Companies seek mobile VOIP

Various start-up companies are looking to combine mobile phones, WiFi and voice over IP to create mobile VOIP.

According to Investors Business Daily, consumers would benefit by having one phone number and cheaper mobile phone calls.

About 174 million Americans have cellphones, while 17 million have in-home broadband wireless networks, also known as WiFi. Approximately one million use their broadband Internet connections to make phone calls via VOIP.

But for the technology to be adopted, new types of cellphones would be required, and wireless operators will have to decide whether it makes business sense.

Oracle has made a database-development component, which plugs into the Microsoft .Net development platform, available for free download.

According to Information Week, this represents a first move toward increased cooperation between the two bitter database competitors.

The component is called Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .Net, and developers must be users of Microsoft`s Visual Studio .Net 2003 for the plug-in to work.

It allows developers using Visual Basic .Net, C# and Visual C++ .Net to create applications that will work with Oracle database. The applications may include the use of stored procedures. Stored procedures are optimised database operations for an application that are stored inside the Oracle database server. The move results in improved execution speed.

Oracle senior VP Andy Mendelsohn has conceded that many people used Microsoft`s SQL Server database, but said consumers should be aware of the alternatives.

Even employees at Sharman Networks - the company that owns Kazaa Media Desktop - hate using the program because the accompanying software can slow their computers.

This is according to internal documents that were made public in an Australian court.

Like many free programs, Kazaa comes packaged with adware for delivering advertisements to users. Many adware programs have been blamed for slowing down systems and causing some to crash, AP reports.

In the document, Sharman Networks director of technology Phil Morle wrote that Kazaa needs to be careful with how much adware it bundles.

"It is reasonable that we show ads in order to create our free software," he wrote, "but I do not believe it is reasonable to place a user in a position where this free software will also make their machine sluggish."

Users are, however, given an option to pay for an advertisement-free version of the program.