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Actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, star of such hit films as “Dirty Dancing” and “Ghost,” has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer but is responding well to treatment, his publicist said on Wednesday.The 55-year-old performer was working during his treatments, publicist Annett Wolf said, dismissing reports in the tabloid media that portrayed him in grave condition with only weeks to live.

Wolf issued a written statement from his physician, Dr. George Fisher that said: “Patrick has a very limited amount of disease and he appears to be responding well to treatment.”

“All of the reports stating the timeframe of his prognosis and his physical side effects are absolutely untrue,” Fisher said in the statement. “We are considerably more optimistic.”

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Kate Burns, one of Google’s first employees outside the US and its first UK managing director, has been hired to run the British operation of YouTube competitor Dailymotion.

Burns, who joins as the first UK managing director of Dailymotion, has the job of increasing the online video website’s user numbers, the amount of user-generated and official content uploaded, and boosting revenues.

She will report to the Dailymotion chief executive, Mark Zaleski, who was appointed last July and is based in Paris. Zaleski was previously chief executive of auction website QXL Ricardo.
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t’s not often that computers are sold on their “spiritual warmth” and “refreshing fragrance” but the star of the world’s biggest IT fair was something different. Instead of shiny plastic it was encased in laminated bamboo strips. The result, said its Taiwanese makers, Asus, was “both aesthetically pleasing and good for the environment”.The Eco Book was the answer, they said, to the growing concern about the use of plastics.

“Bamboo is the most sustainable raw material there is,” said Jellent Sun, a senior director.

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Finland’s GeoSentric unveiled on Wednesday its mobile social networking service GypSii for Apple’s iPhone.

The GypSii application lets iPhone users to get maps and directions and access other location-based as well as social networking services.

Apple has shipped more than five million iPhones globally since its launch in June last year, GeoSentric said.

Source: Reuters

Traditionally, the big names of the IT industry make their predictions the day before CeBIT opens. This time, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was one of them and predicted ground breaking changes for the future.

While Bill Gates was considered the chief visionary among the Microsoft leadership, it seems that Steve Ballmer has taken on this role now. In his opening speech at CeBIT, he did not touch on any of the problems currently dogging the software giant, such as its intended takeover of Yahoo or the multi-million Euro fine imposed by the EU Commision. Instead, he gazed into his own personal crystal ball and shared what he saw with the crowd. His favourite word? Computing revolution. “In my 28 years at Microsoft, I’ve lived through four computing revolutions.” In his opinion, the first was when computers became affordable for a wide audience, the second was the development of the graphics user interface, the third the rise of the internet, with the fourth being the interactive Web 2.0.

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