A real fast turn-on: Booting up and waiting has become a fact of life with computing, but that doesn’t have to remain the case with a crop of home entertainment PCs reaching the market.

A new technology called InstantON is a direct challenge to computers running Microsoft Corp.’s XP Media Center platform, which forces users to stare at the all-too-familiar Windows hourglass after they turn on the PC simply to watch TV or play a DVD.

Created by Fremont, Calif.-based InterVideo Inc., the technology allows a PC’s entertainment functions to turn on almost instantly – in less than 10 seconds, according to InterVideo – because they run on LinDVD, a pared-down version of the open-source Linux operating system.

The Windows platform coexists with LinDVD and still have to be launched for regular computing tasks such as word processing, but users can forgo the longer Windows boot-up time if they only want to watch movies, record TV shows or listen to music.

Danes aren’t fond of unsolicited faxes: A Danish company was fined $66,700 this week for sending more than 15,000 unsolicited commercial faxes, which are considered spam under Danish law.

In the second case in Denmark since the adoption of anti-spam legislation in 2000, the Maritime and Commercial Court in Copenhagen convicted TeleRingen Aircom, ruling it ignored several requests from Denmark’s consumer agency to stop sending the faxes.

Last year, Fonn, a small software company, was convicted and fined $2,500 for sending 156 unsolicited commercial e-mails during 2002.

Don’t be alarmed; you’re not seeing double: Nintendo Co.’s next portable game gadget will sport two screens but still fit in the palm of your hand.

Nintendo said players will be able to view action simultaneously from two perspectives, avoiding disruptions in game play. A soccer game, for instance, could display the entire field in one screen and an individual player’s view in another.

Nintendo, which makes the popular Game Boy Advance portable, expects to launch the machine, code-named Nintendo DS, by year’s end.

The Nintendo DS will face stiff competition from Sony Corp., which plans to launch its own portable device, dubbed the PSP. Sony, maker of the leading PlayStation console, says its gadget will play games, music and video.

Nintendo said it will market the DS machine separately from its Game Boys and GameCube consoles. Though Nintendo sells the leading portable, the GameCube has been losing ground to the PlayStation and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox console.

The Nintendo DS will feature two, 3-inch liquid crystal display screens, each controlled by a separate processor. The system will come with 1 gigabit of memory, the company said.

Yahoo! Inc. tweaking Overture: Yahoo! Inc. is setting out to prove its recently acquired Overture Services division can deliver innovation as well as advertisements.

Inspired by Overture’s past work, Yahoo has formed a research lab that will focus on ways to improve online search, e-mail, instant messaging and other features offered by the Web portal.

The lab represents new territory for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo as it approaches its 10-year anniversary in April.

The move also served as a reminder that Overture – acquired by Yahoo in October for $1.8 billion – offers other assets besides a highly profitable index that distributes text-based advertisements tied to the requests entered into online search engines.

Overture’s former chief scientist, Gary William Flake, will run Yahoo’s new research lab, overseeing about 24 workers.

One of his major goals is to leverage the falling price of computing power to develop more intelligent search engines.

Flake believes search engines can be taught to know whether a person seeking information on “jaguar” is more interested in the car, the Jacksonville, Fla., football team or Apple Computer Inc.’s operating system.

Biomedical industry seeping into Silicon Valley: Jobs in Silicon Valley appear to be shifting from software toward the biomedical industry, according to a new survey of the region’s economy.

The Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network 2004 Index, released this week, shows that jobs in the region decreased 5 percent in the second quarter of 2003 from a year earlier.

The only major industry to gain jobs during that time was health services, which added 1,400 positions.

The concentration of local jobs in the biomedical industry increased more than in any other sector from 2001 to 2002. The industry also gained a larger share of a shrinking pool of venture capital investment.

Associated Press