Laura Rohde

The U.K. government on Wednesday reintroduced its high-tech plans for a national identity card program using biometric technology, this time promising to answer concerns raised by the opposition parties earlier in the year over civil liberties and the Home Office's ability to oversee large scale IT projects.

Ask Jeeves Inc. is continuing its European expansion with the acquisition of Excite Italia BV from Tiscali SpA for an undisclosed sum, the Web search engine company announced Friday. Excite Italia operates Excite Europe. The deal is the logical next step in the company's European strategy, Ask Jeeves said in a statement. In April, Ask Jeeves launched of a test search engine site for Spain called Ask Jeeves Espa

In a move aimed at creating Europe's largest online travel service company, Sabre Holdings Corp., the operator of Travelocity.com, is buying U.K.-based Lastminute.com PLC for

IBM Corp. is looking into ways it can leverage its Blue Gene supercomputer within the firm

British Airways PLC (BA), Europe's third-largest airline, has tapped Cisco Systems Inc. to build a telephone system using VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) for its 14,000 office and airport workers, Cisco announced Wednesday. The San Jose, California, company did not specify the size of the contract other than to say it is a "multimillion pound'' deal, which is expected to pay for itself through cost savings within two years.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) formally launched the Mobile Web Initiative at its WWW2005 Conference in Chiba, Japan, on Wednesday, putting out a call for participants to join two working groups focused on making Web access from mobile devices as natural and easy as making a telephone call. "Web access today is so fundamental, that it shouldn't be hampered by wires," said Philipp Hoschka, W3C's deputy director for Europe. "Through this initiative, we're committed to improving the state of the art in mobile Web content production and mobile access."

PalmOne Inc. plans a new category of mobile computing products called mobile manager, and will unveil the first such device later this month, the company said in a statement Monday. But it appears Amazon.com Inc. has beaten PalmOne to the punch by offering details of the PalmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager on its Web site.

Nokia Corp. on Wednesday launched three new Nseries mobile handsets, hoping users will be seduced by the smart phones' built-in multimedia gadgets, which take print-quality pictures, read e-mail, play music, browse Web sites and display mobile TV.