Canada

Canada's Research in Motion and South Korea's SK Telecom announced Tuesday the launch of corporate service for the BlackBerry Bold smart phone, which will be available in South Korea on the country's biggest wireless network.

The two companies said the device was expected to be available on the market by the end of the month. Plans were to target both multinational and domestic companies, it said.

Sprint Nextel and Research In Motion on Monday announced the availability of the BlackBerry Curve 8350i smartphone. Sprint is calling it the most advanced push-to-talk BlackBerry smartphone ever.

The 8350i taps into iDEN (Integrated Digital Enhanced Network) technology on the Nextel National Network, and offers the Nextel Direct Connect national push-to-talk service. It has a slim design with a black exterior, a full QWERTY keyboard, a trackball with intuitive navigation, and an internal antenna, as well as a two-megapixel camera and a jack for earphones to listen to MP3s.

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland posed the following question: what would happen if we were to literally blanket huge swaths of land in wind farms? Could we change the weather? The short answer is yes, if you build an absurdly huge wind farm stretching from Texas to Canada and from the Great Lakes to the Rockies. Doing so would lower wind speeds by 5-6 mph downwind.

Microsoft launched its New Xbox Experience on Wednesday, expanding the existing service to compete with Sony in turning the video-game console into an entertainment hub.

Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business, said the New Xbox Experience is the future for home entertainment. "It's on-demand, it's high-definition, it's always social, it's all in one place," he said.

A 'Personal Game Room'

Canada's Melancthon EcoPower Centre opened on October 30 after three years of construction. The country's largest wind farm is located near Shelburne, Ontario and has a capacity of 199.5 MW.

In a last-ditch effort to keep operating, consumer-electronics giant Circuit City has filed for bankruptcy protection in both the United States and Canada.

Just days after the Richmond, Va.-based company announced it would close 155 of its 770 retail stores and cut 20 percent of it U.S. workforce, Circuit City on Monday said it has faced significant financial challenges and needs to file for Chapter 11 protection in the United States, while seeking protection under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act in Canada.

Navigon has just taken the wraps off the 8100T -- a personal navigation device that adds a three-dimensional perspective to a company's fleet of GPS-enabled navigation products for automobiles.

Sporting a silver brushed-metal housing, the 8100T integrates a 4.8-inch color touchscreen with a panoramic 16:9 aspect ratio. The extra-wide screen is particularly useful for displaying the contours and elevations of nearby geographic features such as lakes, rivers and rolling hills, helping drivers realistically see what lies ahead.

Fujitsu has rolled out three new notebook PCs, including a mini-notebook that is squarely aimed at field workers and mobile sales teams.

Powered by Garmin's Mobile PC navigation software, the LifeBook U820 arrives preloaded with maps of the U.S. and Canada, together with data covering millions of destinations and points of interest. Weighing just 1.32 lbs, the mini-notebook delivers turn-by-turn, voice-prompted navigation that eliminates the need for workers to carry a separate navigation device, according to Paul Moore, senior director of mobile product management at Fujitsu.

One of Canada's most prominent environmentalists toured the oil sands in northern Alberta recently and had one word to express what she saw: Mordor. Maude Barlow, who was recently appointed to advise the UN on water issues, said her visit to the oil sands reminded her of Tolkien's fictional blackened and barren wasteland.