Year: 2002

Hitatchi will be acquiring IBM’s money-losing hard disk business for US$2.05 billion, according to Reuters. Hitatchi has vowed to return the business to profitability and expects revenues of $5 billion next year, or a quarter of the global disk drive market, with that figure growing to $7 billion by 2006-2007.

Ambrosia Software has released Escape Velocity Nova 1.0.1, the latest version of its popular action/adventure game. The update adds numerous small fixes and enhancements — too many to list here. Escape Velocity Nova is US$30 shareware.

Apple has a positive outlook on its future in the Philippines, according to an i.t. matters article, as noted by MacSurfer “We have been quite bullish, specifically on education and professional users. Of course, we expect growth this year,” Charlie Tang, Apple Manager for the Philippines, told the publication.

Archos today announced the MiniHD, a 20GB ultra-slim hard drive that it bills as the world’s smallest and lightest. Like SmartDisk’s similar FireFly 20GB, the MiniHD is avaialble exclusively with USB 2.0 connectivity, which the Mac OS currently only offers limited support for. The drive is backwards-compatible with USB 1.1, however.

As Apple rolls out the public preview of QuickTime 6 today, Microsoft continues work on its next-generation digital media player, code-named Corona. Microsoft has yet to commit to supporting MPEG-4 in Corona, as Apple has done with QuickTime 6, instead opting to use its own codecs. Microsoft also isn’t planning a Mac release of Corona at this point. “Our focus right now for the Corona time frame is Windows XP and other versions of Windows, Jonathan Usher, director of the Windows Digital Media Division at Microsoft told c|net.