France tries to build a public media giant
France's ambitious plan to mold its public TV and radio broadcasters into a unit with the clout and reach to rival the BBC or CNN has not gone over smoothly.

What Microsoft could learn from Oracle
Determined to match Google in Web search and online advertising, Microsoft has managed to overlook a plain-vanilla strategy, the oldest one in the book: Build on your own strengths.

Swiss insurer humors skiers to reduce accidents
A third of Swiss sports-related injuries happen on ice or snow. Suva, an accident insurance company, uses offbeat ads and speed-check guessing games to remind skiers to be careful.

A wall of publicists surrounds Hollywood
There once was a day when journalists simply called up glamorous or important people and spoke with them, but that doesn't happen much anymore in Hollywood.

Virtual payments catching on in Japan
Some analysts say e-money, spent by devices like cellphones, makes up about 20 percent of the ??300 trillion, or $2.8 trillion, in Japanese consumer spending.

Hollywood studios trying to breathe new life into DVD sales
The victory of Sony's new Blu-ray DVD standard over a rival format, Toshiba's HD DVD, masks a bigger problem facing the studios: the overall decline of the DVD market.

Researchers develop simple method to steal encrypted computer data
The technique, which could undermine security software, is as easy as chilling a computer memory chip with a blast of frigid air from a can of dust remover.

Why did so many companies dump HD DVD?
One reason is the approaching era of Internet movie downloads, but that era is more distant than pundits think.

'Coworking,' a cooperative for the modern age
The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers who team up to rent studio space.

Microsoft makes more code public
Microsoft published 30,000 pages of code for Windows on its Web site. The European Commission, which is considering a pair of complaints against the company, reacted coolly.

Reed Elsevier to acquire ChoicePoint for $3.6 billion
The purchase price represents a major premium for a company that has weathered an embarrassing breach of its database, U.S. government investigations and an inquiry into stock trading by its top two executives.

Google plans to sell ads in Web videos in U.S.
Google wants to capitalize on the explosion in online video and the scale of its advertising network, which analysts say includes a vast majority of Web advertisers and hundreds of thousands of Web sites.

DVD code cracker goes legitimate
Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian teenager who helped crack the code on copying DVDs almost a decade ago, has started a business whose goal is software that manages digital media and lets consumers move their files among any kind of hardware.

Security concerns sidetrack Bain deal for 3Com
Huawei Technologies, which has strong ties to the Chinese government, would have received 16.5 percent of the company.

NBC abandons fall debuts for year-round schedule
NBC Universal took a big step toward undoing one of the television industry's oldest traditions by announcing Tuesday that it would move to a year-round schedule of staggered program introductions. The change is intended to appeal to advertisers, who crave fresh content to keep viewers tuned in.
- Back to work, writers search for new plots

After strike, 'Saturday Night Live' works to retrieve audience
The comedy show returns to NBC this weekend with the first of four consecutive new shows, the first time that breakneck schedule has been tried since 1976.

Cellphones are bringing Pakistanis together
About 65 million people are using mobile phones each day in Pakistan. For most Pakistanis, the wireless devices are the first phones they have ever had.

Toshiba saw the tide running against it in DVD fight
A growing number of movie studies had started to choose Blu-ray, the rival high-definition DVD technology from Sony.

European privacy advocates to issue report in April
Data protection officials from 30 European countries ended a two-day meeting and agreed that search engines needed to make changes.