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By any measure, IBM Connect, the annual IT analyst summit hosted by the company's Software Group (SWG), should have been a walk in the park. After all, the event followed close on the heels of IBM's System and Technology (STG) analyst briefing, and the central purpose of both events was to punctuate...

The U.S. government has largely failed to achieve the same productivity gains that private sector firms have experienced from utilizing IT -- despite spending $600 billion on information technology over the last decade or so. As a result, the federal Office of Management and Budget has initiated a n...

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a patent lawsuit Interval Licensing -- Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's company -- filed last August in Seattle against 11 firms, including Apple and Google. Interval claims the defendants violated four patents owned by Paul Allen's company Interval Research on te...

With holiday online shopping numbers at an all-time high, retailers understand that the Web is a critical sales channel. What they might be overlooking, however, is just how influential social networks have become in the shopping process -- both online and off. As more consumers turn to the Web and...

In what looks like a poke in the eye at Microsoft, Google has introduced Google Message Continuity, a service designed to safeguard Exchange messages through Gmail. The Postini-based service targets those who run Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007. It is designed to make sure users never lose access to...

As the year winds to an end, it is incumbent on all industry pundits to make predictions about what they envision for the coming year. Since I'm often lumped into this category, I'm obliged to offer my views about how the world will evolve over the next 12 months from a cloud computing perspective. ...

Dell announced Thursday it has entered into merger talks with Compellent Technologies, offering $27.50 per share for a total of nearly $900 million. The offer is below Compellent's stock price on Wednesday of $33.65 a share. While acquisition bids are typically slightly above stock price, Dell may s...

Netflix is spending big time to become the dominant video streaming player in the nascent Web-TV world. On Wednesday, Netflix announced it has reached an agreement with Walt Disney to stream ABC programs through its online service. The deal reportedly will last one year with an option to extend for ...

Every opportunity has a life span. Think about its course like a line or a wave that goes up then it comes down again. Fortunes are created, then lost, then created again. New technologies replace old technologies, and then they are replaced by newer technologies. If you know what's coming next, and...

At Google's Chrome OS event and demo on Tuesday, one of the participants was Amazon. The company chose this venue -- a competitor's product strategy launch -- to introduce an upgrade to its own go-to-market approach: the Kindle Web app. Now users can buy and read entire books from their browser with...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in his 1964 Order that he could not use words to describe pornography but "I know it when I see it." Even though judges may not be able to define "social media," they generally understand the complex circumstances in legal disputes. However, s...

AT&T ranks as the lowest-scoring cellphone service provider in a new Consumer Reports survey that asked 58,000 customers to rate their carriers. AT&T was the only one to drop significantly in overall satisfaction from a year earlier. More than half of the of the survey respondents who used A...

AT&T ranks as the lowest-scoring cellphone service provider in a new Consumer Reports survey that asked 58,000 customers to rate their carriers. AT&T was the only one to drop significantly in overall satisfaction from a year earlier. More than half of the of the survey respondents who used A...

AT&T ranks as the lowest-scoring cellphone service provider in a new Consumer Reports survey that asked 58,000 customers to rate their carriers. AT&T was the only one to drop significantly in overall satisfaction from a year earlier. More than half of the of the survey respondents who used A...

The U.S. government's drive to adopt cloud technology has generated a huge opportunity for vendors -- and has sparked fierce competition for the business. In the latest go round, Unisys, in partnership with Google, emerged victorious with a contract to provide a cloud-based email system for the Gene...