Archive

Best Buy has announced it will acquire troubled online music store Napster for $121 million. The deal includes $67 million of cash on Napster's balance sheet and values the Los Angeles-based Internet music store at roughly twice its Sept. 12 closing stock price. "It's an interesting move and looks d...

Imagine going to Amazon.com, finding the book you want and being asked for your phone number and told to wait for a call from your local bookstore with the price of the book. Sounds ridiculous, right? You want the price in the moment, while you're online, while you're still anonymous. But that's exa...

Research In Motion, maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry handheld e-mail device, is moving deeper into the consumer market, where it is sure to run up against tough competition from Apple's iPhone. Earlier this year, RIM forged a partnership with social networking site Facebook that lets BlackBerry de...

Jeremy Jaynes -- said to be one of the world's most prolific spammers -- had his nine-year jail sentence vacated after the Virginia state Supreme Court ruled that the law under which he was prosecuted violated the First Amendment. It did not adequately differentiate between commercial and noncommerc...

The gains that have made 2008 a blockbuster year for the video game market continued in August; however, the rate of sales showed signs of slowing down for the month. Overall sales growth was held to single digits for the first time since 2006, according to numbers released Friday from market resear...

Search engine giant Yahoo is moving ahead with plans to open up its home page and e-mail services to third-party content. The move comes at a difficult time for the beleaguered company -- earlier this year, Yahoo spurned an acquisition attempt by Internet rival Microsoft, triggering vitriolic infigh...

Bill and Jerry are back, and the dynamic duo's second Microsoft ad is already bringing as much divided opinion as its much-analyzed predecessor. The spot, which first appeared on YouTube Thursday night, shows Seinfeld and Gates staying with "average family" in an effort to reconnect with the common ...

Kate Moloney-Egnatios' intuition led her to Intuit. She followed the signs in her career pointing to Verisign and paid her dues at PayPal. But she says her latest tech startup is even more of a winning business idea than tax preparation software and online payment/authentication systems, and the aud...

The issue of compliance is forever on the minds of IT executives, and even more so in the last 10 years, due to increased audit activities by software vendors, complex licensing rules and the management of multiple vendors. Non-compliance with a software vendor's licensing can create uncomfortably l...

Two technology associations with significant clout on Capitol Hill are in talks to combine forces. The two organizations, the AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association, and the ITAA, or Information Technology Association of America, began merger discussions several months ago. "The real syn...

Internet retail giant Amazon.com is muscling into the wine industry. The company plans to start selling wine from California's Napa Valley and other wine-producing regions in the U.S. later this year. Although Amazon has not confirmed the news, the Napa Valley Vintners Association has been holding w...

With the exception of unlimited plans, major wireless carriers have raised their prices for text messaging almost in tandem by more than 100 percent over the last three years, a fact that caught the attention of U.S. Senator Herb Kohl, chairman of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee. Kohl sent a lette...

Location-based mobile and Web services are increasingly delivering value and gaining adherents as service providers devote greater time and resources to developing them further. For example, Sprint's Xohm wireless broadband unit is working with a group of leading mobile Web application development c...

AOL is getting a major facelift. Having fallen far behind competitors such as Google, Yahoo and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft's MSN, AOL -- a division of media giant Time Warner -- has launched a host of new services and content initiatives in a bid to close the gap in the online advertising game. ...

Google is getting on board with a new push to bring high-speed Internet access to parts of world still unconnected. The company has joined Liberty Global and HSBC to fund a startup called "O3b Networks" -- short for the "other 3 billion" people who can't yet surf the Net. The group will install 16 l...