RealNetworks announced Monday that it has unlocked some of Apple Computer's most tightly held technology secrets, giving its music a way onto the popular iPod digital music player.

After decades of being criticized for producing luxury items, Apple Computer is aiming squarely at the mass market with a new budget PC unveiled Tuesday.

Microsoft is expected to release the first test version of its new Windows Media Player software Wednesday, marking a significant upgrade aimed squarely at the burgeoning portable device market.

The computer maker unveiled the design--its third all-in-one iMac--on Tuesday at the Apple Expo in Paris, and in doing so it ended considerable speculation. Apple had kept the specs of the iMac G5 a secret, but that didn't stop a number of Web sites from having a say on the possibilities.

How many of you have coworkers that regularly trot in to work with an iPod shuffle dangling from their necks? Do they religiously synchronize their home music collection with their office computers-using their own MP3 players? Finally, have you ever had a situation where getting some important files to someone was accomplished by handing that person a 1-GB thumb drive?

Microsoft appears to subscribe to the theory that "The best defense is a good offense" - at least that appears to be the case in the newly-reignited Web browser wars. That's my take on the motivation behind Microsoft's release of Internet Explorer 7.0. I'm going to look at why Firefox has lit a fire under Microsoft to get serious about Web browser development again, and why, based on my testing of the IE7 beta, I think that it's quite possible IE7 will take the starch out of the Web browser war.

This is potentially troubling for the disk drive industry because flash memory chips will relentlessly continue to economize on real estate and cost per memory bit. Moore's Law will reduce the cost of chips and enable manufacturers to increase memory capacity at the same time. Novel packages will let manufacturers stack four chips in a space that traditionally held one. Advanced Micro Devices will also come out with flash chips that hold four bits per cell rather than two bits.

Sensing big demand for hard drives in consumer markets, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will greatly expand production and set up design centers to promote its products.

In the weeks before Christmas, Google has quietly added third-party product reviews to its comparison shopping engine, Froogle.

The semiconductor company is shopping around the idea that hard drives can do more than store data in consumer electronics products such as MP3 players and cell phones. In Agere's vision, the hard drive component would handle memory buffering for the overall device, and the computer chip "brains" of the drive would take on additional tasks such as decoding song files into actual music or processing radio signals for a mobile phone.