Proporta announced the winners of their Web launch competition and would like to thank all those who took part. The winners of the five bundles available are: Charlotte Willis, Barbara P Carlin, Jonathan Heeb, Chris Smith, Keith Rawlinson.

A Sony-made battery used in a Fujitsu laptop computer overheated and emitted sparks, Fujitsu said Friday, amid a massive global recall involving Sony batteries. A Fujitsu worker was visiting a customer’s home to retrieve the laptop as part of the company’s recall of Sony batteries when it overheated and started giving off sparks, according to Fujitsu spokesman Toshiaki Koike. No one was injured in the incident, which is under investigation. Fujitsu is recalling more than 280,000 lithium-ion laptop batteries made by Sony because they pose a risk of overheating and bursting into flames.

A company is trying to prove that a 19th-century design known as the Stirling engine has a place in the emerging market for clean energy. Infinia plans to release a dish–which will look like a large satellite TV receiver–that will use the sun’s heat to generate electricity. The product is slated for final design later this year and commercial release in 2008.

According to an article in the New York Times, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives is asking the U.S. government for more detailed guidelines on when and why a laptop gets confiscated at the U.S. border, which, anecdotally, is happening more often. The story includes a report from a business traveler who had her laptop confiscated over a year ago and has yet to have it returned.

A day after shipping Firefox 2, Mozilla largely rebutted two claims of security flaws in the latest version of the Web browser. Bug hunters appear to be in a race to uncover new security flaws in both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7, which Microsoft released last week. Word of what appears to be the first publicly disclosed IE 7 vulnerability came Wednesday.

Security experts have found a weakness in Internet Explorer 7 that could help crooks mask phishing scams, the type of attack Microsoft designed the browser to thwart. IE 7, released last week, allows a Web site to display a pop-up that can contain a spoofed Web address, security monitoring company Secunia said Wednesday. An attacker could exploit this weakness to trick people into believing they are on a trusted Web site when in fact they are viewing a malicious page, Secunia said in an alert.

Instant SMS Sender is a handy application for Bluetooth phone users. You can use your Pocket PC to send and receive SMS messages via your phone. The application is fully integrated with Pocket Outlook, and you can send messages from the contact list and received/sent messages will be saved into Outlook mail folders. It boasts Windows Mobile 5.0 compatibility, manual sending functionality, new COM port mapping capabilities, the ability to save outgoing messages, a new GUI, and compatibility updates for Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones.

Palm has released a new updater for the Verizon Treo 650 smartphone. The version 1.05a update includes enhanced memory handling for opening larger Web pages, Bluetooth performance optimizations, new preferences and other updates.

We just finished a major upgrade, moving our servers from an older, commercial version of Frontier (prior to open source release) to the open source Frontier Kernel which David compiled and built here at ZATZ. Nearly everything has moved over cleanly, but there are still a few things needing to be fixed. We’ve got a few links that need repair and a few style sheets got zorched. We should have everything back to normal within a few days. Stay tuned; we’ll also have a story shortly about what it’s like to add capabilities to an open source project.

Opera Software announced that Opera Mini, a free Web browser for cell phones, has now been made available for the BlackBerry and Palm Treo handsets. According to the company, the Mini focuses on enhancing image rendering speed performance through a server-based component that condenses Web pages, and helps decrease the size of the data that is transferred.