Articles by Erika

The New York Times Co. reported a profit of US$15.7 million this quarter, compared with a $4.3 million loss in the same period last year. The boost came from a number of sources, including a cost-cutting initiative, digital ad revenues -- as opposed total advertising -- and digital subscriptions.

The U.S. Department of Labor and Facebook are collaborating on an initiative that they hope will link more unemployed people with potential employers -- a job search page on Facebook. Also participating in this initiative are the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, DirectEmployers Association and the National Association of Colleges ...

Marketo is taking aim at the smaller end of the business community with Spark, a stripped-down version of its revenue performance management application. ...

Microsoft is partnering with two of the most visible players in the education industry -- Sesame Workshop and National Geographic -- to roll out a series of new "edutainment" video games for its Xbox 360 platform The games -- "Kinect Sesame Street TV," "Kinect Nat Geo TV" and the code-named "Project Columbia" -- let children interact with character...

Dropbox has completed a US$250 million Series B financing -- a windfall for a company whose fundraising up until now has netted $7.2 million. The financing was led by Index Ventures with participation from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners, and Valiant Capital Partners, as wel...

The Novell v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit entered its trial phase in the Utah U.S. District Court this week, with jury selection taking place on Monday. The case, which Novell originally filed in 2004, has traveled a long and winding road. Novell won the right to go forward with the trial in May 2011, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth...

Apple did not violate four HTC patents, an International Trade Commission judge has ruled. HTC filed a complaint with the commission in May 2010, alleging Apple infringed on several mobile patent technologies, including those for power management of mobile devices and phone dialing. It asked the ITC to bar the importation of Apple devices that use...

It is almost hard to remember when all Amazon did was sell books -- the paperback and hardcover versions, that is. Over the years, the company has morphed and then morphed some more into a multilayered e-commerce platform, selling everything from digital music to storage space in the cloud to, well, just about any consumer product imaginable. Now ...

Google appears to be working on an online music store that will compete with the established offerings of Apple and Amazon. How competitive this online store will be is unclear, at least based on what is currently reported about its status. Google has held talks with Universal Music Group, Sony Music, EMI Group and Warner Music Group to license th...

Motorola is trying for another bite at the Apple, so to speak. It has launched its Xoom Family Edition tablet -- a product clearly designed with aspirations to take on the iPad. Going on sale exclusively at Best Buy, Xoom Family is an Android 3.1-powered device with a 10.1-inch widescreen HD display and 16 GB of storage.

Quanta Computer has agreed to pay Microsoft a license fee for devices that run Google Android or Chrome. It is the latest deal in a series that Microsoft has inked with manufacturers using Android, and more lately, Chrome, in their products. Other notable wins for Microsoft have been Samsung and HTC. In September, it reached a licensing agreement ...

Verizon Wireless has changed its privacy policy to permit it to do, well, almost anything it wants to with users' data The new policy, which is opt-out, allows it to track subscribers' Web browsing, location and app usage behavior....

Facebook, check. Twitter, check. RSS feeds, absolutely. Mobile, heck yes. In short, email marketing and marketing automation vendor Silverpop has been steadily adding the social and mobile channels to its range of offerings Now it is pulling the "check-in" channel into the mix with its acquisition of PlacePunch, a location-based services marketing ...

The number of wireless subscriber connections in the U.S. is more than its actual population. In addition, Americans have doubled the amount of data traffic on wireless networks. So says trade group CTIA in its semiannual survey of the state of the industry. The number of wireless connections rose by 9 percent for the first half of 2011, reaching ...

Zynga is spreading its wings beyond Facebook, the giant social network that made it a giant gaming network in its own right. Some 232 million Facebook users also use Zynga It has launched a new, independent gaming platform, Project Z.

Many users of the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) in Europe, the Middle East and Africa found Monday that their Internet service had inexplicably had gone dark. Some were experiencing a total blackout, with no messaging service, email or Web access available. Others were able to intermittently perform some tasks, such as email or messaging. The problems had not been resolved by this article's publication time.

Sprint Nextel investors have received some very good news and very bad news. The good news is that the company plans to step up deployment of its Network Vision. This plan, originally described in December 2010, calls for a comprehensive, nationwide rollout of 4G LTE on its licensed spectrum. At the same time, it is moving away from WiMax provider...

Ejected from Oracle's Open World. An impromptu gathering at a nearby restaurant. Fulsome explanations from PR flacks and tweets galore. The relations between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff went from wary and grudging mutual admiration, to red hot rhetoric. How red hot? Well, for starters, Ellison referred to Salesforce.com as the "roach motel" of cloud services this week.

Yesware has gone to market with a new cloud-based email productivity application that is based on the simplest of concepts: Salespeople hate to waste time inputting data into their CRM systems. However, companies need that data salespeople hate to bother with. Ergo, a system that automatically inputs the data from work that salespeople are already doing -- that is, sending emails -- would save a lot of time and frustration.

India plans to provide very low-cost personal computing devices to millions of students through an agreement with DataWind to manufacture mass quantities of its Ubislate tablet for a price point of around US$50, according to Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal. ...