Microsoft standards fall short

In a preliminary vote made public yesterday, the Microsoft Office Open XML document format fell short of the total it would need to receive approval from a key international standards organisation, reports Seattle Pi.

The outcome does not kill the proposal, but it does promise to make things more difficult for the company and Ecma International, the group shepherding the format through the International Organisation for Standardisation process.

Next, Ecma and Microsoft will try to address the comments and concerns of the national bodies taking part in the process and seek to change votes before a final tally, set for early next year.

NBC Universal significantly deepened its relationship with Amazon's digital video download service after a dispute with Apple over the pricing of television shows on iTunes, reports The New York Times.

The media conglomerate said yesterday that Amazon had agreed to give it something Apple would not: greater flexibility in the pricing and packaging of video downloads.

As a result, NBC Universal said it had agreed to sell a wide variety of television programming on Amazon's fledgling Unbox download service, including the drama Heroes and the comedies The Office and 30 Rock. Episodes will be available on Unbox the day after they are shown.

It may be something of a teenage nightmare - limits on when a wireless phone can make and receive calls and to whom, restrictions on text messages and talk time, and set allowances for ringtones and other downloads - all at a parent's fingertips, says The Associated Press.

AT&T, the largest US wireless carrier, has launched a service giving parents that kind of wide-ranging control on almost all of its 63.7 million subscriber lines.

The company's Smart Limits service will be offered as an add-on for $4.99 per month per line. No contract will be required, and it will work on all but a handful of customer lines left on an old network the company is phasing out.

Toshiba president Atsutoshi Nishida says the world's second-largest maker of NAND flash-memory chips aims to overtake Samsung Electronics as the biggest producer of semiconductors next year, reports Bloomburg.com.

Sales of the chips, which store songs and pictures in digital cameras, mobile phones and music players, will expand as higher communication speeds allow devices to save more data, Nishida said. He spoke at an opening ceremony for a flash-memory line at the company's factory in Yokkaichi, central Japan.

Toshiba and partner SanDisk are increasing output to meet demand. Tokyo-based Toshiba, Japan's biggest chipmaker, said in July it expects to meet 75% of orders for NAND this quarter, down from 80% three months earlier.