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The Federal Communications Commission has closed the first round of comment on its national broadband plan initiative, a requirement of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. The FCC must deliver a completed plan to Congress by February 2010 showing the way to more widespread broadband ...

Social marketing offers a new way to interact with consumers, but aside from being another channel, it requires a different mindset to achieve results. This is Web 2.0, where the consumer is in charge of the message and will angrily resist big brand pressure and broadcast marketing. Content needs to...

It applies to sports and smartphones: If you're an underdog, you will always be compared to the reigning champs until you knock them off their pedestal. The mission, then, for Palm during Saturday's retail launch of its Pre smartphone was relatively simple: Get as close as possible to an iPhone-styl...

When Palm's and Sprint Nextel's latest bundle of smartphone joy, the Pre, arrives Saturday, it will be entering an increasingly crowded market backed by parents that have a lot riding on its success. The Pre -- which costs $200 with a two-year service plan and rebate -- might be most important to Su...

The FTC has shut down an ISP that it painted as the worst of the worst in cyberspace. Pricewert, which has done business under a variety of names including "3FN" and "APS Telecom," sought out criminals seeking to distribute illegal electronic content including child porn, violent porn and bestiality...

On the front line of the e-commerce tax are online travel companies such as Expedia, Hotels.com, Priceline, Travelocity and Orbitz. The issue is whether the OTCs should be collecting hotel room occupancy taxes on the difference in the price between what the OTC pays the hotel operator and the amount...

Two nonprofit groups are protesting the Obama administration's pending appointment of Andrew McLaughlin to the post of U.S. deputy chief technology officer. McLaughlin's background as director of Google's global public policy constitutes a major conflict of interest with the government role he would...

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker on Wednesday dismissed dozens of lawsuits against telecommunication companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's so-called warrantless wiretapping activities several years ago. The once-secret program allowed government agents to listen in on U.S. citize...

ICANN, the Internet naming authority, is up against the wall. It may simply drop its greatest revolutionary idea of offering a brand new type of designer domain name to accommodate the cyberrealities of the widely expanded Internet of tomorrow. This new proposed platform would surely revolutionize m...

The end of mainstream support by Microsoft for Windows XP ended on April 14. That deadline came and left with barely an audible groan from the minions of enterprise, small business and consumer users of the decade-old operating system. The steadfast legions of corporate Windows XP users -- and the M...

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the hiring practices of high-tech firms to determine whether they are colluding with one another, according to a press report. Essentially, it is investigating possible agreements among high-tech companies not to poach talent from eac...

It should come as no surprise to any IT manager that your organization's appetite for data keeps growing every minute. No sooner than a new set of storage tools is deployed, it becomes clear there's a need for more, and you start planning the next wave of hardware purchases. More hardware means more...

EMC's all-cash bid to buy Data Domain is going to be hard to beat, according to Stifel Nicolaus analyst Aaron Rakers. EMC's $1.8 billion bid, announced Monday, is worth $30 per share in cash, a 20 percent premium over a previously accepted bid by NetApp of $25 per share. NetApp may increase its bid,...

The recession's effects on technology budgets, corporate belt-tightening and simple business survival have been well-documented, but less attention has been paid to how IT industry client and developer conferences can help end customers stabilize or even improve their situations. Make no mistake -- ...

Google said Monday that it plans to build an e-book service to make electronic editions of mainstream titles available to consumers -- whether they own a specialized e-book reader or not. The service should roll out by the end of the year, Google spokesperson Gabriel Stricker told the E-Commerce Tim...