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Electronic Arts will pay more than $800 million to buy two video game studios from the private equity firm that purchased them two years ago. EA, the largest publisher of video games worldwide, will acquire VG Holding from Elevation Partners. VG consists of BioWare and Pandemic Studios, each of whic...

Two committees within the U.S. House of Representatives have approved a bill put forth by Democrats this week as an alternative to the broad surveillance legislation rushed through in August to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Known as the "Restore Act," short for the Respon...

This past July, a joint FBI/Chinese effort seized about $500 million worth of counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec software. The seizure and arrests came at a time when our government was pressuring China to do something about its traditional tolerance of software piracy. This was no small seizure and...

Online marketplace eBay paid too much for the Internet phone service Skype, but its head was in the right place when it made the buy, according to a report released Tuesday by a major technology research firm. "eBay's September 2005 acquisition of telephony vendor Skype was overpriced by any direct ...

Virgin Mobile USA staged its long-anticipated initial public offering Thursday, raising more than $400 million in the process, but investors gave the shares a fairly modest boost out of the gate. Shares of the virtual network operator, which focuses on selling pay-as-you-go mobile services to a larg...

Sony Ericsson posted quarterly results that show it continues to gain market share against some competitors but is doing so at the expense of its bottom line. The fourth-largest handset maker posted its first year-over-year profit drop in two years, saying third quarter net earnings fell 10 percent ...

Today, in order to have a commanding e-commerce presence with universal access, domain names must be treated like very special golden keys. Without an effective domain name, the entire exercise of Internet-centric commerce becomes almost useless. Super success in cyber-branding lies in the sophistic...

Did you hit any garage sales when you were growing up? Most likely you didn't do it to save the planet but rather to make money or shop for bargains. Regardless of the motivation, a secondary result -- one with far grander, long-term benefits -- is that a lot of old items sold were kept out of the t...

Following its acquisition of Stumbleupon earlier this year, eBay is wading deeper into the social networking waters with a collection of its own micro-communities designed to foster interaction and sharing among members, the company announced Wednesday. The home-grown social networking feature, dubb...

Google on Wednesday launched the fifth version of its enterprise search appliance with more security, better internal search result relevance and a wider reach across enterprise content management systems. The Version 5.0 upgrades of the Google Search Appliance allow business managers to search acro...

Google has reached a deal to buy a Swedish firm that makes a social networking application that lets users blast their extended networks of friends with micro-blogs whether they're on a PC or a mobile phone. Google did not disclose the terms of its acquisition of Jaiku, which is based in Helsinki; n...

With all the social networking and photo-sharing Web sites out there, few teenagers are taken by surprise when they find that pictures they posed for have been posted online by their friends. However, few expect to see their likeness then featured, without their permission, on a billboard advertisem...

Google is introducing ad-supported video clips from YouTube -- what it calls "video units" -- to its AdSense platform, one of many steps in a strategy designed to glean a return on its massive investment in the video-sharing Web site. Google is working with select YouTube content partners, including...

NBC Universal will purchase Oxygen Media, the operator of a cable channel aimed at women, for $925 million, a move that dovetails with its 2006 purchase of the iVillage online network for $600 million. The acquisition gives NBC a cable channel that reaches 74 million homes and offers advertisers a f...

As it prepares to meet its customers' growing demands for wireless multimedia services, AT&T's board of directors approved the acquisition of 700 MHz spectrum licenses from Aloha Partners. The purchase will cost the nation's largest wireless carrier about $2.5 billion. The purchase will give AT&...