Stories by: John Blau

Sonic Solutions has come up with a way to help Hollywood studios and other providers of video content distribute their movies over the Internet without fear of rampant, illegal DVD burning.

The race to push more bits down broadband networks has leaped ahead with Siemens achieving a transmission speed of 107Gbps (bits per second) over a single optical fiber.

Measures to reduce the millions of tons of electronic waste generated each year by manufactures of computers, mobile phones and other consumer electronic products will be the focus of a United Nations-sponsored conference in the capital of Kenya.

Germany's cash-strapped public sector will be the driving force behind the takeup of open-source software in the country as state-run organizations strive to lower their IT costs, according to a study released Wednesday by the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering.

Entrepreneurs attending a forum in Germany this week showed how they plan to use clever open-source products -- commercially -- to compete with proprietary software companies.

Open source has plenty of supporters -- among them venture capitalists who view the software as a disruptive technology with huge potential. But that doesn't mean they're about to throw cash at open-source startups as they did at new companies during the dot-com rush.

How could an IT company with sales of more than US$90 billion ever be interested in software essentially available for free?, asked Adam Jollans, open source strategy manager at IBM, at a conference Tuesday. "Because we see huge business opportunities," he said.

Experts discussing Internet telephony strategies at the Von conference in Berlin view VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) as a key step toward open communication infrastructures.

The four-day United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) was heavy on talk, light on action -- in line with its mandate to give interested parties a global stage to express their views on the future of the Internet.

For many critics, the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is nothing more than a hot-air event void of any decision-making power. But advocates see the meeting, the first to follow last year's contentious World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), as an opportunity to set the tone for future discussions on who should govern the Internet and how.

What's it like for a small German provider of open-source ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to peddle its product in the home market of SAP, the world's largest maker of commercial business software? "It's a challenge but we have a business that's growing," Hilmar Brodner, managing director of Synerpy, said Monday on the sidelines of the Systems IT trade show in Munich.