Stories by Rodney Gedda

Past and present: how 30 years of Star Wars imagination changed technology forever. During 2008 Sydney's Powerhouse Museum played host to one of the largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia combined with real-life examples of how such technology is being applied for business and social advancement.

Following the HTC Magic release last week and pricing announcement by 3, Vodafone will offer the Google Android phone free on a $69 per month cap over 24 months.

Antivirus and Internet security software vendor ESET will now allow end-users to pay as they go with its first foray into software as a service.

Norfolk Telecom, the sole telecommunications provider for the remote Pacific Ocean island of Norfolk Island, has completed a WAN optimisation project for its satellite Internet connection resulting in a 100 per cent increase in its available bandwidth.

The social media phenomenon that is Twitter continues to attract third-party developers with the London-based WorkDigital developing TwitterJobSearch, a job search engine for the microblogging service now available online (in beta, of course).

Each year thousands of people from country NSW descend on Sydney for the Royal Easter Show, but this year millions of people around the world can experience the show online via social media portals like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace in its biggest Web 2.0 technology push ever.

Today's modern desktop operating systems of Windows Vista, Apple Mac OS X, and Linux still fail to address the basic requirements of the NSW Department of Education and Training's netbook project and instead the older Windows XP remains the platform of choice for more than 260,000 computers.

Back in 2006, Novell took the plunge with its first significant Linux desktop for business product SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, or SLED, 10. Novell has taken two years to produce the next generation, SLED 11, which should offer an even more polished user experience. TechWorld takes a look at SLED 11, including what's changed since version 10.

A new service has been launched in Sydney which promises free telephone calls to 70 international destinations simply by calling a local mobile number.

Less than a week after the federal government's URL blacklist was leaked and caused a furore over the status of online betting company Betfair, Australia's poker industry is now in the firing line over the number of legitimate poker sites that could be banned by the filter.

Sydney-based video technology company Vquence has launched a social video metrics product dubbed VQmetrics aimed at making sense of social video marketing.

Marketing success story Kogan Technologies has announced what it claims is Australia’s cheapest 10-inch netbook computer powered by the Linux-based gOS operating system.

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) will migrate some 40,000 student user accounts to Microsoft’s Live@edu hosted messaging and storage platform providing an alternative to the successful Google Apps education surge.

Hosted computer access and management application LogMeIn is planning to support Linux “this year” in response to growing demand for the platform.

Citrix has announced the latest generation of its core application virtualisation product, XenApp 5, now includes XenServer for server virtualization and improved management capabilities.