Articles by Stephanie Losi

Without hiking license fees, Microsoft will roll out its next upgrade to Microsoft CRM software in August, the company announced Tuesday. The new version, Microsoft CRM 1.2, will have several key improvements, including closer integration with Microsoft Office 2003, a new mobile component, reporting enhancements and a tool to ease the redeployment process for IT administrators...

Nintendo and Sony took the stage with competing announcements at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles. Each game console maker detailed specs of a new portable gaming device, but the proposed gadgets differ in important ways Nintendo said its entrant in this market will debut this year in Japan and North America, and in Eur...

Intel has unveiled a new family of chips based on its XScale technology, which is geared toward balancing low power consumption with high-performance processing. The new PXA27x processors reportedly can handle multiple wireless broadband standards, such as 3G, WiFi and WiMAX, while also sporting enough power to provide mobile phones with full-motion videoconferencing capabilities and provide PDAs with DVD-quality video playback...

In an effort to warp the space-time fabric, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates will go back in time to sabotage the Linux operating system, according to an internal memo leaked to the Internet by an unknown Microsoft insider "This is clearly a smoking gun," open-source programmer Tux Rodriguez wrote in his weblog, where he also posted the leaked memo....

Hot dog stand owner Jim McMahon has announced the triumphant return of his company, Piping Hot Dogs.com, from the dot-com graveyard. "We really learned our lesson, man," McMahon said in an interview Thursday. "For a while, dot-com became dot-bomb, you know? It was like a stigma. People saw the .com on my cart and walked the other way. They didn't ...

Last week, Apple's iTunes Music Store sold five times as many songs as the newly relaunched Napster service. According to Nielsen SoundScan, which measures digital download numbers, iTunes accounted for about 80 percent of all legally downloaded music files during the week. And at an analyst meeting Wednesday night, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented that his company is now "the Microsoft of music stores."

After flooding ISPs and universities with thousands of subpoenas targeting individual consumers, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has moved from threats to open warfare, filing 261 lawsuits against those whom it terms the most egregious file swappers -- users caught sharing more than 1,000 files on free peer-to-peer networks, such as Kazaa...

Chip giant Intel has reported second-quarter earnings that slightly surpassed analysts' expectations, posting a profit of US$896 million, or 14 cents per share, on revenue of $6.8 billion That revenue figure represents an increase of just 1 percent from the first quarter and 8 percent from the year-ago period. In contrast to the slight rise in reve...

Microsoft is backing away from the Web browser business. On the heels of its late May disclosure that it will cease developing new stand-alone versions of Internet Explorer for Windows, the company has announced it is abandoning the Mac browser market entirely. IE as a project is not dead -- new versions will be integrated into future Windows releases, starting with Longhorn in 2005 -- but from a user perspective, it is dormant, at least for now...

As recently as a few years ago, IT personnel were trained to harden their network perimeter, barring outsiders entirely. In contrast, today's security environment is far less clear-cut -- and the role of firewalls is expanding Corporate IT managers face two contradictory demands when purchasing firewalls for the enterprise. On one hand, today's fir...

Following WorldCom's disclosure of what appears to have been the largest financial misstatement in history -- nearly US$4 billion -- the company on Tuesday fired chief financial officer Scott Sullivan and announced its intention to redo its financial statements for the past five quarters During an internal audit of the company's capital-expenditure...

Name-your-own-price e-tailer Priceline.com(Nasdaq: PCLN) and online auction giant EBay (Nasdaq: EBAY)have inked a deal that calls for Priceline to offer itstravel booking engine on EBay. "It is similar to the deal where Amazon last year signed on Expedia and Hotwire as partners," Forrester senior analyst Henry Harteveldt told the E-Commerce Times....

Adding fuel to the argument that an e-commerce resurgence is at hand, 1-800-Flowers.com (Nasdaq: FLWS) has announced a second-quarter net profit of US$1.8 million, along with a sharp increase in revenue "Despite what continues to be a very challenging retail environment, we were able to achieve solid revenue growth of approximately 21 percent," com...