Skype has enhanced its popular Net phone application with two new premium features: SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail.

Both have been available in limited tests but are now ready for widespread use for the Windows, Linux, Pocket PC and Mac OS X versions of Skype’s free software, which has just reached the 100 million download mark and boasts 35 million registered users.

SkypeIn allows users to buy up to three phone numbers in eight countries–Denmark, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. People can call them at those numbers from standard or mobile telephones. Skype Voicemail, as the name implies, records messages from callers.

Along with SkypeOut, which allows Skype users to call standard phones from their computers for a per-minute fee, the company now offers a total of three premium services.

SkypeIn costs $12.90 (10 euros) for three months, or $38.72 for one year. It includes the voice mail feature.

The voice mail feature on its own costs $6.45 for three months or $19.36 for a year.

Both tools are available for purchase on the Skype Web site.

Source: News.com

Intel Corp. officials said late Friday that systems containing its first dual-core processors will begin shipping Monday.

Systems from Dell, Alienware, and other OEMs will begin rolling out, ending a wave of speculation as to when the systems will actually ship. Intel originally said that the dual-core shipments would begin this month, and Advanced Micro Devices is expected to announce its first dual-core Opterons on April 21.

Source: ExtremeTech

Comcast Corp. , the top U.S. cable television network operator, is being sued by a Seattle-area woman for disclosing her name and contact information, court records showed on Thursday.

In a lawsuit filed in King County, Washington, Dawnell Leadbetter said that she was contacted by a debt collection agency in January and told to pay a $4,500 for downloading copyright-protected music or face a lawsuit for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Leadbetter, a mother of two teenage children, was a customer of Comcast’s high-speed Internet access service.

The company, Settlement Support Center LLC, based in Washington state, was using information that the Recording Industry of Association of America (RIAA) had obtained in a Philadelphia lawsuit over the illegal sharing of digital music files, said Lory Lybeck, the lawyer representing Leadbetter.

But no court authorized Comcast to release names and addresses of its customers, or notified his client that her information had been given to an outside party, Lybeck said.

“Comcast should respect the rights of privacy who pay them monthly bills,” Lybeck said.

Comcast said it could not comment on pending litigation.

“We hold our customer’s privacy in the highest regard,” said Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick.

The RIAA has filed thousands of lawsuits since September and settled several hundred for about $3,000 each.

Source: Reuters

InPhase Technologies, announced that it will conduct a public demonstration of the world’s first prototype of a commercial holographic storage device using video clips provided by Turner Entertainment Networks. The demonstration of the InPhase Tapestry™ drive will be conducted with Hitachi Maxell at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, April 18 through April 21, at the Maxell Corporation of America booth #C8530 in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Maxell Corporation of America is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Maxell. The prototype is the foundation for a 300 gigabyte (GB) drive that can store more than 35 hours of broadcast-quality high-definition video on a single disk. The family of InPhase Tapestry holographic drives will have capacities that range to 1.6 terabytes (TB) on a single disk.

A breakthrough in data storage, the InPhase prototype demonstrates a new generation of data storage, well beyond magnetic and optical formats, which capitalizes on the company’s leadership position in both holographic drive and media development. InPhase has created a new class of photopolymers, and the delivery of a stable recording device, to achieve a working commercial holographic system. The initial commercial units will be delivered to original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers in 2006.

InPhase has architected an advanced technique, polytopic recording, which provides greater data density by overlaying “books” of data, rather than pages of data. The InPhase polytopic technique eliminates the space between books of data, thereby increasing data densities. This innovative technique will be implemented in all generations of the InPhase Tapestry product family.

After months of keeping its prized cow in the barn, Microsoft is beginning to let Longhorn out of the corral for public viewing. The company plans to shed light on what Longhorn will offer when it hits the market next year. High on the list of features are security enhancements, improved desktop searching and organizing, and better methods for laptops to roam from one network to another. According to Microsoft, “This product has something for everybody.
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Source: Tech Republic