Archive

It's party time in blogland. So say analysts in the wake of two successive blog-related acquisitions this week. First, yesterday AOL said it would acquire Weblogs, Inc. Today, Verisign said it has purchased Weblogs.com. VeriSign purchased the company and its ping service from Scripting News in a US$...

The upcoming turning of the calendar to January of 2006 brings more than a new year. It also marks the start of what some say is the most sweeping demographics change to hit the American workforce since World War II. That's because during 2006, the first of the Baby Boomer generation will turn 60 ye...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission took action against spyware this week by asking a U.S. District Court Judge to halt an operation that allegedly plagued users who clicked for free file-sharing software with performance-slowing, private-information-gathering software that also altered search results...

Shareholders of long distance provider MCI overwhelmingly approved a plan for Verizon Communications to buy the company for US$8.4 billion, one of the final hurdles for the major telecom merger. MCI said 88 percent of its shareholders voted in favor of the merger, despite attempts by some investors ...

Dell computer has officially opened what it calls its largest, most advanced manufacturing plant in North Carolina, a move meant to underscore the company's commitment to operating in the United States but one that has already created its share of controversy. Dell opened the 750,000-square-foot fac...

Sprint Nextel has filed suit against Vonage Holdings and other voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) startups, claiming those companies infringed on patents the telecommunications company holds for delivering VoIP traffic across networks. In addition to Vonage, the action filed by Sprint Nextel in U.S...

Sun Microsystems and Google today announced a multi-year deal to promote each other's software, a deal seen by many as the possible groundwork for a direct attack on Microsoft's market dominance in the desktop productivity software space. Under the terms, financial terms of which were not disclosed,...

Symantec has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire an agent-less IT security compliance software company in a US$209 million all-cash transaction. Symantec said the acquisition of BindView Development Corporation would allow it to offer customers an end-to-end solution for p...

Among a business's greatest assets is the information it collects, but only if it can sort through and present that information in a timely fashion. Enterprises collect millions if not billions of bits of data on customers, products and suppliers. Beyond merely storing the data, they must decide whi...

Yahoo has put its money behind a team effort to bulk up the amount of valuable content available on the Web. The search engine company will foster the Open Content Alliance, a consortium set up to digitize materials in the public domain, such as classic books, and those published under the less-rest...

United Kingdom-based music act managers are seeking to pressure Apple on royalty payments, saying too little of the proceeds from each song download is actually reaching the artists that created the songs. Members of the UK chapter of the Music Managers Forum met today to launch a public awareness c...

Sales of digital music soared during the first half of 2005, nearly tripling over 2004 levels, but weren't quite robust enough to help the music industry see overall growth, according to sales figures from international music trade group IFPI. Worldwide, music sales for the first six months of this...

Looking to fend off competition from Internet-based entertainment providers and others, DirecTV and XM Satellite radio have signed a deal to offer subscribers of DirecTV access to streaming radio offerings of XM. The two satellite-based companies said starting in mid-November DirecTV subscribers wi...

Computer maker Dell is ending its long-standing practice of offering free home delivery of personal computers, a move seen as an effort to protect its historically robust bottom line from price competition. Though Dell has remained among the most profitable computer makers, its most recent earnings ...

Even before Hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the gulf coast, the United States had serious long-term problems with oil availability and pricing. But, nobody was willing to take a hard look at how we were going to overcome our oil dependency. The ramifications of the destruction caused by the hurri...