IT Roundup

Sportech has canceled its loss-making interactive gaming contract with British commercial broadcaster ITV PLC; the seven-year agreement was signed in March 2002. Sportech, founded in 1923 as Littlewoods Football Pools and quoted on the London Stock Exchange, will incur losses of up to £14 million. Analysts say the service failed to take off as gamblers looked to the Internet for a wider variety of services offered by the likes of Sportingbet and PartyGaming.

Two Know More Than One

Adobe, with the know-how of Macromedia (which it bought last year), has updated the mobile version of Flash Player. The new Flash Lite and Flash Player SDK can be incorporated into devices by manufacturers, enabling users of the devices to view Flash animations in the same way as desktop PC users.

Pay As You Go

Be has become the first U.K. broadband Internet service provider to deliver the awesome power of up to 24 meg broadband. With download speeds up to a staggering 24 meg and upload speeds up to a record-breaking 1.3 meg, this is super-fast broadband, and it now has a pay-as-you-go option, with high speeds using the next generation broadband technology, ADSL2+. According to Point Topic, England now has 9.8 million broadband lines. Worldwide, the United States is the largest broadband market with 40.9 million lines.

Tellies Go TV

BT launched its next-generation of services, "which will help customers transform how they communicat, are entertained and manage their lives." For this you need ADSL broadband and the "BT Hub," a router that provides a wireless network. And then you will get:

• Communications: PC-based and phone-based VoIP services, with advanced applications such as network-based address books, unified messaging, video calling and high-definition voice calling.
• Entertainment: Broadcast TV including PVR features, "catch-up TV," archive TV, movies on demand, music on demand and interactive gaming and gambling;
• Life Management: ID protection, Internet protection and parental controls, home surveillance, and online content backup and management.

Sticky Business

Glu Mobile (formerly Sorrent, Inc. and Macrospace Ltd.), a leading developer and global publisher of mobile entertainment, and Harrah's License Company, an affiliate of Harrah's Entertainment, have announced a worldwide, multi-year alliance to create and publish World Series of Poker-branded mobile content, including games, graphics, ringtones and other applications. The Glu agreement follows announcements of pacts between Harrah's and America Online for online gaming and Harrah's and Activision for console gaming. As the exclusive mobile games partner for the World Series of Poker, Glu will begin developing and publishing content for this year's event.

The Real Big Brother

China blocks access to gambling sites, as well as pornography, information on Taiwan, the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations, fabricated information and content deemed to harm national security. Zhao Shiqiang, vice head of the Ministry of Public Security's Internet security and supervision bureau, said at a news conference last week that the spread of Web sites featuring the mentioned subjects has been brought under effective control. Police had detained 221 people and shut down almost 600 domestic pornographic Web sites as of the end of November, Zhao said. Mainland China is home to 100 million Internet users.