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For sale again, Business.com could fetch $400 million

If it's beginning to seem like 1999 all over again in some parts of Silicon Valley, then consider this ominous piece of dot-com investment news. The domain, Business.com, a type of business-to-business portal, is up for sale yet again. The asking price: "anywhere between $300 million and $400 million", The Wall Street Journal reports. Yep, you heard right. That's between £150 million and £200 million, for a b-to-b portal that earned $15 million EBITDA last year, the Journal says.

Widgets away

To many people a widget is the thing in the bottom of a can of Guinness that gives the drink a proper head when opened and poured.

To an increasing number of computer users, they are the little icons that you download to your desktop which update you on anything from the weather to the latest news in your favourite section of your preferred journal.

The reality of a world in which the information we receive from the web is increasingly personalised came a click closer today with the announcement by Netvibes, one of the largest providers of widgets, that it had done content deals with more than 500 media companies, many of them household names.

The great French Blackberry ban

Charles Bremner, Paris Correspondent of The Times, reports this morning on his blog that Nicolas Sarkozy has banned Government officials from using Blackberrys because of fears that the devices may be bugged by the Anglo Saxons. French civill servants suggest that the ban is making them even more inefficient.

Venezuelan researcher sets wi-fi connection record

It may not be the equivalent of swimming the English Channel or sailing around the world solo. To true geeks, it's bigger.

Ermanno Pietrosemoli made networking history recently when he established a wi-fi connection distance record of 382km (238 miles) in the mountains of Venezuela, CNet's News.com reports. That's like sitting in Manchester and picking up a wi-fi signal that originates in Southampton. Certainly, beats my small accomplishment: establishing a 1Mbps connection from a distance of 10km in the mountains of Central Italy recently.

Pro Evolution Soccer strengthens its side

Konami, the company behind Pro Evolution Soccer, has been talking about the latest instalment of the series. The biggest advance will be the inclusion of an artificial intelligence system called Teamvision, which is designed to make playing against the computer more realistic.

"It will learn new ways to build attacks and to counter specific movements and previous attacking or defensive errors, ensuring games are more in line with the tactical but flowing nature of the real thing," the company said.

Pro Evo 2008 will be released this autumn for the PS3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS and PC.

Moonbounce

A guest appearance today from the Books crowd at The Times, who have made a tentative but exciting foray into the world of technology.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first time the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank moved -- it rotates in azimuth and tilts in elevation, swinging on gun turrets rescued from battleships -- we have helped stage the First Move literary and scientific festival this weekend. Here, in the shadow of the telescope, in the middle of the Cheshire plain, we have enjoyed literary and scientific speakers, and watched the telescope 'dance', showing off its various moves. We can report it is in excellent nick for a 50-year-old dancer. 

The highlight, though, came earlier this afternoon when a hare-brained scheme to bounce poems off the moon came to fruition. When we heard this could be done, it appealed to our romantic sensibilities no end, and we begged the astronomers here, notably Tim O'Brien and Ian Morison to help us make it happen.

O2's great white hope

O2 was very chirpy about the new handset it previewed at the Wireless Festival and the excitement appears to be justified.

Rather than stick a logo on a seemingly generic model, as has been customary for some operator-branded handsets, O2 briefed a Dutch design company to combine the best aspects of a media player and a phone.

The result – 18 months in the making – is Cocoon, which is on one level a clamshell handset and on another a sleek, curved white thing which registers first as a design object, then a phone.

Why have a million PC users downloaded Safari?

The Apple influence continues to grow among the PC community. More than a million PC users downloaded Safari 3 for Windows in the first 48 hours of availability this week, Apple announced. The downloads continue at a healthy clip despite the occurrence of a new batch of bugs preying on the Apple Web browser. Eighteen and counting, says InfoWorld.

Kate Moss to wear an RFID tag?

Swarovski’s image has always been a little less sparkly than its wares. The Austrian crystal maker has always been rather too closely associated with the ornaments that adorn the bronzed bodies of ballroom dancers to amass anything vaguely resembling ‘street cred’.

In its latest attempt to gain the respect of the in crowd, Swarovski has join forces with that well-known paragon of cool: Near Field Communication (NFC).

And, admittedly, the O2 Wireless Festival.

To gain access to the VIP area at the festival, which starts in London tomorrow, celebrities will be asked to wear a crystal-studded wristband containing a radio frequency chip, which can be swiped in front of a reader.

The band – of which "only 50 have been made", an O2 spokeswoman assures us – can be topped up with cash so that payment can be made "in a swipe of the wrist", much in the way that an Oyster card does on London's transport network.

Does this mean that Kate Moss, one of several celebrities expected to attend, will be paying for her own drinks, then?

"We don’t anticipate that the celebrities will be using it in that way, no," the spokeswoman said, explaining that the wristband was part of a trial to see whether mobile payment could be adopted more widely at the event.

Facebook sold stake because of 'hardware stuff up'

A year ago Facebook announced that it had received an additional $25 million from venture capital firms. At the time it seemed an arrangement mutually beneficial to all: a social network on the cusp of great expansion had secured the necessary funding, an investment team – led by Greylock Partners, a Silicon Valley-based group – had backed one of the most promising start-ups in many years. Now it emerges that the venture capitalists came away best off. Facebook's call for funds had been prompted by a rather pressing situation which left it with little room to negotiate: it had run out of computer space.

Say low-fat cheese

HP has launched a range of digital cameras designed to lop a few inches off the waistline and make the people in front of the lens look slimmer.

Technologically, this isn’t quite as advanced as it sounds. It basically involves compressing slightly anything in the centre of the frame. So there’s a risk that fat-faced subjects will end up with fat, squashed faces. Still, the examples on the company’s website look quite natural.

IPhone's first review? Unconvinced

It's T-minus 17 days before mere mortals (well, those in the United States, anyhow) get the first glimpse of Apple's iPhone. But today, the first review is out. Well, sort of. The Wall Street Journal's gadgets columnist Walter S. Mossberg, always ahead of the pack, received his freebie days ago and told a gathering in San Francisco on Monday that he's, well, not immediately blown away by the device.

Nintendonitis makes it into New England Journal of Medicine

The primary symptoms include sudden and intense pain in the shoulders or one of the extremities. Odd, really, because the patient has not experienced any recent injuries nor trauma. Stranger still, he or she has not participated in any sports or physical exercise of late. A rare circulatory condition? A degenerative muscle disease? No, it's Wiiitis (pronounced Wee-eye-tis). And this week, the ailment has been offered up to the New England Journal of Medicine for further study.

A printer-friendly web?

How often do you print from the internet using Internet Explorer, only to find that half the website is cut off when transferred to the page?

Some applications where the accuracy of the print-out is paramount – such as maps – have resolved the issue, but for many websites it remains a gaping inadequacy.

Spam fighters blame Tiscali for e-mail outage

Spam fighters are laying the blame for the widespread blocking of Tiscali's outgoing e-mail last week squarely at the feet of the "totally unresponsive" ISP. Tiscali had repeatedly ignored warnings from spam fighters that its networks had become overrun by spammers, The Spamhaus Project says in a statement issued at the weekend.

Tiscali e-mail woes continue

For Tiscali's 1.8 million UK subscribers, this has been an aggravating week. A week ago, customers started complaining that their e-mails weren't being received or were being delayed by days. The culprit? Spammers.