Free music and video will be the centerpiece of America Online's new strategy to boost advertising revenues by moving most of its content outside its well-manicured walled gardens.
As it designed its new portal, AOL kept in mind the growing number of broadband households, many of which have been dropping AOL accounts when they moved from dialup to dedicated high-speed access.
Visitors will be able to set the new portal's home page to a Video Hub mode featuring video links from AOL, Time Warner sister companies and elsewhere on the web.
AOL also is pushing an AOL Music On Demand video channel and is developing an American Idol-like web contest carrying as its prize a recording contract. On-demand channels featuring comedy, celebrity news and self-help are also in the works.
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Audio phone: Sirius Satellite Radio said it reached a deal to supply music channels to telecommunications company Sprint on a mobile phone to be introduced later this year.
Sirius said channels being evaluated by the two companies include new hits, classic rock, hip-hop, country and blues.
Sirius said the cost of the new channels would be included in the cell-phone service package that Sprint sells to its customers rather than sold separately by Sirius.
Sirius said the agreement is part of a move to deliver its content to consumers beyond those who buy its satellite receivers and pay about $13 a month for coast-to-coast radio service.
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Novel approach: A federal judge has dismissed four counts in Novell's lawsuit against Microsoft, according to court documents.
A U.S. District Court judge for the District of Maryland said the software giant did not have a monopoly in the word processing and spreadsheet software markets that gave it an unfair advantage over rivals.
The court kept Novell's two other counts against Microsoft, which claim that it used its Windows operating system monopoly to hurt sales of WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, applications that Novell owned briefly a decade ago.
Novell contends that WordPerfect and Quattro Pro had a combined value of $1 billion when it owned those products, but that it ended up selling those businesses to Corel in 1996 for $170 million.
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Expansion abroad: IBM opened its fifth software-development center in India and announced plans to hire 1,000 programmers in the new center by the end of 2005.
IBM currently employs 23,000 people in its four Indian centers at Bangalore, Pune, Gurgaon and Calcutta.
Companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard use the offshore business model to provide low-cost software-development services to their clients worldwide. India is the world leader among a handful of countries where wages are low and skilled workers plentiful.
IBM, long known as a computer maker, has increasingly become a services company, selling off its personal computer business to Chinese firm Lenovo in a deal worth $1.75 billion.
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Compiled by David Cohn. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
