Stories about: British Telecom

You might not agree with him. You even might not believe what he says. But British Telecom does. Ian Pearson has been BT's futurologist since 1991. His job it to imagine where today's technologies will lead us. Artificial intelligence, genetic modification, intelligent viruses, imaginary civilizations and Second Life 10.0, as well as some pretty nasty scenarios involving robots like the Terminator are all real possibilities he included in his 2006 Technology Timeline. In this interview, Pearson talks about his profession, explains why he doesn't think we will understand intelligent machines when they finally arise, and warns to the big ethical dilemmas our technological civilization will have to face sooner or later.

Zimbra customers appalled at the company's planned acquisition by Yahoo are speaking out, saying they are vexed by the deal and upset over its possible negative consequences.

Nokia intends to boost its mobile ad business through the acquisition of Enpocket, which provides mobile phone marketing technology and services to advertisers, Web publishers and carriers.

Azul Systems, secured US$40 million in new financing Thursday just as the provider of Java "network-attached processing" servers was laying off employees and reading media speculation that it was looking for a buyer.

Coghead, an early pioneer in the creation of a Web 2.0 application development platform, announced a deal on Thursday with British Telecom (BT) that will give Coghead developers access to BT's telephony services and, by extension, its 1 million customers.

IBM Friday announced that it has acquired Princeton Softech, a maker of data archiving, classification and discovery products, to bolster its own data management offerings. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

Australia's Centre of Excellence in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) research, NICTA, has appointed Dr David Everitt, to head up its Canberra Research Laboratory.

Privacy experts from afar afield as the United Kingdom met with the federal government this week to examine weaknesses in the Privacy Act which is currently under review.

Microsoft and British Telecommunications Monday launched a competition to encourage developers to create "network mashups" that merge telecommunications features like voice and text messaging with Web 2.0 applications like mapping and search. A "mashup" application or web site combines content from multiple sources.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's keynote this year at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) put the company's newest power broker at center stage: Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices division. Bach is the man behind Microsoft's Xbox, which at the time of its launch was a big risk and departure for the company. Xbox has gone on to become one of Microsoft's most successful consumer products, and Bach now is in charge of charting Microsoft's future strategy to give consumers real-time, always-available access to content over IP networks.

Australian telcos are again lagging behind the rest of the world by not offering voice, data and video triple play bundles, according to industry analysts.