Entrepreneur and founder of Virgin Group Sir Richard Branson has announced the launch of a new, innovative communications and entertainment platform.
Virgin Media, which was formed after the merger between NTL: Telewest and Virgin’s mobile service, will be the first UK operator to offer a “quad play” of TV, broadband, fixed-line and mobile phone services. (more…)
Californian-based search engine company Powerset has announced that it has secured the rights to natural language search technology that it claims will enable it to surpass Google as the internet’s leading search engine.
The new technology has taken Silicon Valley-based Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) over 30 years to develop.
Powerset hopes natural language searching will prove move popular than Google’s current approach, which involves listing the most popular pages which include the keywords in the search.
Natural language searches, on the other hand, have been developed to examine the relationship between the words in the search in an attempt to make computers “understand” and “process” language in a bid to improve results. (more…)
Around 68,000 people in the UK currently earn all or most of their living by selling products on eBay it has been estimated, highlighting the growing popularity of e-trading.
“E-traders” are defined as those who either make products specifically to sell online at a profit, buy goods in order to sell them on online, or sell products online for a commission or a flat fee. (more…)
Mobile phone giant Vodafone has announced a temporary link up with social-networking website MySpace in a move which could see both firms reap dividends.
While Vodafone hopes the affiliation will encourage customers to use their mobile phones as a way of accessing the internet, MySpace is using the tie as a way of creating awareness of its product in Europe. (more…)
Employee-owned firm John Lewis has announced ambitious plans to create 35,000 jobs and double turnover in the next ten years.
The proposals will see the company’s workforce expand to 100,000 by 2017, and sales double to £12 billion in the same timeframe. (more…)
Oxford student Thomas Whitfield’s proposal to create an “online timeline” has received the full backing of the notoriously hard-to-please panel of Dragon’s Den.
The judges were “blown away” by Mr Whitfield’s idea, the premise of which involves creating a website with a virtual timeline that details not only the past but also has space to record future events. (more…)
Tim Campbell, who found fame as a contestant on the UK version of the Apprentice, has revealed he is to start his own business.
However, Mr Campbell, who emerged as victor in the show’s inaugural series in 2005, has admitted that his “company” has no product, no name, no suppliers, no distributors and no retail outlets.
Despite this, he expects the business to be “up and running” by the summer, and for the first products to hit the shelves sometime before the end of the year. (more…)
