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Lower total cost of ownership and little or no IT infrastructure to maintain are good starting arguments for moving to the cloud. While such concepts are easy to understand in the abstract, considering cloud computing on an industry-specific basis drives home some surprising limitations on this hot ...

More than 230,000 Facebook members got a rude awakening this past week when they were notified that they had been "de-friended" for a nice, juicy Burger King Whopper. Facebook users who installed the "Whopper Sacrifice" application were rewarded with a coupon for a free Whopper if they de-friended ...

Sprint Nextel subsidiary Boost Mobile announced it will begin offering a flat rate plan that includes unlimited calling, wireless Web, texting and walkie-talkie services for $50 per month, available Jan. 22. Roughly half the price of unlimited plans offered by carriers such as Sprint, Verizon and AT...

There are plenty of figures to show the efficiencies and cost savings that cloud computing can deliver, but here's one you're unlikely to hear during a sales pitch: The benefits of cloud computing are not linear with a project's progress. That means if you only complete about 80 percent of the proje...

Struggling Internet portal Yahoo has tapped former AutoDesk CEO Carol Bartz as its new CEO. Bartz, 60, will face a monumental task in attempting to turn around Yahoo, which was the No. 1 destination on the Internet before being supplanted by search engine powerhouse Google a few years ago. Bartz bri...

Google is launching a reseller recruitment drive that could herald a shift in the way the company markets its products. Google has used resellers in the past -- the partners it inherited along with the Postini acquisition, for example. Now, though, it is hoping to recruit "a very large number" of re...

Merrill Lynch once forecast that the cloud computing market would reach an eye-popping $160 billion by 2011, a prediction that mostly drew skepticism. While sizing up the expectations for a nascent tech market is equal parts art and science, there are growing indications that $160 billion may indeed...

President-elect Barack Obama has selected former Internet executive and venture capitalist Julius Genachowski to be the next head of the Federal Communications Commission. Genachowski, who was classmates with Obama at Harvard Law School, is expected to receive an easy confirmation from the U.S. Sena...

So far, the vast majority of press reports and blog posts coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show last week rave about Palm's new Pre smartphone and webOS, the operating system that drives it. It's a 3G phone that runs on Sprint's network, has WiFi, GPS, 8 GB of memory, and all the standard stuf...

Two giants of Japan's consumer electronics industry are expected to announce annual losses for the first time in many years. Sony, maker of the industry-changing Walkman music player and the PlayStation series of video game consoles, is expected to announce a $1.1 billion loss for the 2009 fiscal ye...

Cloud computing may still be in its infancy, but Google, Amazon and IBM -- as well as other large vendors -- have rolled out cloud services at almost breathtaking speed. Indeed, it might appear these tier one vendors already have the multibillion dollar industry sewn up. That is not true, of course....

Microsoft is making Windows 7 available as a public beta on an unlimited basis following a surge in demand that crashed the site after it first posted the code. Microsoft had originally planned to roll out the Windows 7 public beta on a limited basis; initially, it was to have become available to th...

One Laptop Per Child, a Boston-based nonprofit dedicated to providing cheap laptop computers to children in underdeveloped countries, has laid off 50 percent of its staff. That leaves the organization with 32 employees, all of whom have taken salary cuts in an attempt to cut costs, said Matt Keller,...

Beleaguered Internet portal Yahoo is about to wrap up its search for a CEO to replace cofounder Jerry Yang. An announcement could come as soon as this week. Two candidates have emerged as the company's probable next leader: Carol Bartz, who is former CEO of AutoDesk; and Susan Decker, Yahoo's curren...

Data centers and headquarters have made up approximately 90 percent of the value in many recent asset sales on Wall Street. For example, Lehman Brothers sold its assets to Barclays for $1.75 billion, 86 percent of which was for the data centers and headquarters alone. The fact is that a company's he...