VIA Technologies today released the VIA IVP-7500 board, the first in a series of dedicated x86 in-vehicle platforms for developers of car PCs and intelligent transportation devices. The continued evolution of the PC as a multimedia playback device for audio and video entertainment means that car owners are now demanding access to their digital media library whilst on the road. In-vehicle PCs offers access to intelligent global satellite positioning services for accurate location tracking, route planning and navigation.

VIA IVP-7500 Board Designed from the ground up for the rigours of in-vehicle computing, the VIA IVP-7500 is a versatile, scalable and highly power-efficient processor platform with strong multimedia performance. Customers have the option of fanless designs implementations for industrial and grade stability. The flexible VIA IVP-7500 measures 114mm x 185.5mm and can be employed in a variety of dashboard implementations, including one or two DIN designs as well as discrete, in-seat and headrest designs.

Microsoft Corp is set to publicly launch Internet Explorer 8 early on Thursday, the latest version of its market-dominating Web browser. IE8, as it is commonly referred to, has been in public beta testing for about a year, but Thursday's launch marks its full public rollout.

The application replaces IE7, which has a lock on the browser market. According to a recent survey by IT consultants Janco Associates Inc, Internet explorer has a 72.2 percent market share, ahead of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser with 17.2 percent. Google Inc's new Chrome browser has only 2.8 percent of the market, while Apple Inc's Safari has less than 1 percent.

Micro-Star International (MSI) is optimistic about future market demand for motherboards and graphics cards and believes the market is starting to recover. However, Asustek Computer and Gigabyte Technology are still conservative about the first half of the year, according to sources at the motherboard makers.

Joseph Hsu, chairman of MSI pointed out that the company's motherboard and graphics card shipments in the first quarter of this year are surpassing expectations and are even showing signs of a shortage. With the company's order visibility extended by 1-2 quarters, Hsu believes the worst has already passed and demand is starting to recover. However, Asustek commented that recent rush orders are likely due to vendors double booking orders. The company therefore remains cautious about shipments in the first half. Gigabyte also believes rush orders are mainly due to vendors restocking inventory and the effects will only last for around one month. The company expects the market to slide back into oversupply in the second quarter.

NVIDIA is betting that there is a market for Adobe CS accelerators, and their first foray into this area is what we’re looking at today on HotHardware, the recently released Quadro CX. This is not a daughterboard or separate add-in which works with your standard graphics card, but rather this is a full-on, pro workstation graphics card which just happens to have a link with the Adobe CS suite through software for accelerating specific content types, similar to the Quadro FX for 3D content creation software.

It’s always a pain in the rear when a friend sends you a link to a photo or video when you’re in the middle of doing something and you don’t want to take the time out to open the link in a new tab.Google decided the pain was too great to force those using Gmail to have to do that one moment longer, and users now can get previews for YouTube videos, Picasa or Flickr pictures or Yelp ratings right there in your e-mail.In Google Labs, you can enable the previews for any or all of the services in your e-mail. For

Yippee! More solid state drives to window shop for! We use “window shop” to assert that you still probably still won’t be forking out your savings in order to actually own one. At any rate, as the competition heats up in the SSD arena and prices gradually (albeit slowly) make their way down, SiliconSystems is simultaneously introducing its new SSD technology platform and its new line of solid state drives.The newly unveiled SiliconDrive III solid-state storage technology platform promises faster read/write speeds

No less than three different browser platforms have succumbed to zero-day exploits by the end of the first day of the three-day long, third-annual Pwn2Own contest being held at the CanSecWest 2009 digital security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Safari on Mac OS X was the first to fall, followed by Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on Windows 7, and then a second Mac OS X Safari exploit, and finally Firefox (the specific OS-version of Firefox was not supplied in the announcement). Making this even more impressive

And here we were thinking that Sony’s PlayStation 3 had something special going on. Merely 24 hours after NVIDIA announced that its PhysX technology would be coming over to the PS3, the company has gone and essentially announced the very same thing for the Wii. Or, as NVIDIA puts it, it has been approved as a “third party tools solution provider for the Wii consolue,” and as a result of that, the PhysX SDK is now available for registered Wii developers.According to Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content

The ASUS Eee Top is an innovative, low power, touch screen computer with many uses. It uses an Intel Atom N270 Processor for a solid workstation, and it has modified software for functionality and user-friendliness. Read on to see if it really is all that ASUS claims it to be, or is it just another marketing gimmick?

Much has been made of a possible bird flu pandemic, and Twitter might just be the answer to predicting it, if a new Twitter mashup has its way. SickCity calls itself “realtime disease detection for your city,” and gathers statistics by looking for tweets that specify diseases or feeling ill.The site also notes that they will be adding Facebook soon, which would add a significant number of data points to their feed of “sickly” information. The site scans for the terms flu, food poisoning, headcolds, chicken pox