Archive

The EU last year adopted a "common position" on how purchases made within mobile and online applications should be treated by operators of app stores. Now, seven months later, Google is drawing praise for striving to comply with EU guidance, while Apple is being rebuked for dragging its feet. Google...

The frenzy over the forthcoming iPhone intensified Tuesday with a report that Apple has ordered up to 80 million units of the device. Meanwhile, Samsung unveiled an ad poking fun at the "iPhone 6" and Xiaomi introduced its answer to the iPhone, the Mi4. Xiaomi, known for high specs at relatively low...

Vendors could be spending a busy summer preparing to respond to a major federal IT project. The Defense Department is planning to issue a request for bids on a multibillion dollar EHR system by the end of September. The objective of the program is to modernize DoD's EHR system and to make records a...

Secret last week announced that a recent round of funding, to the tune of $25 million, would help it expand its reach in the social networking space. Since its launch about six months ago, Secret has provided a platform for users to post anonymous notes on topics ranging from the ridiculous to the s...

The Internet adoption rate in China appears to be slowing, based on a report that shows the lowest six-month increase in the number of Internet users in eight years. The total number of Internet users in the country reached 632 million by the end of June. That includes the 14.4 million people who jo...

While the cloud promises faster time to market and reduced costs, it also presents a new landscape for hackers to attack and achieve their goals -- namely, to find and gain unauthorized access to data and information. Attackers follow the data they are after, and if that data is residing in the clou...

Facebook is testing a function that would allow users to buy products without leaving the site or app. Small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. that are taking part in the trial can add the Buy button to ads displayed in users' News Feeds or in posts on their pages. Users will see the Buy butto...

Amazon on Friday introduced Kindle Unlimited, a new subscription service for e-books. The service allows customers to download and read as many books as they want from a list of more than 600,000 Kindle books for a monthly fee of $9.99. Amazon is making a number of popular titles available under the...

Apple has agreed -- conditionally -- to settle a lawsuit over allegations of fixing the prices of e-books brought against it by the attorneys general of 33 states in the United States, following a protracted legal battle. The settlement is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the South...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday announced the elimination of 18,000 jobs -- roughly one in seven of the company's workforce -- in the next year. About 12,500 of the positions eliminated will be at Nokia. However, Microsoft will add jobs in "certain other strategic areas." Microsoft's time sp...

Dish Network this week chalked up another legal victory for its Hopper DVR service. An appeals court rejected Fox's bid to disallow some features in the Hopper platform, namely the place-shifting capabilities of Dish Anywhere and Hopper Transfers. Dish Anywhere gives Hopper customers the option to v...

Why do so many companies keep slapping their customers in the face and expect them to stick around? Remember the good old days, when an update or an upgrade was good news? It solved problems. Today, updates often create new problems in their wake. Today, updates are two steps forward and one step ba...

Apple and IBM have teamed up on enterprise mobility in an exclusive partnership that will create iPhone and iPad business apps incorporating IBM's Big Data and analytics capabilities. "Mobility has been very much a catch-as-catch-can solution in most businesses," noted Yankee Group Research Vice Pre...

The explosive growth of data is one of the biggest challenges facing organizations of all sizes across nearly every industry, and a growing number of cloud service providers are recognizing that they can provide more than just simple storage and economical compute power to their customers buried in ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella may launch a massive round of layoffs, possibly this week. Some details reportedly are still being worked out. Layoffs have been widely expected since Microsoft purchased Nokia, and Nadella's recent memo to Microsoft employees was viewed as a hint they might soon be at ha...