Archive

With rumors swirling that it will be acquired as the PC industry continues to consolidate, Gateway said Friday it had rejected an unsolicited bid to buy its retail operations for US$450 million. Gateway said its board of directors had determined the offer was "not in the best interest of shareholder...

France-based telecom giant Alcatel said Friday it had reached an agreement to acquire the Universal Mobile Telecommunications wireless access business unit of Nortel in a deal valued at about US$320 million. The deal is aimed at boosting Alcatel's profile in the wireless broadband space, and represe...

Sarbanes-Oxley has really sharpened the businessperson's awareness of the fiduciary responsibilities of corporate board service. In fact, it seems that nowadays, even the press has become more attentive to what's going on in the corporate boardroom. The recent battles over directorship seats at H.J....

Since the technology of data warehousing has risen to become common currency, it has been at the epicenter of leading-edge advances in database, data analysis and decision support systems theory and practice -- and for good reason. With experts estimating that the amount of data in any given organi...

When a searcher types a word into Google or Yahoo, organic and paid results populate the return screen. Because competition for top rankings in search results is steadily increasing, business-to-business marketers are challenged to develop ever more sophisticated search strategies. FedEx, for instan...

China has announced it will adopt a digital TV broadcast standard that will combine two systems developed by the Tsinghua University and Shanghai Jiaotong University. The decision, made by the Standardization Administration of China following a review of the short list of submitted proposals, will b...

Microsoft appears to be in line to get more time to comply with all the provisions of its antitrust settlement with the federal government, with terms of the deal now stretching until 2012. The U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft have jointly filed with the court overseeing the settlement for a...

Verizon Communications became the second major telecom company in a week to back off a plan to replace a phased-out government fee with a surcharge of its own, after customers complained and regulators questioned its legality. Verizon had sought to charge customers of its high-speed DSL Internet ser...

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been named to the board of directors of Apple Computer, a move some say could portend future cooperation between the two tech giants and spell bad news for common rival Microsoft. Schmidt was elected the eighth director during a meeting of existing board members at Apple ...

A week or so after Hurricane Katrina roared out of the Gulf of Mexico and devastated huge portions of the coast, it became clear to officials at the Louisiana Department of Economic Development that they would have to rethink their long-term game plans. "The mission of the LDED is to expand existing...

Imagine a world in which you could walk in your office in the morning and see a stoplight. Green would mean your company's image on the Web was favorable, yellow would mean neutral, and red would mean big trouble -- like one of your customers had just blogged that your product obliterates hard drive...

Firing a potentially powerful salvo in the online music war, Universal Music Group said it would make its entire catalog of music available for free download using an ad-supported approach that could pose one of the most significant threats yet to the dominance of Apple's iTunes Music Store. Univers...

Over the last decade, many businesses -- long established and newly formed alike -- have made the World Wide Web a key revenue-generating channel. Billions of dollars are transacted each year over the Web. For many, going online to make a purchase or to find information that will lead to a purchas...

Corel on Monday announced it would acquire InterVideo in an all-cash transaction worth $196 million. InterVideo develops multimedia DVD software that lets users record, edit, author, distribute and play digital multimedia content on PCs and other devices. InterVideo's 2005 majority interest acquisit...

eBay said Monday it had signed a multiyear pact with Google to have the search giant deliver ads, including click-to-call functionality, for its auction and e-commerce sites outside the United States. The contract calls for Google to do at international sites what Yahoo earlier this year won the rig...