Mountain View (CA) – Google’s core search engine has been walking down an evolutionary path, with new functionality being integrated almost silently over the course of the past years. At least for today, the perception of a gradually improving search engine has changed: Google announced a wave of new features that go well beyond integrated search: There is a new contextual search, access to experimental search features as well as an upcoming cross-language platform, which could bridge search results between different languages.   

Mountain View (CA) – Google today announced may be the most significant enhancement to the company’s core search engine in several years: Google is integrating search engines that so far have operated as separate entities into the main Google search. It also marks the first time that YouTube is closely embedded into Google search results.

Los Angeles (CA) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gave his last keynote at the WinHEC conference earlier this morning and outlined the success of the Windows Vista operating system.  He told the audience of programmers and hardware engineers that Vista sales were “beyond our expectations” and outlined some key features of the upcoming Windows Home Server and the renamed Longhorn Windows Server 2008.  

Los Angeles (CA) - At this week's WinHEC conference, Microsoft gave the official title of Windows Server 2008 to its next major platform, which was previously codenamed Longhorn.   New products on the WinHEC 2007 showfloor (32 images) ...  

U3 sticks, flash based memory devices that allow users to carry launch ready applications on chewing-gum sized portable storage, have been around for a while, but never really conquered the market. Sandisk now has convinced Microsoft to help market the next version of U3 sticks in the hope to attract more eyeballs and wallets.

Sun Microsystems has introduced Java FX, a new suite of products that it hopes can mount more competition against Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

Java is making its way deeper into the consumer electronics space as Sun pitches a new scripting language as application platform for devices ranging from mobile phones to Blu-ray players as well as web browsers.

Roxio today debuted Crunch, a Mac-specific software program designed for video conversion to the myriad video players from Apple.

Microsoft has upgraded its 9-year-old free Hotmail email service by adding a larger mailbox and extra connectivity.

Microsoft will update Hotmail.com on Monday to give users more storage and enhanced connectivity to Messenger, but not much else.

Google Calendar is making a move to cell phones with the addition of SMS alerts.

Just one week after bringing back Windows XP to some of its desktop and notebook computers, Dell today announced that it will begin offering “select” consumer desktop and notebook computers in a preinstalled Ubuntu Linux configuration.

Microsoft has made its upcoming Windows Server, dubbed “Longhorn” available for beta testers.  Anyone with a Microsoft Live ID can download Longhorn Beta 3 and try out some of the new features like the read-only domain controller and PowerShell.

Avid Technology today shed light on the latest version of its consumer video editing software, Pinnacle Studio 11.

Microsoft on Thursday announced its most aggressive move yet to reach more people that do not have the financial resources to purchase a modern, functional software environment: The company will offer a complete software package built around Windows and Office for $3.

AMD’s graphics division today announced its April driver package for Radeon-based graphics cards.

Microsoft this week launched a new plug-in for Firefox that allows its proprietary media player to run on embedded web page scripts on the Mozilla browser.

Nero is updating its Nero 7 Ultra Edition Enhanced to include high-definition video playback and recording.

Adobe is showing off its latest video editing tools to broadcast professionals at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas.