Unites States recorded an increase on Internet retailers sales increased of 19% from Nov 1 till Dec 27 compared against the same period last year. However, this increase is below the sales increased last year, which was 26%, compared to 2006 for the same period.

Online retailers attributed this to the warm weather in early November. However, the online spending increased to 21% between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Thanksgiving is celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November each year. This year’s Thanksgiving was on November 22.

Seven gaint chip makers - IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, AMD, Chartered, Freescale and inifneon - are collaborating to develop the chips containing transistors in only 32 billionth of a meter wide. This will mean more transistors can be stored in the chip which will give it more processing power.

However, the cost of developing chips are often very expensive. By coming together the seven companies are sharing cost of early development. They have agreed to work together through 2010 to design, develop and produce chips using tiny circuits.

Strangely, Intel, the largest supplier of chips to computers, is not part of the alliance. According to analyst from Future Horizon, Intel is very focus in the personal computer chips. Hence, Intel is very focused in a niche market.

Virtualization simply means a single computer which can run multiple operating systems and applications simultaneously. This is a breakthrough technology compared to the conventional where a single computer operates a single operating systems. Virtualization can reduce the number of computers and related computer hardware in a data center that can bring savings in term of cost savings in electricity and real estate rental.

The company VMWare, majority-owned by EMC, has raised US$1.1 billion in its initial public offering in August 2007. This is one of the largest IPO since Google went public in 2004.

MySpace and Google have announced they are collaborating in a deal that could change the landscape of social networking.

MySpace has agreed to join OpenSocial, a Google’s platform that allows developers to build applications that will work on any platform. Besides MySpace, other sits like Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut are members of OpenSocial. The participation of MySpace, with 200 million users, will encourage more programmers to develop applications on OpenSocial.

According to Google, they have reached out to everyone in the social networking industry to join OpenSocial and it indicated that included Facebook.

Meanwhile, Facebook is still sitting at the sideline waiting to see further development on OpenSocial. Since opening up its platform the programmers, Facebook has tens of thousand programmers developing applications for Facebook.

Recently, Facebook sold 1.6% stake to Microsoft for US$240million. MySpace is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The most recent survey showed that digital television installation in United Kingdom homes has reached 84%. This year data increased by 13% is the highest in many years. This data was released by media watchdog, Ofcom in the run-up of the digital switchover.

The first analogue switch off will happen in Whitehaven, Cumbria in October.

Digital television is estimated to be around 9.1 million sets in United Kingdom.

By 2012, analogue television will earn its place as a new chapter in history.

Dell is changing it’s business strategies quick and fast. It has started to reach out for consumers in more ways than their traditional ways of direct selling. Dell has setup outlets in Wal-Mart stores. Dell is reaching out to walk-in customers.

Now, Dell is adding more products into its traditional product portfolio of laptop, PC and servers. Dell is acquiring privately owned Zing Systems which develops software for audio streaming and digital audio file management.

Zing Systems is not the first. Dell acquired ASAP Software in April and Silverback Technologies in July 2007.