IBM, Intel execs charged with insider trading

In today's podcast: IBM, Intel execs charged with insider trading; Nokia's Comes With Music service has just 107,000 users; and US gets mobile TV standard.

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Executives from Intel Capital and IBM face insider trading charges after allegedly scheming to provide information that others used to reap millions of dollars in illegal profits, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The SEC charged six individuals for conspiring to execute trade securities using confidential information from companies including Intel, Google and Advanced Micro Devices. Executives charged included Robert Moffatt, senior vice president and executive in IBM's systems and technology group, and Rajiv Goel, who is Intel treasury's managing director of investments. The SEC filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Moffatt and Goel allegedly provided insider information about companies including Sun Microsystems and Intel.

A year after launching in the U.K., with rollouts elsewhere since, Nokia's Comes With Music service has amassed just 107,000 subscribers, according to an analyst report. The report, issued kast Thursday by Music Ally, came the same day that Nokia reported dismal financial earnings. Comes With Music lets anyone who buys a supported Nokia phone download and keep as many songs as they like from Nokia's collection of 6 million tracks. The service first launched in the U.K. one year ago and since then 33,000 people there are using it, Music Ally said. Other countries got the service throughout the year. Australia has the second-largest mass of users, with 23,000 people subscribing to it. Italy has only 691 users, after the service launched in April, according to the report.

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), which oversees TV standards for the U.S., said Friday it has approved a standard for mobile digital broadcasts. The ATSC Mobile DTV Standard will allow local TV stations to broadcast to mobile devices on the frequencies they already have. Consumers may be able to pick up the broadcasts on laptops, handheld TVs and in-vehicle entertainment systems as well as mobile phones. Mobile TV has been more successful in some other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, than in the U.S. Handset makers Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics were promoting two different specifications to the ATSC until last May, when they joined forces on a unified proposal.

Microsoft registered more than 1.5 million downloads of its free antivirus software in the week after it shipped. The company's Security Essentials software is a basic antivirus program designed to appeal to Windows users who don't want to shell out the US$40 to $50 per year that most AV vendors charge. It was launched on Sept. 29, and by Oct. 6, the software had been downloaded more than 1.5 million times, according to a Microsoft blog post by Microsoft. That number jumped to 2.6 million in the first two weeks

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.