T-Mobile admits losing customer data

In today's podcast: T-Mobile admits losing customer data; Microsoft extends XP downgrade deadline; and eBay buys Bill Me Later and lays off 1000.

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Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems for US$7.4 billion. The deal comes after Sun reportedly walked away from an offer from IBM a few weeks ago. The move will take it into the hardware business for the first time, as Sun gains a significant part of its revenue from sales of servers. There are areas of overlap: both companies have database engines, in Sun's case the open source MySQL database it bought for a billion dollars last year. Oracle is also a strong supporter of the Java software that Sun developed, and both companies sell Java application servers. For Sun, the deal will bring an end to CEO Jonathan Schwartz's efforts to turn the struggling company around. Sun's sales have been declining since their peak during the dot-com boom, as customers turned away from its pricey Unix servers in favor of x86 systems.

Adobe Systems has unveiled a version of its Flash multimedia streaming technology that will allow people to run entertainment programming directly to television sets from the Internet, a new option for the rapidly changing digital-home market. Adobe has also signed up partners including Intel, Broadcom, Comcast, Disney Interactive Media, Atlantic Records and Netflix. Currently, the main way to get this kind of content onto televisions is by hooking up a PC to a TV or set-top box.

Companies looking for outsourcing services are no longer going straight to India, but are instead including other countries in their evaluation, according to new research by Gartner. Brazil, the Philippines, Mexico, Vietnam, and some Eastern European countries are getting a larger share of offshore outsourcing, Gartner said, noting that India has reached a saturation point in outsourcing, and customers are reducing their exposure to risk by looking at other locations

Microsoft researchers in Beijing are developing applications that mine online data to track human relationships and help with translation, lab managers there said Monday. The lab has produced an application that maps a person's connections to friends and colleagues when a user searches for the person's name. Clicking on the line linking two people gives a pop-up summary of their relationship. Another program in development analyzes satellite positioning data to direct users to interesting locations by mobile phone.

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