Archive

Google has proposed modifying its proposed digital books deal with publishers and authors in an effort to tamp down growing opposition to the project. The changes would limit the number of out-of-print books it places online. Industry groups were given a venue to complain about the proposed agreemen...

A rose by any other name can raise quite the stink, making the act of localizing Web sites to fit foreign cultures all the more thorny. Even if the product is as sweet as ice cream, it's possible to leave a bitter taste in consumer's mouths. "Ben and Jerry launched their 'black and tan' flavor of ic...

On Facebook, most people make friends the old-fashioned way -- by sending a request to be added to someone's posse of pals. Now, an Australian marketing company hopes to save you time and energy by simply buying you a few thousand buddies. The service from uSocial is mostly meant for businesses, cel...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. Microsoft will be able to continue selling copies of its ubiquitous word processing software -- at least until the appeal of the o...

Several telephone companies have suggested to the FCC that it change its definition of broadband. Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are asking the government to define broadband transmissions as anything over 768 Kbps downstream and 200 Kbps upstream. They were responding to an FCC call seeking definiti...

Travel Web sites were among the first category of e-commerce ventures to actually make a buck a decade or so ago. It is astounding, therefore, that recent industry reports show a deep dissatisfaction among many users of these portals. In particular, Forrester Research recently reported on the failin...

The European Commission on Thursday expanded its investigation into Oracle's plans to purchase Sun Microsystems. The EC wants to study the potential antitrust issues arising from proprietary database vendor Oracle's takeover of Sun's open source MySQL database application. It will issue its ruling o...

If you ask anyone today to define "cloud computing," there is slim chance you will get agreement on an exact definition. It is one of those emerging technologies that everyone knows they want to get into, but no one seems to know why or what the real benefit is. There is a lot of promise, but very ...

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause. The group has sent letters to six members of the U.S. House of Representatives describing the extent to which pers...

Gmail's 100-minute outage Tuesday was the result of a cascading series of router failures caused by a combination of hardware maintenance and traffic policies, Google said. The failure of the third-most popular Web mail service left users around the world who access the system online instead of thro...

After a tough year of cuts, layoffs, and the pressure to do even more with less, many of you are facing the toughest fiscal environment of your professional careers. Can you achieve your key objectives in 2010 with reduced spending and a smaller staff? It is possible, and many of the answers can be ...

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud "enables end-users to have the same capabilities of the traditional desktop, but with a thin client and delivered from the data center," said A...

Online auction site eBay has finally managed to divest itself of Skype, the VoIP company it bought back in 2005 for $2.6 billion. A group of venture capitalists led by Silver Lake Partners has purchased 65 percent of Skype for $2.1 billion in cash and a note, eBay announced on Tuesday. The transacti...

Wal-Mart has changed its logo. It's sprucing up many of its stores with new looks. Now, the world's largest retailer is expanding its online sales channel, adding a trio of carefully selected third-party vendors to its Web site in a bid to increase sales. WalMart Marketplace debuted Monday, offering...

VMworld, VMware's signature annual user and partner event, is kicking off this week in San Francisco, so it seems worth reconsidering the company's recent acquisition of SpringSource. Along with critical human assets, the deal brings a host of tested technologies to VMware, including the Spring Fram...