NVidia readies video-recording boards

Recordable DVD drives are starting to make waves in the consumer market and NVidia is readying for this new market with a range of graphics boards. The company unveiled a Personal Cinema graphics board at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.

Historically, ATI has owned the market for combination graphics board/TV tuners with its line of All-in-Wonder boards, but now NVidia is jumping back into the market with its offering. The boards turn a PC into a personal video-recorder and digital media centre, with features like direct-to-DVD video-recording. They succeed the tuners NVidia released last year. [PCWorld]

IBM is planning to release DB2-based data integration software later this year that will let IT managers link data throughout their systems without needing to collapse the information into a single data warehouse.

Although the company is a little sketchy on the details at the moment, IBM has said the integration technology will give end-users real-time access to data beyond DB2 and rival databases. Using the native XML capabilities in DB2, users will be able to access data from conventional sources, such as applications, as well as unstructured information stored in documents or e-mail messages, says Nelson Mattos, director of information integration at IBM. [ComputerWorld]

After dominating the desktop, burrowing into the Internet and bursting into the video game market, Microsoft is making progress at getting firmly into the palm of your hand.

The company is ramping up efforts to provide the operating system for a new generation of "smart cellphones that can handle e-mail, digital photos and other data".

Microsoft has already jumped into the European market with a device sold by British wireless carrier Orange, and last week it made a big North American advance as Hitachi and Samsung each said they would soon produce Microsoft-powered handhelds.

Microsoft claims it can make mobile devices easier to use by assuring seamless connections with its desktop programs. Its people talk as if they owe it to a Windows-addicted world.

"We feel a certain sense of responsibility," says Microsoft`s mobile-product manager, Ed Suwanjindar. "When you ask people what they want to do with these devices, very often they`re similar to the things they`re already doing on their Windows desktop." [Reuters]

Former Red Hat employee Bernhard Rosenkraenzer has resurfaced, after leaving Red Hat last year, with a new GNU/Linux distribution meant for the average user.

"The Ark Linux distribution is based primarily upon a Red Hat Linux 7.3 / 8.0 foundation," says Rosenkraenzer. "On top of this, we have added a new easy-to-use installer - an Ark Linux installation is only four mouse-clicks away - and extensively tailored the software applications and utilities included in an effort to ensure that Ark Linux provides superior ease-of-use and the features and functionality end-users have told us they want."

Rosenkraenzer says there are already a lot of good distributions available for advanced users but none for first-timers. He hopes to change this with Ark and attract more users to Linux, although he says he doesn`t intend to lure users away from other distributions. [Open for Business]