Monday, November 13, 2000		Latest in IT world

Madonna’s first live British gig in seven years will be telecast live on the Internet. The tickets for the concert at London’s Brixton Academy on November 28 have already been sold that will be attended by some 3500 persons. The show on the Internet would generate a lot of interest from the Internet community and it is likely to even break the record set by the Webcast of Paul McCartney at The Cavern in Liverpool last year, which drew 3 million viewers. This would be Madonna’s first Web-based online concert on the Internet and experts feel that it could become the trendsetters for other pop stars also.

Pets.com – the latest disaster

San Francisco-based high profile pets.com recently announced shutting down of its retail operations, thus becoming another dotcom disaster. Pets.com was backed by amazon.com and was a leading pet store on the Net. The company’s decision to close down would render hundreds of employees of this popular portal jobless. The company also announced selling its assets and also its URL and the rights to sock puppet icon. Recently some other popular portals, like furniture.com; bigwords.com and mothernature.com, have also announced either closure of their portals or lay off. The closure is significant as it is the second amazon.com-backed site that has gone down.

HP to launch laptop with wireless networking

Hewlett-Packard has developed a new small-sized laptop that features wireless networking and is light in weight. HP plans to unveil its new product in the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. This laptop, known as OmniBook 500, has the antenna inside the box. However, HP has decided not to include the necessary antenna inside the box. The HP’s latest offering is being rated as good as its other features like 1-inch thickness and ultralight weight of 3.4 pounds, apart from wireless networking puts it at par with IBM’s ThinkPad X series or the Armada M300 from Compaq Computer and Dell. Other features of this laptop are a 12.1-inch display, battery life up to 10 hours when using the multimedia expansion base, two USB slots, integrated 56 K modem and network adapter. Though, Hewlett-Packard has not announced the price of its range of laptops yet it is expected that the entry-level laptop with 500 MHz Celeron processor would be priced at around $ 1900. However, the higher models are likely to be priced in line with the top-end products available in the market, which could be around $ 3500 for a Pentium III 700 MHz model.