Articles by Erika

Amazon and Viacom have inked a licensing agreement that will bring the number of instant videos available to Amazon Prime customers to more than 15,000. The deal, which will go into effect over the next several months, will add episodes from Viacom's Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon and BET outlets. Titles will include "The Hills," "Jersey Shore,"...

Oracle is clearly not prepared to let go of the TomorrowNow case involving corporate theft it suffered at the hands of the service provider, which was acquired by rival SAP in 2005. In a legal filing this week, Oracle rejected the US$272 million in court-ordered damages from SAP. A jury found in favor of Oracle in 2010 and awarded the software mak...

How much does a civil engineer in New Orleans make? What is the average temperature there? What are the differences in the trigonometric functions of sin, cos and tan? What is the exchange rate between the U.S. and the UK right now? Throw one of these questions at Siri, the voice assistant in iPhone 4S, and she will speedily reply. Fueling Siri is...

Amazon is planning to launch a retail store in Seattle in the coming months, according to reports published by Bloomberg and Good E-Reader. The endeavor is meant to serve as a pilot project for a possible chain of stores that would sell Amazon Exclusive books, as well as its Kindle Fire tablet, line of e-readers, and related accessories. This will...

BitTorrent search engine BTJunkie has abruptly shut down its website, giving its users a short and sweet goodbye: "We've decided to voluntarily shut down. We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on." It appears likely that the move was a defensive maneuver in response to law enforcement's takedown of the ...

Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its forthcoming service update to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which will be released in Q2 2012. The service update will build on Microsoft's rollouts last year in such areas as social CRM and mobile, Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM's product management group, told CRM Buyer.

An in-depth look at Facebook user behavior reveals some interesting trends among this more than 800- million constituency: One, Facebook users tend to receive more from the Facebook friends than they give out; two, there is a solid core of users that are very active on the site. The Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project report o...

Verisign has alarmed the online security industry with its reluctant disclosure of repeated hack attacks on its network in 2010. The infrastructure company supports key servers of the Internet's backbone, serving as Top Level Domain host for .com, .org and .gov....

Salesforce.com unveiled a new customer service help desk tool this week. Desk.com works with customer requests delivered over a social network. ...

A change to the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) recently sailed through the House of Representatives without a hitch. The bill would allow a provider of rental DVDs or videos to get consent to share their customers' title selections, as long as users were provided with an opportunity to withdraw that consent That smooth ride ended in the S...

Apple has suffered a setback in its multicountry, extremely complex, and seemingly everlasting patent fight with Samsung. In the latest episode, its request to ban Samsung from selling two devices in Germany -- its Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and its Galaxy Nexus smartphone -- was rejected by the Munich Regional Court. This particular dispute began la...

AOL delivered a little bit of something for everyone with its Q4 earnings report -- good news, bad news, and hope that its many different initiatives are on track to pay off for the company. First the bad news: AOL reported a profit of US$22.8 million, or 23 cents a share, that was down from the $66.2 million, or 61 cents a share, it earned in the...

Andreessen Horowitz announced that it has raised US$1.5 billion for a fund aimed at investing in technology startups. The new fund is launching just as one of the firm's well-known bets, Facebook, prepares to go public. Andreessen Horowitz has an unspecified stake in the social network. Indeed, among the many reasons tech investors will be scouring Facebook's S-1 will be to learn the extent of Andreessen Horowitz's ownership.

Twitter is on the defensive over its new tweet-filtering policy, which it considers a progressive, forward-looking approach to complying with local laws around the globe. If a particular tweet might be illegal in one country -- such as a pro-Nazi sentiment, which would be illegal in Germany and France -- Twitter will block it in the country or cou...

Zero hour is approaching as the certainty grows that Facebook will be filing for its initial public offering this week. Zero hour for excited investors and Wall Street banks -- and zero hour for privacy advocates, who see a public Facebook as a very dangerous Facebook, at least as far as privacy is concerned. Even as a private company, Facebook ha...

This is it -- the week every social media investor has been waiting for. Facebook is expected to file for its IPO this week, according to widely circulating rumors, in response to huge demand in the market -- to say nothing of its own employees, many of whom stand to become millionaires overnight. Morgan Stanley is said to be the leading investmen...

Oracle has closed on its US$1.5 billion acquisition of RightNow, developer of a cloud-based customer self-service application. Oracle announced the deal in October 2011. For Oracle, the deal makes eminent sense: It fills in a missing gap in its cloud-based CRM functionality and gives it a broader base from which to compete against Salesforce.com.

Intel is buying about 190 patents, 170 patent applications, and next-generation video codec software from RealNetworks The terms of the sale will allow RealNetworks to retain certain rights to continue using the patents in current and future products.

At the National Retail Federation's annual convention,Retail's BIG Show 2012, Epicor debuted its latest mobile offering: the Epicor Retail Clienteling application. ...

Netflix shares rose sharply after the company reported that it added 610,000 customers and that profit margins in the streaming business this quarter could widen to 11 percent. That said, there was plenty in the earnings report to worry investors and analysts -- the company's profit fell 14 percent from the same period last year and its DVD busine...