Archive

Compared to solar and wind, geothermal energy is still a small fraction of the renewable energy market. It's holding its own, however, and it's likely to become a much bigger player in the not-so-distant future. "The resource is enormous," said Karl Gawell, executive director of the Geothermal Energ...

The Novell v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit entered its trial phase in the Utah U.S. District Court this week, with jury selection taking place on Monday. The case, which Novell originally filed in 2004, has traveled a long and winding road. Novell won the right to go forward with the trial in May 201...

There's a new social network in town -- Chime.in, the brainchild of Bill Gross, known for creating Google's AdWords platform. Gross is the CEO of UberMedia, the developer of popular Twitter clients Echofon and Ubersocial. Chime.in launched as a public beta on Tuesday and will fully launch in Novemb...

Apple did not violate four HTC patents, an International Trade Commission judge has ruled. HTC filed a complaint with the commission in May 2010, alleging Apple infringed on several mobile patent technologies, including those for power management of mobile devices and phone dialing. It asked the ITC...

It is almost hard to remember when all Amazon did was sell books -- the paperback and hardcover versions, that is. Over the years, the company has morphed and then morphed some more into a multilayered e-commerce platform, selling everything from digital music to storage space in the cloud to, well,...

Wireless customers just caught a big break on those surprising overage fees. Wireless industry trade group CTIA, the FCC and Consumers Union have entered an agreement that requires wireless providers to let their customers know when they're about to incur extra fees. The "Wireless Consumer Usage Not...

Google appears to be working on an online music store that will compete with the established offerings of Apple and Amazon. How competitive this online store will be is unclear, at least based on what is currently reported about its status. Google reportedly has held talks with Universal Music Group...

Not all computing tasks are created equal, and the same goes for computing systems. Corporations and other organizations will be best served by systems that are designed to perform particular jobs or are flexible enough to adapt to them -- one of the core principles of engineering. In techie jargon,...

As of Friday, Skype, the popular video and voice service, is a division of Microsoft. The $8.5 billion acquisition was announced in May, and the U.S. Justice Department quickly cleared the sale. Antitrust regulators in the European Union signed off earlier this month, although Microsoft acknowledged...

Verizon Wireless has changed its privacy policy to permit it to do, well, almost anything it wants to with users' data. The new policy, which is opt-out, allows it to track subscribers' Web browsing, location and app usage behavior. The policy allows it to share this data with third parties in orde...

When people think of traditional channel companies in the tech industry, a wide array of distributors, systems integrators, or value-added resellers usually comes to mind. These players have an important role in the cloud, but a new form of cloud-enabled channel is also beginning to emerge. The trad...

RIM announced that BlackBerry service has been reinstated to millions of users following more than three days of service interruption. The outage prevented many users from sending and receiving text messages and emails, or surfing the Web, although some experienced limited or sporadic service. Users...

The superstar movie rental giant Netflix rapidly graduated to movie streaming and suddenly splintered off its old-fashioned DVD-by-mail service to create "Qwikster," a separate division with a name identity inspired by the likes of "Twitter" and "Napster," etc. When the outcry of customers reached...

Akamai's stock surged 10 percent Wednesday after sources told Business Insider that Google was aiming to buy the struggling content delivery network company. Later, a BusinessWeek report cast doubt on the rumors, citing anonymous sources who said no such deal is being planned. However, it's not the...

The number of wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. is more than its actual population. In addition, Americans have doubled the amount of data traffic on wireless networks. So says trade group CTIA in its semiannual survey of the state of the industry. The number of wireless connections rose b...