Sony wants to be "active player" in tablet market
Sony appears ready to enter the tablet market, describing itself as "very interested" in designing a product of its own. Pressed on Sony's response to Apple's iPad announcement, chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda gave the clearest indication yet that the company was contemplating a challenger.
PC PRO

Telecom Italia denies only two bidders remain for Argentina stake
Italian operator insists it is in the process of compiling a short list from a 'number of bidders'.
Telecom Italia denied Thursday a report that only two bidders remained in the running for its stake in Telecom Argentina. Earlier, Reuters, citing an unnamed source close to the deal, reported that airport services operator Corporacion America and local businessman Alfredo Roman were the only two bidders still seeking to buy Telecom Italia's stake in Telecom Argentina.
Total Telecom

Microsoft’s Mundie calls for mandatory ‘internet drivers licences’
Microsoft’s chief strategy officer Craig Mundie suggested that internet users should get mandatory training before being allowed online. Mundie has proposed a three-tier system of authentication - for people, devices and applications saying that while this would mean some loss of anonymity online people were used to having to present identification in other areas of life and the internet should not be different.
v3.co.uk

EU reviews internet security after emissions fraud A phishing scam against the Emissions
An email phishing fraud against the European Union's greenhouse gas Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has prompted the executive European Commission to revise its internet security guidelines. German officials said this week that online fraudsters had targeted international carbon markets to steal emissions permits from companies and sell them illegally.
IT PRO

Facebook could sell own brand phones by 2011
Facebook could produce its own mobile phones before the end of next year, according to Christian Lindholm, an industry expert and managing partner at design consultancy Fjord.
Lindholm, who pioneered Nokia's user interface and was head of global mobile products at Yahoo, that getting into the hardware space would be an obvious move for the social networking site.
v3.co.uk

Licensing.biz leaps to latest traffic high
Europe's dominant site for licensing across mobile, games  toys, sport, fashion and more achieved record readership last month. According to the latest Google Analytics audit, www.licensing.biz attracted 31,669 unique visitors between January 1st and 31st, whilst page views hit an all-time high of 76,489 during the same period.
Mobile Entertainment

Did Apple just ban location based ads in iPhone apps?
There may be trouble ahead for iPhone apps (and mobile ad networks) looking to make use of location-based advertising. In an 'App Store Tip' posted on its iPhone Developer website, Apple appears to have nixed the idea.
Mobile Entertainment

GSMA and comScore launch Mobile Media Metrics service
From today, brands can access anonymised mobile Internet usage data from all five UK operators. This is a massive day for the GSMA and its operator members, the culmination of many painful years of collaboration between notoriously slow and mutually suspicious companies.
Mobile Entertainment

Apple iPad could kill the Internet
It has only been seen in the flesh by a handful of hand-picked hacks, but already Apple's iPad has been hailed as the saviour of computing, dismissed as nothing more than an overblown iPod and received more column inches than the devastasting earthquake in Haiti. Now the device, which won't even see the public light of day for at least another month, has been credited with the ability to bring the world to its knees by swamping the Internet's infrastructure.
Thinq

AT&T lets 3G Sling TV onto iPhone
AT&T has reversed an earlier stand, allowing Sling Media's player for the iPhone touch to stream live or recorded television over 3G. As we reported last spring, AT&T originally restricted SlingPlayer Mobile to Wi-Fi connections - even though it allowed 3G streaming rights for Major League Baseball's MLB.com At Bat app. At that time, Cnet quoted Sling Media's mobile product manager, Dave Eyler, as saying that their player was "under the bit rate that Apple has set for these kinds of applications," adding that "we are below some of the apps that have already been approved for the App Store."
The Register