Nancy Gohring

Stepping up efforts to keep sex offenders off MySpace.com, the popular social networking Web site has partnered with an online identity and background verification company to build a U.S. national sex offender database and dedicate staff to checking the database against MySpace profiles.

Microsoft has touted Vista as a more secure version of Windows, but on the day of Vista's official launch, a security company has identified malware already in circulation that can infect computers running the operating system.

Skype launched its first mobile Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service in collaboration with an operator, 3 Group, whose customers will soon be the first to use it.

French electrical equipment manufacturer Schneider Electric SA plans to acquire American Power Conversion Corp. in a Can$6.86 billion deal to create a worldwide developer of critical power products.

Despite interest in what could become a lucrative industry, Internet companies face a number of roadblocks to delivering applications and services to mobile phone users and they made their complaints known during the Symbian Smartphone Show in London.

Although the mobile industry is keen to duplicate the success of Web 2.0 applications on the Internet, the wholesale transfer of that new approach over to the mobile world won't work, experts said.

Oracle Corp. will pay the U.S. government a whopping $111.7 million (US$98.5 million) to settle allegations that PeopleSoft, the enterprise software company Oracle acquired last year, overcharged government customers for years.

In the "old days" of the 1990s, Nokia focused on developing technologies for communicating via voice and data, said Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center. But now and into the future, Nokia expects to move away from a telecom-centric approach into an information technology way of thinking, he said.