I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line (New York Times)

I.B.M. plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft’s dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

The company is announcing the desktop software, called I.B.M. Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the I.B.M. Web site.

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Google Adds Presentations App to Hosted Suite (CIO.com)

Google plans to add a presentations application to its Web applications suite on Tuesday, delivering on a promise made in April. The suite, until now known as Docs & Spreadsheets, will also be renamed Google Docs on Monday.

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Princeton DoIT Digit-Heads Take Hoi Polloi to Lunch (Campus Technology)

Princeton University's Office of Information Technology has invited the public to lunch to meet some of its premier technology researchers and experts. The idea is to teach them tricks of the trade--"instruction ... on complex ways technology has helped scientists make discoveries"--over sandwiches.

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An Application That's Buggy by Design (Baseline)

Dow Chemical isn't putting tiny RFID chips on the backs of termites and zapping them with radio frequencies, but its use of the technology does demonstrate that companies may find uses for RFID that were never conceived.

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SpiralFrog debuts with free, ad-supported music downloads (ars technica)

Digital music service SpiralFrog has officially launched and brags that it has almost a million tracks available for download. What's unique about the service is that it offers legal downloads, but for free. There are, however, a few catches.

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