The companies will develop the high definition set-top boxes that will allow Virgin subscribers to record programming on the box's hard drive, and access online content through a broadband connection. TiVo will provide the so-called middleware ? which powers the boxes ? and the software. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Neil Berkett, Virgin Media's chief executive, said, TiVo's record of innovation and patented technology meant it was "an ideal strategic partner for Virgin Media ( Read more... )
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The banks would not (and, indeed, could not) lend, companies were not looking for office space, particularly in London, and firms that would consider signing new leases were only looking for short-term agreements, on smaller offices. Those that can recall the demise of Woolworths can guess what retailers thought of taking on more space.

The property market slump had long been signalled. Two years ago, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) fired a shot across ( Read more... )
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Among the UK's biggest fast-food chains, Subway grew its number of restaurants by 25.9 per cent to 734 in 2009, Domino's ramped up its outlets by 19.8 per cent to 260, and Eat expanded its estate by 17.8 per cent to 86, according to the Local Data Company's survey of 705 town centres. In the 10 biggest cities, fast-food outlets soared by 8.2 per cent to 1,456 premises, with London, Edinburgh and Glasgow leading the way.

Matthew Hopkinson, a director at the Local Data Company, said these ( Read more... )
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Winter-sport operator TUI Ski is now offering passengers ski hire, lift passes and reservations for après-ski events as they fly into resorts ? receiving a commission from every sale. American Airlines, meanwhile, is testing on-board sales so that passengers can buy tickets for Broadway shows as they cross the Atlantic, while those coming back to Britain can get their Heathrow-to-Paddington express tickets ready even before landing.

Finding new ways of selling more to passengers in the skies ( Read more... )
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He seems particularly chipper today. The owner and chairman of Birmingham City Football club ? and the man behind the Ann Summers and Knickerbox chains ? smiles broadly as he runs the rule over the staff tending to his giant estate in the Surrey countryside.

The contrast between this cheery fella and the man who was nearly driven out of Birmingham in tears just a few months ago, after enduring a tirade of abuse from angry fans following the club's relegation from the Premiership, is stark. ( Read more... )
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The likes of Legal & General and Aviva (formerly Norwich Union) face the prospect of having to tap shareholders for billions of pounds as they grapple with creaking capital positions, the threat of new regulation from Brussels and Westminster, and falling demand for their products. The sector is also in the midst of a wave of consolidation as the former zombie fund raider, Clive Cowdery, eyes up potential targets after snaring Friends Provident last month. These are indeed interesting ( Read more... )
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In the days before launch, the 135-strong crew of the Astute ? who have been living on board for some weeks ? were unstinting in their praise. Andrew Coles, the boat's commanding officer, said: "This submarine is a step change in technology and an awesome capability."

It is no small triumph is that Astute exists at all. The shipyards in Barrow-in-Furness have been building submarines for more than a century: from the first-ever Holland in 1901, through the first nuclear-powered Dreadnought ( Read more... )
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There has been an increase in PC sales in the UK as more and more of us join the online world. We seem to be spending more time online, spending more money and discovering new ways of using the net for fun and games.

Yet despite these healthy signs of a growing internet community, investors seem to have lost their appetite for net startups. They appear to have arrived at the conclusion that internet investments are only safe for large companies which can take a long-term view (like banks, ( Read more... )
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It's been a week since Labor Day, when we Americans all take the day off and honour those who have to work for a living.

And since the millions who get the day off want to have fun, millions of other of souls with jobs at shops and restaurants and hotels and cinemas wind up working overtime to serve the lucky folks who get weekends and holidays off. The rich guys have a good time at the expense of the guys not so lucky. This is very American.

Silicon Valley is almost as far as you ( Read more... )
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It's Sunday, there's a rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee in the air. My wife is out of town.

The hardwood floor in the family room holds a pile of large and small boxes freshly carted from Fry's, the geek superstore. There's a box containing a generic PC chassis with bare motherboard and power supply, Sapphire in colour, a boxed AMD K6-II 500 MHz processor, a 128 MB RAM stick, a 54x generic CD-Rom, a generic SCSI card, a boxed copy of Be OS 5.0 and a boxed Red Hat Linux 6.2 distribution. ( Read more... )
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Maybe we'll all be known as the '99ers. There was a huge explosion of activity in Northern California in 1849. Gold had been discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and thousands flocked to San Francisco to find their fortune. The San Francisco football team is still called the '49ers, after the term locals used to describe the recent arrivals 150 years ago.

Huge wealth was created during that time, but, truth be known, many more fortunes were made outside of the goldfields than ( Read more... )
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The UN is to hold a conference in Copenhagen next month that it hopes will lead to a dramatic shift in the world's attitude to climate change.

More than 15,000 officials are expected to attend the two-week conference from 7-18 December. Delegates from 192 countries will seek to reach an agreement on what industrialised and developing countries can do to cut emissions. This includes debates on help that can be given to heavily carbon-emitting developing countries ( Read more... )
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The son of Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament co-founder and Marxist intellectual Ralph Miliband told the Commons on Monday he was fast-tracking the construction of 10 nuclear power stations to produce 16GW of power. "We need nuclear power, which is a proven, reliable source of low-carbon energy," he gushed.

That emotive word "nuclear" got everyone chattering, but Miliband's strategy was far from one-planked. He also detailed plans to raise up to £9.5bn through ( Read more... )
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Mr Murdoch told Sky News Australia on Monday that papers owned by News Corporation, which include The Times and The Sun in Britain, will disappear from the largest search engine when the titles begin charging for online content. A few days earlier he had admitted that these plans to charge had been delayed.

At this week's Monaco Media Forum, both issues ? charging for online content and blocking news aggregators such as Google ? have been fiercely debated.

Mr Murdoch has spent much ( Read more... )
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Between 2004 and 2007, Mintel says in a report to be released today, growth was spectacular. It seemed everyone thought they could emulate the likes of Phil Hellmuth, Amarillo Slim and the grandaddy of them all, Doyle Brunson, by becoming a poker millionaire through the click of a mouse.

But after a growth of 72 per cent between those years (Mintel says), last year the online poker market stagnated, with a gross gaming yield of £265m.

What is more, this year online poker is expected ( Read more... )
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What makes Roth's story unusual is that he is an Ossi, an East German, from Saxony, the so-called rustbelt part of the country. The point made relentlessly over the past few weeks, as the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approached, has been that following the euphoria of the revolutions of 1989, the collapse of communism and the reunification of Germany the following year, things have gone depressingly wrong. Some Germans still talk of "the wall in the head" that in many ways continues ( Read more... )
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Watching the markets, in other words, you would not think that we are at least four years off getting GDP back to 2008 levels; nor that unemployment, bankruptcies and repossessions are still climbing. The latest UK jobless figures are out today, as is the Bank of England's Inflation Report, their definitive view of prospects for the real economy. They are unlikely to be bubbly.

So are the markets running ahead of themselves? Has the massive programme of credit easing by central banks round ( Read more... )
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The conundrum is this. Unemployment is close to 2.5 million and will go higher. Pay rises are rare. People fear debt. The credit crunch has hardly gone away, meaning that mortgage finance, especially for first-time buyers with slim deposits, and movers with little equity, is expensive, if available at all. Mortgage approvals may be up on last year, but the new money going into the market isn't sufficient to secure rising prices. Values are steep by long-term historical standards in relation to ( Read more... )
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It is the sort of unpleasant letter that will become common as competition is injected into British banking. Almost five million Lloyds group customers will be told in coming years they have been sold to another company ? perhaps a supermarket or an insurance company or a foreign lender ? and can no longer bank with Lloyds. The same fate is faced by 1.7 million Royal Bank of Scotland savers and borrowers.

If customers demand to move their accounts back to Lloyds or RBS after what might ( Read more... )
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The bank's board, led by Stevenson, had told them the money was needed to provide a solid platform for HBOS's future growth and to strengthen its capital position.

Today, HBOS has been rescued from collapse by Lloyd's Banking Group and those investors are demanding to know whether the board gave them a full account of how parlous the bank's state really was when it asked them to put up new money. They may at last be about to get some answers.

In a circular published on 3 June that ( Read more... )
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