Someone across the pond thinks that roll-up displays are worth enough moola to buy out the firm making them. Polymer Vision was previously a division of Philips Electronics' R&D division, but has been bought out, & will therefore split off from Philips entirely.

"The venture capital is set to help Polymer Vision continue with commercialization plans. Volume production of its 5-inch monochrome rollable display is set to start this year."

Barry at THG takes an Acer Ferrari laptop loaded with Windows Vista & Microsoft Office 2007, & puts it through its paces over the holidays break. Interesting that MS Is loaning out AMD-based laptops these days...

"I'm hoping that, along with you, Microsoft and other software vendors will be reading the diary to see not only what I'm telling you, but also whether they missed something important after subjecting Vista and Office 2007 to heavy internal and external quality control and user experience testing."

The guys at DigitalTrends have a sit-down with Amazon's director of digital media to talk about their media download service: Unbox. The Unbox service has been going since this past September, & you can both buy or rent videos and TV shows.

"Though the iTunes Store would seem to be the immediate dominant leader in this space given their iPod market share and early lead with television video downloads, Amazon is betting they will have a thing or two to say about that with their Unbox offering."

I've had this question posed to me plenty of times. The answer is pretty much always the same: it depends. The PCMechanic guys lay down the cost scenario for a small business site in this informative piece.

"To be honest, it is very easy to quote a price for large, complex sites. All I have to say is so-many-dollars an hour. Big corporations are used to dealing with contractors who charge on an hourly basis."