Visa, the leader credit card network in the United States, has announced the terms for its upcoming IPO. The offer of 406 million shares at a range of $37 to $42 would potentially raise $15 billion to $17.1 billion, positioning the company’s initial public stock offering as the largest ever in the United States.

The exact date for Visa to go public has not been set yet although some sources have mentioned the week of March 17th.

Visa’s IPO plan follows in the footsteps of rival MasterCard, which went public in May 2006 and has grown by 408% to a market share value of $26 billion.

Powerset is building a consumer search engine based on natural language processing.

Unlike other conventional search engines that index keywords, Powerset claims to do a deep linguistic analysis on every sentence it reads.

Powerset extracts and indexes facts about every sentence in every page, making its index the first truly robust semantic index of the web. Powerset will offer a transformative search experience, with better, more relevant results. Powerlabs is an online community that will contribute to the development of Powerset and allow the company a direct line of communication with consumers to better understand the potential, possibilities, and challenges of building a large-scale search engine. [Powerset]

Using Powerset’s semantic search engine, a user could ask, “When did earthquakes hit San Francisco? ” and potentially get more on-point search results than from typing in mere keywords such as “San Francisco earthquakes.” Another advantage of the Powerset approach is that it gets to the meaning of words, so queries for one word will fetch results that contain words which are synonyms.

The project is backed by a team comprised by industry leaders from companies such as Altavista, Apple, Ask.com, BBN, Digital, IDEO, IBM, Microsoft, NASA, PARC, Promptu, SRI, Tellme, Whizbang! Labs, and Yahoo!.

For now, Powerset’s is currently under development. The search engine is testing the system based only on Wikipedia content before they go for the huge expense of indexing the entire Web.

A day after Toshiba announced it made the decision to stop manufacturing HD DVDs, all six major Hollywood studios are now supporting Blu-ray as the next-generation High Definition technology standard.

Sony’s Blu-ray is currently supported by Paramount, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Warner Home Video, Panasonic, Dell and Philips. Toshiba’s HD DVD is still backed by Sanyo, NEC and Microsoft.

Both Blu-ray and HD are high-definition DVDs, the successor to the regular standard definition DVD. But Blu-ray and HD involve different hardware and are not compatible with each other, reason why consumers had to decide which system to choose.

Moving to a single high-definition format will allow studios to focus on generating awareness among consumers of the many benefits of high-definition media.

The 2008 Entrepreneurship Week will be taking place from February 22^nd to February 29^th at Stanford University, CA (USA). Events will be open to all students, alumni, members of the greater Stanford community, and the general public. All events will be free (with the exception of the Entrepreneurship Conference at the Graduate School of Business on February 27) and seating will be on a first come first served basis.

In 2007, the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network (SEN), a federation of organizations across campus, held its first Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford celebration. It was an enormous success, with standing room only at every event. Stanford University was also the site of the national launch of EntrepreneurshipWeek USA. Click here to see what happened last year.

Entrepreneurship is of enormous interest on campus, because the Stanford community recognizes that the 21st Century will belong to innovators who can turn ideas into action. This applies more than ever to today’s students, who need to be self-starters and possess an entrepreneurial mindset, regardless of what they go on to do in life.

For Entrepreneurship Week 2008, SEN has again planned a series of exciting events to engage students in various dimensions of entrepreneurship. Events include presentations by prestigious speakers; roundtable discussions; mixers; VC/student “speed dating” allowing students to pitch their ideas; and a start-up job fair. Stanford will also host the Innovation Tournament, an “Apprentice-style” competition that will be open to student teams around the world. The acclaimed documentary film, Imagine It!, will also be making its world premiere (view the trailer); it captures the dreams and excitement of last year’s Innovation Tournament and features numerous Stanford students. [eWeek]

British designer Mark Sanders has unveiled a new foldable bicycle called Strida 5.0. Previous versions of Strida collapsible bikes have been rolling in Europe for over 16 years but, for the first time, Strida 5.0 is now available in the U.S.

Strida was designed primarily for those commuters whose storage space might be limited. When folded, Strida can be easily moved on and off buses and trains since it incorporates parallel wheels which allow users to push it effortlessly.

Strida: The first completely new bicycle geometry in 95 years. Inside a triangular frame of lightweight aluminum, power is transferred to the rear wheels via a silent clean Kevlar belt. Handlebars are mounted horizontally, so the rider can sit comfortably upright with an excellent view of the road. The genius of the triangular frame is that it can fold. In six seconds, you have a light, compact form that you can easily wheel before you, stow in a closet, load in your car or take on the train. With no external grease or oil to soil your clothes, Strida makes daily commuting fun and practical. Now, instead of being snarled up in traffic, you can ride wherever you want, then fold up your transport and take it with you. [Strida]

Moreover, with only 19.4 lbs (9 kg) the light bike produces a stable and smooth ride as well. Strida can be bought in the US through Areaware for $799.

ooVoo, a videoconferencing and Instant Messaging startup, has launched a new VoIP phone service that allows users to make free phone calls from a computer to any landline or mobile phone in the US and Canada.

ooVoo provides a high-quality video communication service that delivers a more meaningful way for people to call and connect over the Internet. ooVoo’s technology enables people to experience a face-to-face conversation and share a full range of emotions as if they are in the same room together, whether they are across the street or across the globe from each other. ooVoo’s superior quality video and audio is available to anyone with a computer, broadband connection and a web camera, for real-time video calls with up to six friends, relatives and colleagues simultaneously. ooVoo’s high quality video chat service includes video conversation recording, telephony, video messaging, instant message chat and file sharing amongst other capabilities. [ooVoo]

Unlike competitor Skype, ooVoo does not use a P2P network. The company offers a wide range of capabilities such as face-to-face conversation with up to six people, video stream recording, file transfer, in-call video effects and chat.

Apple has introduced new models of its iPhone and iPod Touch devices with double the memory of previous versions.

The latest iPhone offers 16 GB of memory and costs $499. The previously released 8 GB version will still be available for $399.

The new iPod Touch comes with 32 GB of memory and will sell for $499. Apple will continue to sell the older 16 GB and 8 GB versions at $399 and $299, respectively.

Apple said that all iPhone and iPod Touch models come with updated software which includes a new maps application and the ability to watch movies from the iTunes movie rental service.

Apple, which stated in January that it sold more than 4 million iPhones since it was launched last June, stood for 28% of the U.S. smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2007 according to research firm Canalys. Research In Motion (maker of Black Berry) had the largest market share (41%) and Palm took the third place with 9% of the market.

Worldwide, Nokia is still the clear market leader with a 52.9% of all smart phones during the fourth quarter. Research In Motion was second with an 11.4% and Apple took the third place with a 6.5% of the market.

Virgin Galactic, a company owned and established by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to undertake the challenge of making private space travel available to everyone and by creating the world’s first commercial spaceline, has recently unveiled the design of its new space shuttle model, the SpaceShipTwo.

The space launch system of the new SpaceShipTwo is based on the technology of preceding model SpaceShipOne, which successfully flew into space for the third time in October 2004. It is comprised of two vehicles: The White Knight Two (WK2) mothership, or carrier aircraft, which will be capable of lifting other payload (such as small satellites and scientific load) and launching it into space. And the 60-feet-long SpaceShipTwo shuttle, with room for six astronaut passengers and two pilots, which will be launched into orbit by the White Knight Two.

Whilst the two vehicles comprising the space launch system are still under construction, Virgin Galactic’s reported that it received over 85,000 registrations of interest to fly.

Virgin Galactic’s spaceport and operational headquarters, Spaceport America, will be built in New Mexico. However, initial flights will be launched from the Mojave Spaceport in the Mojave Desert, California.

Space tickets cost $200,000 and deposits start from $20,000.