US Internet search giant Yahoo launched a video-sharing service in a move that could capitalize on a hot online trend made clear by the popular young YouTube website.

The unveiling of the enhanced Yahoo Video service came as the Sunnyvale, California, company continued to vie with online juggernaut Google for devotees by becoming a place where online communities can build social networks.

The new Yahoo Video service was scheduled to go live on the Internet at 6:00 pm (0100 GMT Thursday), according to Jason Zajac, Yahoo’s manager of social media.

Nearly 10% of CIOs are planning to add IT staff this quarter. The industry with the greatest optimism for IT hiring is retail, and CIOs there are spelling out key skills in demand. Among them: retail-specific apps and networking.

Source: InformationWeek

When Adobe swallowed up Macromedia last year, one of the biggest topics of conversation was which applications would survive. Most people figured that where the product lines overlapped, the more popular program would survive, no matter where it originated. It turns out they were right. At the recent Adobe Live event, an Adobe executive said that Freehand and GoLive would be moving from the endangered species list to full extinction.

GoLive competes with the ever-popular Dreamweaver WYSIWYG HTML editor, while Freehand has gone up against the more popular Adobe Illustrator.

Source: arstechnica

Sun Microsystems said it will cut 4,000 to 5,000 jobs in the next six months and sell some facilities in a restructuring to save the troubled maker of computer servers up to 590 million dollars a year.

Santa Clara, California-based Sun also said its board of directors voted to eliminate its shareholders rights plan, known as a poison pill plan, which makes a takeover plan harder by imposing extra costs.

Source: AFP

Symantec’s next-generation security software is officially named Norton 360 and faces a possible delay from the original September due date.

Word of the potential delay comes as Microsoft is starting to ship its Windows Live OneCare security product and a day after McAfee announced its Falcon project for new, integrated consumer security software, slated for delivery this summer.

Symantec unveiled plans for its new software, then code-named Genesis, in February. The product is to rival Microsoft’s OneCare and Windows Vista security technology, and will integrate components of Symantec’s current security, PC optimization and backup products, the security company has said.

On Wednesday, Symantec announced that Genesis will be called Norton 360 and that the product is slated to ship by the end of March next year, a change from the original September due date. However, a company spokeswoman said a delay isn’t certain.

Source: News.com

In the lull before the long holiday weekend, the U.S. Senate passed the immigration reform bill on May 25, which includes a controversial provision to raise the H-1B visa cap to 115,000 from 65,000.

Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect and long a proponent of an uncapped H-1B program, arguing that limits must be lifted to keep the United States globally competitive, praised the Senate in a statement.

Source: eWeek

Mozilla has reached the latest development milestone for its next-generation Firefox 2.0 “Bon Echo” browser with a little anti-phishing help from Google.

Anti-phishing capability, which Mozilla has branded “Safe Browsing,” is one of the marquee features in Firefox 2.0 and one of the reasons a third alpha is necessary. Now baked into Firefox 2.0 alpha 3, Google Safe Browsing is triple-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1, the GPL 2.0 and the LGLP.

It is also built into the Google Toolbar, which is available for both Firefox and IE.

Download Firefox 2.0 alpha 3

Source: internetnews

Chicago could soon become the world’s largest Internet cafe now that the city hall has put out a request for bids to build a city-wide wireless Internet system.

The goal is to provide inexpensive — or even free — Internet access to all residents in order to help Chicago bridge the digital divide, Mayor Richard Daley said in a statement Tuesday.

Source: AFP

Microsoft has added a database-oriented tool to Visual Studio Team System, an application development suite designed to bolster the company’s sales to large corporations, the software giant said Wednesday.

Visual Studio Team System has different tools aimed at various participants in the software development process, including coders, testers, project managers, and architects who design systems. These collaborative development suites are generally used for complicated, larger-scale projects.

On June 12 at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference, the company plans to release a preview of Visual System Team Edition for Database Professional, which is expected to be ready by the end of the year.

Source: News.com

With an eye toward making its upright electric scooters easier for the average American to buy, Segway Inc. on Wednesday rolled out its first financing program.

The consumer financing arm of General Electric Co. will manage the program, allowing consumers to take out loans for the scooters, which cost from $4,000 to $5,500.

“The sticker shock of $5,000 there and then can in some cases be a deterrent,” said Jason Barton, vice president of sales at Bedford, New Hampshire-based Segway. “But if you have an offering where they can have it as a monthly payment, that is more appealing.”

Source: Reuters

ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Slyck.com is reporting their servers have been seized by the Swedish police.

The police right now is taking all of our servers, to check if there is a crime there or not (they are actually not sure), ThePirateBay.org spokesperson brokep told Slyck.com.

Source: slyck

Microsoft gave its Windows Vista browser a new name on Friday, officially dubbing it Internet Explorer 7+ as a way to set it off from the edition for Windows XP.

The new moniker will denote Vista-only features in that operating system’s browser, including protected mode, parental controls, and better network diagnostics–all of which are missing from the Windows XP version.

Source: InformationWeek