The new entity formed by Seven Network and Yahoo! Inc, to compete with ninemsn, has today been named Yahoo!7. A new name and corporate identity have been unveiled and the six person board has been appointed with John Marcom, senior vice president, international operations at Yahoo! Inc, announced as chairman.

Australian mid-market ERP provide, Professional Advantage, has adopted business intelliegence (BI) tools from Panorama Software as part of its business applications offering.

While its profit was down slightly on 2004, Microsoft reported solid results for the quarter to 31 December 2005, its fiscal Q2 2006, with a significant boost in revenues. Total revenues were US$11.8b, up 9.4% on the US$10.8b achieved in the previous corresponding quarter. Operating profit was US$4.66b, down 2% on the US$4.75b for nthe same quarter in 2004.

Database and infrastructure software vendor, Sybase, posted strong results for the 2005 fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2005.

Senior executives from the Itanium industry met last week in San Francisco and announced a collective investment of US$10 billion to drive industry standard Itanium platform adoption in favour of legacy, proprietary alternatives.

Brisbane-based games developer Krome Studios has reportedly sent its scouts to Adelaide with a view to opening an office there in the wake of the closure of Ratbag by its new US parent Midway in December last year.

A new open source software foundation, the Annodex Foundation, based on CSIRO technology, will be launched at the Australian Linux Conference being held in New Zealand this week.

Perth based e-learning vendor HarvestRoad (ASX:HRD) has signed a software partnership deal with Linux vendor Red Hat. HarvestRoad  develops solutions for the education, defence and  enterprise marketson the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

A large Australian organisation has identified that more than 1800 breaches of its computer network security occurred in just 10 days reports a security specialist.

New reports from former Ratbag employees have indeed confirmed earlier accounts of the demise of the company at the hands of the new US owner Midway Games. However, perhaps people are looking in the wrong direction for the reasons behind the closure.