We're taking you to Vegas, baby....

Israeli business newspaper Globes is reporting EMC has bought Israeli-headquarted NAND array startup XtremIO for $430m, giving EMC boss Joe Tucci a nice flashy toy to brandish at EMC World in Las Vegas later this month.…

Or had the silent craft seen enough of our planet?

Pic The European Space Agency has all but given up hope of contacting its long-lived Envisat mission, a month after the satellite went silent.…

Quake, floods, strong yen, Moon's alignment with Jupiter

Disasters both natural and manmade have led to tech megacorp Sony reporting a record loss for the fiscal year ending in March.…

Microsoft throws browsers back to 'Dark Ages'

Mozilla and Google are crying foul over Microsoft restrictions blocking rivals from Windows 8 on ARM, due later this year.…

New object technology supplier

Storage software and hardware provider Quantum Corp is shrinking – not a lot, but it's visible – yet it wants to grow so very much. It has decided to ship Amplidata object storage technology for big data as its latest growth strategy. Will it succeed?…

No protection from Thargoid brain-probe beams, mind

Tinfoil hat wearer? Here's what to slap on your walls: wallpaper that keeps Wi-Fi signals boxed in - and, maybe, alien brain-probe waves out.…

People's Republic ordered to invade mobiles

The Chinese government has demanded more trials of its homegrown 4G mobile broadband standard TD-LTE in hope of eventually rolling it out across the globe, according to China Daily.…

Liquid Crystal Domination

Samsung may be keen to tout OLED as the future of television tech, but it'll be a good few years yet before sales of organic LED screens come to match plasma and even CRT, let alone LCD.…

New photos are key clue to cracking Red Planet's past

Pic NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has found the wind blows much more fiercely across the surface of the Red Planet than previously thought - reshaping sand dunes at around the same rate as those on Earth.…

Sync'n'store more

iOS App of the Week I looked at SkyDrive back in early 2011 and was impressed by the 25GB of free cloud storage that it offered. Unfortunately, it also suffered from the Microsoft’s traditional ‘designed by committee’ syndrome, and lacked the simplicity of rivals such as Dropbox and, more recently, Apple’s iCloud.…

Gambling and smut pop the virtual money floodgates

Alternatives to traditional credit and debit cards are now processing €165bn ($214bn, £133bn) annually – 22 per cent of global e-commerce – and that's just the start as the next generation of consumers grows up without seeing a plastic card.…

It's just a gallery of mobile applications ... for now

Facebook is launching an App Center to recommend mobile applications based on demographic preferences as well as user ratings, just as long as they're tied into users' Facebook credentials – with a view to monetising the process eventually, of course.…

Coupons to make Londoners ditch the train for trainers

In the race to get London's road and tube network ready for the Olympics, Transport for London has endorsed a new app called re:route: a map app with reward vouchers.…

Cheeky

Japanese scientists have cracked one of robotics' untouched areas: they have unveiled a mechanical bum that not only look realistic - apparently - but tense, twitch and respond to touch in the same way a real rear would.…

Also accused of pwning online newspaper, financial services group

Norwegian police have charged two teenagers suspected of taking part in denial of service attacks against the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency and other targets.…

All rights reserved. Credit: Greenpeace / Pedro Armestre Volkswagen is lobbying against critical environmental laws

With fuel prices at record levels and predicted to keep rising, you’d think that new European proposals to stem drivers’ costs and reduce emissions would be welcomed by all. But major car companies like VW are opposing these laws – so today we released a new report detailing how increasing efficiency will benefit both the public and the climate.

The best defence against soaring petrol prices is to use less petrol. And the best way to do that - besides driving less - is to improve the fuel efficiency of new cars.

Right now, the EU is discussing how much more fuel efficient our cars need to become. They’ll be making a decision this summer. In the run up to that decision, major car companies including Volkswagen are opposing the efficiency proposals and, if they win, they’ll leave Britain reliant on fuel-hungry cars - with all the high fuel costs, high emissions, and reliance on foreign oil imports and dangerous drilling that inefficient vehicles entail.

With EU politicians caught between protecting the interests of industry lobbyists and the interests of their own people, we decided to make sure they have the full facts at their disposal. We asked an independent expert to calculate the savings that British - and other European - drivers can expect to make under a couple of fuel efficiency scenarios. The findings are compelling:

If the existing EU efficiency law is confirmed (ie car-makers are forced to reduce their average C02 emissions to 95g/km by 2020), British drivers’ average annual fuel costs will drop from £1,731 to £1,335 (in today’s money) by 2020.

If EU governments decide to go a step further and tighten the target to 60g CO2/km by 2025, fuel costs will drop to just £685 by 2030. That’s an average saving of over £1000 per year.

Setting ambitious, long-term efficiency targets of 60g CO2/km is a no-brainer: it’s better for individuals, better for the climate and better for Britain's energy independence. Yet Volkswagen is still opposing the targets - and there's a very real danger that politicians might listen to them.

Over 500,000 people have already asked VW to turn away from the Dark Side and embrace an energy efficient future. Join the rebellion here.

Resellers told to penetrate small biz

VMware has ratcheted up rebates for certified resellers who sign up virtualisation virgins - prospective clients that most likely reside in the SME market.…

Sound thinking

Microsoft Research took motion detection to new levels this week when it unveiled a new gesture recognition system for laptops.…

5% Q4 surge after months-long struggle to shift product

A late flurry of consumer spending in the UK boosted Dixons Retail's Q4 sales but came too late to prevent a full-year fiscal 2012 decline, the firm revealed in a trading statement.…

Factories on stand-by

It pays to read the small print, folks. Samsung once again showed off its 55in OLED TV today, but if you think it has gone into mass-production, you'd be wrong - it's merely "ready for mass-production", the South Korean giant admitted.…