Tag archive: Venezuela

Folks who thought eBay's online payment service PayPal was already pretty ubiquitous might be in for a little shock: the service is expanding its global reach by rolling out fully localized sites in Mexico, Singapore, and Hong Kong, as well as adding nine new languages to its primary Web site, including Danish, NOrwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, and Bahasa Indonesian. The additions bring the… Read More

Microsoft has announced an agreement with Portugal to put WIndows XP, Microsoft Office 2007, and a selection of educational products onto Portugal's “Magellan” laptops, based on Intel's Clasmate PC design. The notebooks cost school children just €50, and are aimed at accelerating technology adoption in Portuguese schools. “For the first time a whole generation will grow up to have strong English and ICT… Read More

Earlier this year, Portugal made a deal with Intel to produce 500,000 Classmate PCs under license based on Intel's design. Now, Portugal has turned around and made its own deal with Venezuela that will see one million Linux-powered Classmate PCs for use in Venezuelan schools. Although terms of the deal were not given, the move is part of a broader package of agreements involving energy development, infrastructure, and housing valued… Read More

The idea was a simple one – give away $40,000 of free gas to motorists in order to promote a new video game. But the result when it happened in a London neighborhood on Friday was chaos and even brought condemnation from the local Member of Parliament. Given that gas costs well over $8 a gallon in the UK, it’s not surprising that the promotion, created by Electronic Arts to promote the Mercenaries 2: World in Flames game,… Read More

Now the total is up to four. Venezuela and India and joined Brazil and South Africa in appealing against the ratification of Microsoft’s Open Office XML format as the International Organization for Standardization and International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) standard. They filed their appeals before the Sunday night deadline and the IEC now has 30 days to ensure the appeals conform to the directives. Realistically… Read More

Cuba is definitely changing. A few weeks ago President Raul Castro allowed Cubans to legally own mobile phones. Now the ban on them owning home computers has been lifted, slowly bringing Cuba intothe modern age.   The emphasis is definitely on slowly, however. With computers selling there for $800 when most people make $20 a month, they’re not likely to be lining up five deep tomake purchases. But, according to a BBC report, people… Read More

Fidel Castro only stepped down as Cuba's president last month after nearly 50 years as the island nation's leader, but one major change is already on the way for Cuban citizens: Reuters is reporting the country is getting set to allow unrestricted sales of DVD players and computers. Currently, only businesses and foreigners are allowed to purchase computers in Cuba, and until last year DVD players were actually seized at Cuban… Read More

Electronic Arts is the world's largest video game publisher, and it showed in the company's announcements and demonstrations at this year's scaled-back E3 Expo in Santa Monica. EA's pending titles span a wide variety of styles and genres, and leave no franchise—and no gaming platform—untapped. First up, Electronic Arts plans to capitalize on the success of the Guitar Hero franchise with Rock Band, a new… Read More

A year-long study by the OpenNet Initiative, detailed at a conference in Oxford, England, examined the practices of 41 countries to learn about online government surveillance and censorship. The results? Where five years ago only a handful of states were filtering Internet content, the study found 25 of the countries it examined were engaged in state-mandated filtering and censorship of online content, and the filtering is becoming more… Read More

From the company's press release: AT&T Wireless today announced the recent expansion of its international text messaging (SMS) services, permitting delivery of text messages between Mexican and North American users. The service helps build a communications bridge across the border that supports business development with Mexico´s primary trading partner and links the more than 10 million Mexicans living in the United States with… Read More

Until recently the video-on-demand (VOD) market has been almost exclusively a North American phenomenon, driven by the overwhelming dominance of cable services there. That state of affairs hasexisted for most of the three years since such services were launched. In the last six to nine months, however, VOD has started to gain real traction in other parts of the world. Vamsi Sistla, ABI Research's director of broadband research, says that… Read More