John Backus, the man who led development of the first mainstream programming language, Fortran, has died at the age of 82.

Microsoft Corp. and Nortel Networks Ltd. Wednesday jointly announced a road map for delivering unified communications technologies as part of a development and marketing alliance they formed last July.

Over two years in the making, Sun Microsystems Inc. is due to release the latest version of its Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software Monday, placing particular emphasis on the application development platform's support for other scripting languages.

Microsoft Corp. on Friday finished development on a new version of its Exchange messaging server a week after the company celebrated its launch alongside significant new releases of the Windows client OS and Microsoft Office.

Mobile phones will undergo a dramatic transformation over the next few years, incorporating more powerful processors and more storage, as well as new technologies, a Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. research and development (R&D) executive said Monday.

Asian countries are playing a bigger role than ever before in the development of new technologies, and the region's importance as a research and development (R&D) center will continue to grow during the years ahead, said one of Microsoft Corp.'s top executives in the region.

Last week's firing of a prominent Chinese academic for faking the development of one of China's best-known chips is an embarrassing setback for a government that sees high-technology research and development as key to the country's economic future.

Nokia Corp. and ATI Technologies Inc. are partnering to try to simplify and drive the development of multimedia capabilities for Nokia phones, the companies said on Thursday.

A software player for Sony Corp.'s LocationFree system that is compatible with Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X is under development by Tokyo-based Kaga Electronics Co. Ltd. and should be available soon, Kaga Electronics said Tuesday.

Intel Corp. opened on Monday a new research and development center at its lab in Braunschweig, Germany, to focus on the design of multicore processors.

Admitting that this was something that should have happened years ago, Oracle on Monday will make available a graphical database development tool for Oracle databases.

Microsoft Corp. has finished development on Windows Vista and expects to ship the product by the end of the year, around the same time venerated Windows development leader Jim Allchin said he will retire from the company. But Allchin said Friday he is willing to put off both of those events if Windows Vista doesn't reach a standard of quality with which he is comfortable.