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A bipartisan trio of Senators has introduced a bill that gives states the authority to collect online sales taxes. The measure, cosponsored by Senators Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Dick Durbin, (D-Ill., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., carves out an exception for small businesses, one of the main objections to t...

Apple's iPhone is showing up everywhere this year. Most major competitors have it, and Apple has also knocked on the doors of some of the Tier 2 players. In an interesting twist, C Spire said yes, and U.S. Cellular said no thanks. Why? I thought everyone wanted the iPhone -- but they have their reas...

As an observer of the IT and Internet industries for several decades, I watch with great amusement as new buzzwords surface for old concepts. Not too long ago, the term "cloud computing" appeared on the scene. The technology concept behind cloud computing has been around for more than 50 years, and ...

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces to sell unused online ads to each other, a position designed to combat the growing market dominance of Google and Facebook. The partnership will allow the companies to buy and sell each other's online inventory of ads. The companies are interested in uppin...

Accel Partners is launching a $100 million fund to identify -- and fund -- entrepreneurs at every layer of the big data stack, in particular, those developing projects for the Apache Hadoop platform. The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with Cloudera, which is pushing development in Hadoop. These pro...

American Express is extending its financial reach to the wild world of tech startups through a new multiyear digital commerce initiative. The $100 million program is designed to help identify and develop innovative technologies to aid the company's digital transformation and strengthen connections ...

Google has introduced Google+ Pages, an element of its Google+ social network that has been much anticipated by corporate brands. Pages provides a public placeholder on the Google+ network for any entity -- not just companies. A sports club like FC Barcelona, for example, could have its own page. Or...

The countdown to Cyber Monday has begun. Is your online business ready for the holiday shopping spree? We're all too familiar with sluggish online shopping experiences that have left us frustrated or caused us to leave the site altogether before we've completed a transaction. As the holiday shopping...

Last week, Calxeda launched its ARM-based "EnergyCore" Server on a Chip, which the company said consumes as little as 1.5 watts -- the first server CPU to achieve this milestone. This makes EnergyCore ideal for workloads such as Web serving, Big Data applications, scalable analytics such as Apache ...

Best Buy said Monday it would buy out Carphone Warehouse's interest in its North American Best Buy Mobile business for $1.3 billion. By purchasing the CPW stake, Best Buy is trying to shift more of its focus to mobile devices. Best Buy has asked CPW to stay on in a consultancy capacity for up to fiv...

A coalition of film studios, record labels and media entities led by the UK record industry lobby group BPI recently sent a letter to British Internet service provider BT demanding that the company block access to The Pirate Bay website. The group said that if BT doesn't act within two weeks, the ma...

Google may be taking aim at one of the few digital screens and content sources it doesn't dominate -- paid television. The search engine provider is reportedly considering offering paid cable-TV services to leverage its high-speed Internet access project under way in Kansas City, where it is plannin...

Before it went public, Groupon priced its stock at what turned out to be a highly conservative $20 dollars per share. Ha! was the market's response Friday morning, the day Groupon finally debuted on Nasdaq. Trading immediately pushed the share price up to $27.96. The low of the day was $ 25.90 and t...

Sometimes you can't win for winning. LinkedIn's stock price fell more than 10 percent Friday morning. On Thursday, LinkedIn reported higher-than-expect Q3 revenue of $139.5 million, more than doubling last year's revenue. The company also beat analyst expectations of $128 million for the quarter. Li...

One would think that after all of the publicity in recent years about insider trading and its illegality, that such a phenomenon would be a thing of the past. Not so. On Oct. 13, 2011, the hedge fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam, received the longest prison sentence to date for insider trading. A judg...