OutlookEnvoy has announced the creation of a new online calendar reminder service that can also work with Microsoft Outlook by placing a reminder call to any phone to prevent forgotten appointments, meetings, and events, even if those events are in a PDA or computer calendar program. There are two ways to use the new service. One is a stand-alone online calendar that has the look and feel of Microsoft Outlook, or you can use an add-in feature that is easy to download and plugs into Outlook XP or Outlook 2003. Those who use a PDA simply sync their PDA handheld device to Microsoft Outlook and OutlookEnvoy will automatically place reminder calls at the selected time.

AvantGo, the mobile Internet service from Sybase’s iAnywhere, announced a mobile marketing campaign with Esurance, in which Esurance will sponsor this year’s AvantGo College Basketball National Tournament channel. The channel will deliver NCAA college basketball to users via mobile devices, including headline news articles from The Sporting News, 24-hour news feed from ESPN’s SportsTicker, additional boxscores, player stats, game recaps, nightly polls and free bracket pool tracking through the “Bracket Challenge.”

A variety of interest groups have joined forces to fight a proposed bulk emailing fee they claim strikes at the heart of online communication–a level playing field for rich and poor. America Online plans to introduce a service that would charge businesses and other bulk emailers a fee to route their email directly to a user’s mailbox without first passing through junk mail filters. Another major provider, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo Inc., in the coming months will test an optional certified email program based on “transactional” messages only, such as bank statements and purchase receipts, Yahoo spokeswoman Karen Mahon said. The alliance protesting the move includes liberal activist group MoveOn, the conservative activist group RightMarch.com, the U.S. Humane Society, labor and environmental groups and online medical communities.

RhinoSkin has unveiled a new case, the Treo 700 Leather Flipcase. The protective shield beneath the sheepskin surface of the case creates a stylish and secure shell for the smartphone. The custom case design allows for easy access to all of the Treo’s ports and function buttons. Inside the front flap, the case has slots designed to hold up to two SD cards and three business/credit cards.

U.S. senators on Tuesday accused the Bush administration of “stonewalling” a congressional investigation into the legality of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary committee, said that the White House apparently believes that “there’s no place for congressional or judicial oversight of any of its activities related to national security.” “They’re running roughshod over the Constitution, and they’re hiding behind inflammatory rhetoric” about the war on terror, Leahy said during a hearing that lasted almost three hours. Because of administration “stonewalling,” Leahy added, the committee may have to resort to issuing subpoenas to obtain the information it wants.

You can never be too rich, be too thin or have too much hard drive capacity, according to VoodooPC. The gamer PC specialist later this year will launch a desktop PC with 16 hard drives, according to Raul Sood, VoodooPC president. In all, the system will be capable of holding eight terabytes of data. That’s the same amount of information you could store on the paper from 400,000 trees, according to a UC Berkeley research study. Academic research libraries typically contain about 2TB of data. VoodooPC’s hard drive obsession comes courtesy of Vista, the new operating system coming from Microsoft later this year. Microsoft and PC makers will promote Vista as a way to turn PCs into home entertainment centers. Video, and in particular high-definition video, can gobble up storage fast. Depending on the standard and the compression, HD video can require anywhere from 11 to 410 gigabytes per hour of video. (1,000GB make up 1TB.)

A group of security researchers claims to have found the first virus that can jump to a mobile device after infecting a PC. The malicious software, dubbed “Crossover,” was sent anonymously to the Mobile Antivirus Researchers Association, the group said in a statement released on Monday. The virus is a proof-of-concept bug and was not released in the wild, meaning that it doesn’t pose an actual risk for PC and device users. “Crossover is the first malware to be able to infect both a Windows desktop computer as well as a PDA running Windows Mobile for Pocket PC,” the research group said.

One Voice Technologies’ One Voice software add-on for Windows XP Media Center is designed to allow users to control their TV, stereo, and computer via verbal commands. The One Voice slogan is “Just say it to play it.” The purpose of the product is ease of use, and the underlying technology is voice recognition. The basic operations of the program are based on a set of simple commands such as “play” and “record.” When the application is launched it scrolls through the computer, gathers the names of picture folders, artist names, albums and genres, and automatically creates phonetic matches to each name or word in the inventory.

One thing is true about urban legends: People love to repeat them. Better yet, they love to email them. In fact, owning a computer opens the door to a host of myths and tall tales about the care and feeding of your pricey info system. And because a computer can be an expensive, mysterious piece of equipment, many cautious people take some of this maintenance “advice” as fact. But rest assured, most of it isn’t. Here is a simple true-false quiz designed to help get to the bottom of common computer misconceptions. Finally, here is some information you can feel good about emailing to your friends.

CBS will start a new subscription service next week sending multimedia news and entertainment alerts to cell phones for a small monthly fee, the company said Monday. The company will initially provide subscriptions to CBS News alerts, with video and pictures, for 99 cents a month. A similar subscription to entertainment content from Entertainment Tonight will cost $3.99 a month. The news organization, as well as its sports and other divisions, has previously offered free text alerts for cell phones and has provided video for carriers’ services such as Verizon Wireless’ V Cast. The new subscription model will test whether consumers are willing to pay a bit more in order to have immediate access to video.