IBM, which expects to unveil better-than-expected quarterly figures, has announced it will spend some of its cash on incentives to encourage some of its largest partners to invest more in training and other areas.

On Wednesday, the company introduced a scheme to help its business partners who are cooperating on its New Enterprise Data Center strategy. The scheme involves incentives for IBM partners to improve their knowledge in three specific areas: virtualization and consolidation; energy efficiency; and business resiliency.

And Mike Bernard, general business and channels marketing leader at IBM, told ZDNet.co.uk that there is also a fourth area under consideration, but not yet announced: information infrastructure.

"Skills in those areas are what's most needed," Bernard said. "From that the clients will benefit as well as the partners."

There are two levels of incentive for training that partners can apply for: general specialty, for which they will receive $25,000, and specialty elite, for which they get $100,000.

Bernard said the scheme was open to any qualifying partner. "There is no qualification other than that they are undertaking work in the chosen areas. They do that and they qualify and they get the money for it," he said.

A Federal Communications Commission engineering report released late Friday essentially backs a plan to create a free wireless Internet service by dismissing concerns about interference for existing providers.

The FCC has been considering auctioning 25 megahertz of spectrum in the 2155MHz to 2180MHz band. As part of the rules for using the spectrum, the FCC plans to require license holders to offer some free wireless broadband service.

The FCC sees the plan, which is based on a proposal submitted to the FCC by M2Z Networks in 2006, as a way to provide broadband Internet service to millions of Americans who either can't afford or don't want to pay for high-speed Internet access.

But existing providers like T-Mobile USA, which spent $4.2 billion in 2006 acquiring spectrum in an adjacent band, say that opening up this spectrum would cause interference and disrupt service.

Friday's report, however, concludes that spectrum could be used as planned "without a significant risk of harmful interference."

Click here for a PDF of the full FCC report.

It should be noted that this free Internet plan is separate from a proposal to use so called unused TV spectrum, also known as "white space" for wireless broadband services.

People who listen to personal music players for only five hours a week at a high volume may be doing permanent damage to their hearing.

A team of nine experts on the Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks is expected to release that finding in a study Monday, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune .

The EU entity also points out that young people may be doing damage to their hearing that may not surface until years after the exposure, according to the newspaper.

The concern over hearing led a Louisiana man to file a class-action lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company had failed to take adequate steps to prevent hearing loss among iPod users. The suit, filed in 2006, charges that the iPod music player can produce sounds of up to 115 decibels even though some studies suggest that listening to music at that level for 28 seconds a day can cause damage over time.

MySpace has unveiled "MyAds," an advertising technology focused on small businesses and individuals rather than the huge brand advertisers that the News Corp.-owned social network is best known for. It's a platform in which an advertiser can allocate exactly how much to spend--between $25 ad $10,000--and target its audience using the HyperTargeting system that MySpace debuted just under a year ago.

With HyperTargeting, MySpace says that there are more than 1,100 specific ways to target an ad based on geography, demographics, interests, and other information sourced from public profile data. Advertisers can then keep tabs on performance through online analytics.

MyAds is currently restricted to MySpace in the U.S., where it has about 76 million members.

The "self-service" model is similar to what Facebook has done with its own ad platform--create an ad, choose how much to spend, select a target audience. But MySpace has a more obvious clientele in mind: bands. The MyAds homepage explicitly recommends the service for band promotion, something that gets very close to MySpace's roots as an independent music hub.