printing, or forwarding them, if desired.

Huawei has launched the IDEOS, or U8150, smartphone, which will cost between US$100 and $200, depending on the market, the company said on Thursday at the Internationale Funkaustellung (IFA) trade show in Berlin.

Microsoft announced that the code base for Windows Phone 7 1.0 has been finalized. The software has been "released to manufacturing," meaning that this version is the one handset makers will deploy on the first devices to feature the radically redesigned mobile OS.

Potential revenue inflow for the company charged with rolling out Labor’s National Broadband Network (NBN) remains up in the air as it continues to negotiate final wholesale pricing with the industry watchdog.

A month after SAP finalised the $US5.8 billion acquisition of mobility and data warehousing company Sybase, local offices are waiting for the proverbial green light to begin integration.

Sony has announced that it will partner with retail chain Borders to bring several of its eReaders to Australia.

3Par, which is already the subject of a bidding war between Hewlett-Packard and Dell, is now among a group of companies being sued by Crossroads Systems for patent infringement.

Many moons ago I wrote about TouchFreeze, a free laptop utility that solves one of life's most maddening problems: accidental swipes of your touchpad while typing. (Why isn't Windows smart enough to do this on its own? Just saying.)

The data from the Net Applications for browser market share in August show that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 continues to lead overall and outpace all competitors in growth. Even better news is that Internet Explorer 6--the archaic and insecure browser that refuses to die--is losing ground.