Tesco

Jon Garvie in The Times of London:

Imagine if makers of, say, vacuum cleaners needed to design different models for different stores. One for Wal-Mart, another for Target, another for Tesco, and yet another for Carrefour. That's a bit what it's like to be in the business of writing programs for mobile phones.

British retailer Tesco entered the U.S. market only last year but already it has managed to put Wal-Mart, the world's No. 1 retailer, on the defensive. Tesco fired the first salvo, in a battle that retailing analysts expect will intensify, by launching Fresh & Easy, a chain of 10,000-square-foot convenience stores, in cities across California, Nevada, and Arizona in November 2007. Eleven months later, Wal-Mart returned fire, taking on Tesco in Arizona with the debut of the similar-size Marketside, its first new store format in a decade.

Just one day after Dell announced it was moving into the market of netbooks by introducing its new Inspiron Mini 9, which weighs less than 2.3 pounds and has an 8.9-inch LED display, the company said it is partnering with Vodafone to resell the Mini 9 in Europe.

The two companies said Friday that the Mini 9 would be sold with a Vodafone built-in mobile broadband connection, which supports High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA). Sales will be exclusively through Vodafone stores and online, and directly from Dell, later this month in key markets in Europe.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN] has voted to allow--in addition to more traditional top-level domains [TLDs], such as .com and .org--theoretically any TLD at all, as long as it is no longer than 64 characters long. The application process for such custom TLDs looks set to be arduous and the criteria reasonably rigorous, but observers say the new system will create confusion.