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What's the cost of not showing up to court? For PepsiCo Inc., it's a $1.26 billion default judgment. A Wisconsin state court socked the company with the monster award in a case alleging that PepsiCo stole the idea to bottle and sell purified water from two Wisconsin men. Now the company is scrambling to salvage the situation. The damages award was handed down on Sept. 30. PepsiCo filed motions to vacate the order and dismiss the claims on Oct. 13, saying it wasn't even aware of the lawsuit until Oct. 6.

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Newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades in the United States, according to the latest audit figures. Apart from the toll taken by rising Internet readership, price increases and the recession, observers say circulation has also fallen victim to budget cuts that have made newsrooms smaller and papers thinner. The average weekday circulation of the nearly 400 daily papers lid 10.6 per cent to 30.4 million between April and September compared with the same six-month period in 2008, the Audit Bureau of Circulations said on Monday. That was bigger than the 7.1 per cent decline recorded during the previous six-month period.

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The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history, with the expected approval this week of international domain names — or addresses — that can be written in languages other than English, an official said yesterday. That change could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic, in which Russian is written. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann — the non-profit group that oversees domain names, or website addresses — is holding a meeting this week in Seoul.

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The dream of a one-size-fits-all cellphone charger is no longer just wishful thinking. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the technology arm of the United Nations, has just given its stamp of approval for a universal charger system that will allow mobile phone users to juice up their devices from any available charger, regardless of manufacturer or make. The move will 'dramatically cut the number of chargers produced, shipped and subsequently discarded as new models become available' because new phones can still use existing chargers, a statement from the ITU said. As it is now, new phone chargers are packaged with every new handset. Consumers are thus likely to have a drawer of unused chargers collecting dust, as many people in countries like Singapore change cellphones every year or so. Each manufacturer has its own proprietary charger design, and different models require different chargers now.

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Surfing the Web can help slow the effects of age-related mental declines that can end in dementia by boosting the brain activity of the elderly, new research has found. Using brain scans, a team at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found that using the Internet stimulated the mind more strongly than reading, with effects that continued long after an Internet session had ended, the Sunday Times of London reported. 'We found that for older people with minimal experience, performing Internet searches for even a relatively short period of time can change brain activity patterns and enhance function,' Dr Gary Small, a professor of neuroscience at UCLA, told the newspaper. Dr Small and his team worked with 24 men and women between the ages of 55 and 78. Half of them were regular users of the Internet, while the other half had little experience online.

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Meet Wordster, touted to be the Wikipedia for the English language. Created by Associate Professor Anindya Datta as a project in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore (NUS), Wordster will be commercialized through a start-up company and the free online resource will be made available to the public early next year. With assistance from Master’s student Ryan Shaw, 25, and PhD students Bao Yang, 24, and Fang Fang, 22, Dr Datta has been building up and testing the website over the past four months. Dr Teo Hock Hai, head of the department of Information Systems at the NUS School of Computing, said he is “absolutely excited” about Wordster, adding: “I believe it has the great potential to innovate the dictionary the way Wikipedia has transformed the encyclopedia.” Dr Datta, 44, said: “I thought of the idea about two years ago when I realized that most dictionaries provided only definitions without contextual meanings. I thought it would be interesting to revolutionize the dictionary.”

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Article written by Joanne Lee, The Straits Times, September 26, 2009 After spending some of my recent leave with friends who are mothers, I discovered a whole new world on the Internet. It's the nursery of the World Wide Web, to use an analogy I heard earlier this week. A speaker at this week's Social Media World Asia 2009 conference likened networks of Internet users of various ages to the different rooms in a house. For teenagers, their online pursuits were likely to proclaim their affinities, much like their bedrooms, bearing large "do not enter" signs on their doors. For adults, activities were more social, in a living room-type manner.

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