Amazon is following in the footsteps of brick-and-mortar retailers with an offer customers aren’t likely to refuse — a $50 credit to individuals who purchased HD-DVD players. Best Buy and Wal-Mart have already implemented similar policies.

Sony’s Blu-ray recently achieved a permanent victory over rival high-definition format HD DVD. With Blu-ray backed by almost every major Hollywood studio, Toshiba raised the white flag on HD DVD. That left thousands of consumers with a device that will soon become obsolete as the industry distributes movies on Blu-ray discs.

Amazon is offering consumers who purchased an HD-DVD player before Feb. 23 a little consolation, a $50 coupon good for anything Amazon sells. Feb. 23 is when Toshiba announced it would stop making HD-DVD players.

“New technologies don’t always work out as planned. We at Amazon.com value our customer relationships more than anything and would like to support customers who purchased these players by offering a credit good for $50 off any products sold by Amazon.com,” the company said in an e-mail to customers who purchased the HD-DVD machines.

IBM said Thursday that it reached a deal to acquire FilesX, an Israeli developer of software that controls digital storage systems and protects corporate data.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. IBM said in a statement that it expects to close the deal “shortly.”

FilesX’s Xpress Restore software backs up critical business data and makes it readily available when needed, according to IBM. The company’s customers include Amherst College, CenterStone Software, and South Nassau Communities Hospital.

All told, FilesX has more than 100 customers in the United States and Israel, IBM said. IBM said it plans to add FilesX’s technology to its Tivoli Storage Manager line of products.

“The FilesX acquisition would complement IBM’s vision of enterprise data protection by adding critical capabilities for remote offices, delivering continuous data protection for applications and servers, and supporting business users needs with nearly instantaneous recovery of data,” said Al Zollar, general manager for Tivoli software at IBM, in a statement.

IBM is developing a type of memory that it says could one day be faster and more reliable than today’s hard drives and flash memory.

Called “racetrack,” it is a solid-state memory that aims to combine the best attributes of flash, like having no moving parts, and the low cost of hard drives for an inexpensive form of nonvolatile memory that will be stable and durable, said Stuart Parkin, an IBM Fellow.

Racetrack memory stores information in thousands of atoms in magnetic nanowires. Without the atoms moving, an electrical charge causes data to move swiftly along a U-shaped pipe that allows data to be read and written in less than a nanosecond, Parkin said. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second and commonly used to measure access time to RAM.

The memory reads 16 bits of data through one transistor, so it reads and writes information 100,000 times faster than flash memory, Parkin said

Microsoft Corp plans to unveil a Web-based service for driving directions that uses sophisticated software to help its users avoid traffic jams, the New York Times reported.

The software technology system, called Clearflow, will provide drivers with alternative information for routes that takes into account prevailing traffic patterns, according to the Times.

The Clearflow system will be available as part of Microsoft’s Live.com site for 72 U.S. cities, the report said.

Apple TV is getting some competition from Blockbuster.

The home video giant is developing a set-top device for streaming films directly to TV sets and is expected to announce the offering sometime this month.

Blockbuster declined comment, but a spokeswoman for the company said: “We’re talking to numerous companies and vendors about products, services, alliances and initiatives that can help us achieve our mission to transform Blockbuster into a company that provides access to media content across multiple channels — from our stores, by mail, through kiosks, through downloading, through portable content-enabled devices — so it’s not surprising that there are rumors out there.”

The device would join a growing roster of devices that aim to bring broadband video to the living room, including Apple TV, which hasn’t quite seen sales match the hype surrounding the product. Blockbuster rival Netflix also has indicated that it will compete in this market with a similar device being created with LG Electronics.