UK company bans e-mail

John Caudwell, CEO of UK mobile phone retailer, Phones 4U, has banned intra-company e-mail, saying there will be instant benefits and immediate productivity gains from the ban, reports CNet.

The ban will reduce the time employees "unnecessarily" spend on e-mail, which Caudwell estimates will save the company around lb1 million a month.

Within three years, most US-located automated teller machines (ATMs) will run on Windows, according to a study published last week, Wired News reports.

The site reports that by 2005, 65% of ATMs (not including free-standing machines in places like convenience stores) in the US will use a stripped-down version of Windows. About 12% of these machines will use Windows by year-end, according to Gwenn Bezard, an analyst at market researcher Celent.

Asian attempts to create regional standards for computer and communications technologies are doomed to failure, according to Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel. Reuters reports that Barrett said efforts to protect local technology firms had been tried before and produced only short-term results.

His comments come weeks after officials from China, Japan and South Korea agreed to co-operate on the development of Linux-based applications. The initiative "echoes other efforts to promote regional standards that would protect Asian companies from US and European rivals". There has also been discussion, especially in China, of developing standardised microprocessors and other types of chips.

The creators of the file-sharing software, Kazaa, are making a big splash with their latest venture, offering free telephone calls over the Internet. The company joins a growing group of upstarts taking on the world`s communications giants, reports The Globe.

"The ambition here is to become a global telephone company," said Niklas Zennstrom, CEO of Skyper and co-founder of Kazaa. "We will help bring down the cost of telecommunications."

Microsoft plans to announce new speciality software packages today, based on the upcoming update of its Office productivity software, reports ZDNet. The new packages, which feature third-party add-ons and services, will be sold by Microsoft partners under the Office Solution Accelerator Programme.

The first seven products from the Accelerator Programme will focus on specific business segments and tasks: sales proposals, personnel recruiting, quality-management projects for Six Sigma (an efficiency theory made popular by General Electric), financial reports, compliance projects for new Sarbanes-Oxley Act accounting rules in the US, business scorecards and financial scenarios.

An Internet search company has filed a $100 million anti-trust lawsuit against VeriSign, accusing it of hijacking misspelled and unassigned Web addresses with a service it launched last week, reports Reuters.

Meanwhile, ICANN, the agency that oversees Internet domain names, has asked the company to voluntarily suspend its new service, reports CNet.