AFP - IBM on Friday opened online doors to a virtual version of the famed Forbidden City in China that served for centuries as an exclusive realm for the nation’s emperors.
NewsFactor - Amazon Web Services announced Friday that it will be lowering prices for its Simple Storage Service, known as Amazon S3. Beginning Nov. 1, there will be new volume discounts, based on a tiered pricing structure that offers greater discounts as storage volume increases.
CNET - President Bush on Friday signed into law a bill that would facilitate the collection of data regarding broadband access in the United States, though most of the actions required by the law have already been accomplished by federal regulators.
AP - When Yahoo Inc. co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang spurned Microsoft Corp.’s rich buyout offer this spring, he promised brighter days in Sunnyvale were just over the horizon.
NewsFactor - Zoho Mail has emerged from its private beta-testing stage. Tapping functionality built into Google Gears, Zoho’s Web-based e-mail application now sports a “setup offline” link at the top of the page that gives users offline e-mail access.
NewsFactor - For people who worry that it’s impossible to escape from Google’s amazing search capabilities, the ability to hide just got harder. Last month, Google helped sponsor the launch of the high-resolution GeoEye-1 satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. After a month of calibration and testing, the satellite’s first image was released Friday by Satellite Imaging, a Houston-based remote sensing and survey company.
InfoWorld - Shedding more light on its Oslo vision for model-based software development, Microsoft this week elaborated on plans to preview Oslo technologies, offering code names and citing the company’s DSL (Domain Specific Languages) concept as a lynchpin of the platform.
Reuters - Internet users in Kazakhstan complained of censorship Friday after being unable to access the popular blogging service Livejournal, but the state-owned telecoms company denied it was blocking it.
CNET - LONDON–On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the “open social Web,” or a talk by Ben Huh, the “Chief Cheezburger” of goofy “lolcat” meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?
NewsFactor - On Thursday, Sling Media pushed out its latest innovation — the SlingCatcher. The SlingCatcher lets customers watch online video from a diverse spectrum of sites on the Internet, including network television venues like ABC.com, video content sites like Hulu.com and CollegeHumor.com, community video sites like YouTube, and even online movie rentals from popular services like Netflix.