Stories about: Octopus

Yahoo was criticized by some shareholders on Friday for the way it handled Microsoft's attempted acquisition, but in the end there were fewer fireworks at its annual meeting of stockholders than some had expected.

Toss aside your typical idea of a robot -- all metal, jerky movements and a stiff-legged walk.

Two years ago, Canadian contactless micropayment vendor Dexit was quietly morphed into the point-of-sale company HDX. No-one cared much.

It is now more than two years since the AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) buzzword swept through the world of client-server applications, up-ending the old architectures and spurring us to rethink how we can make the browser the center of our world. But long before the coinage of AJAX, rich-client framework vendors JackBe and Nexaweb had already embraced and extended what has become the AJAX ideal.

Lucasfilm is the creative force behind a host of special-effects-laden motion pictures, including the "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones" and "Pirates of the Caribbean" series. The firm has six divisions in addition to the parent company: Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects group; Lucas Arts and Entertainment, the gaming division; Lucasfilm Animation; Skywalker Sound; Lucas Licensing; and Lucas Online. The company operates from three locations in the San Francisco area and the Lucasfilm Animation facility in Singapore.

Creative scientists have until next week to submit proposals for creating a shape-shifting military robot that can shrink and then reconfigure itself to normal height and shape.

Fancy a visit to the store-of-the-future? It's nicely decorated, and your shopping cart computer displays promotional items and your shopping history (by checking the transactions on your RFID-enabled card) as you stroll the aisles. Digital signs change to display information based on your personal interests, as the RFID device passes displays and transmits data from your previous shopping experiences.

Desperate to reduce IT purchasing cycles, vendors are teaching IT professionals how to pitch projects to their internal committees and stakeholders.

Planning for business continuity means weighing risk: what systems can your business not live without? How can you get access to that data or computing power should something happen? And, perhaps most importantly, how much do you want to spend to have a backup plan - a plan which you, hopefully, might never need?

The first thing I check on when ringing Remote Lounge's publicity coordinator is the bathrooms. There are no Webcams there, right? Nope, no cameras in the bathroom, he assures me.

Two recent moves by Nokia in Hong Kong demonstrate the company's interest in promoting m-commerce locally, but now that they've built it, will anyone come?