Shelley Solheim

Search engine AskJeeves.com has rebranded itself as Ask.com, ditched its namesake butler icon and added several new search tools in an effort to woo more users, Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of Ask Jeeves

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Monday is set to light up its long-delayed public computing grid allowing users to book CPU (central processing unit) hours with a credit card through a Web-based portal, company officials said.

IBM Corp. said it had developed technology to speed up the way large computer networks access and share information. Under a project code-named "Fastball," IBM's ASC Purple supercomputer has been able to achieve 102G bytes per second of sustained read-and-write performance to a single file -- the equivalent of downloading 25,000 songs in a second over the Internet, according to IBM.

The heads of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp. sought to reassure users of their investment in the Itanium processor. The end goal of these efforts is to help businesses create automated, remotely managed data centres.

Symantec Corp. said it has reached an out-of-court agreement in its adware lawsuit against New York-based Hotbar.com Inc. The deal calls for Symantec to dismiss its suit, but continue to classify Hotbar's program files as low-risk adware.

IBM Corp. Tuesday rolled out a raft of new servers based on its Power5+ processors, including a new server with a Power5+ chip running at 2.2GHz and several new machines based on its quad-core module (QCM) technology that allows four Power5+ 1.5GHz cores to plug into a single socket.