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The fact that we pay the taxes that support the costs of government ought to make us the customers of the government, right? That seems logical, but often taxpayers and constituents (or drivers, in the case of the DMV) are treated more like an annoyance than a valued customer However, some government agencies are starting to see the light and work ...

Conserving energy, reducing floor space and managing utility costs are becoming major priorities for IT organizations. As the number of servers continues to grow and demand for storage capacity increases, companies are faced with the challenge of powering and cooling these systems while controlling their energy consumption and complying with environmental regulations...

Facebook has a new honcho. The Web upstart-turned-conglomerate has lured away Sheryl Sandberg, Google's ad platform guru, to join its team as chief operating officer Sandberg, who was with Google for six years, made an indelible stamp at the organization as she built out the Adsense and Adwords product lines. At Facebook, she will lead sales, busin...

Five years after it began work on Singularity, an operating system research project focused on constructing dependable systems, Microsoft has released a research development kit (RDK) to the academic and research community The terms of the license make Singularity free software, not open source software....

Google has announced that it's taking Google Gears to the road, a move the company said is intended to make sense out of the dense and complex process of developing for the mobile Web Google Gears, previously only available for desktops, is software that enables device users to access online services when they are not connected to the Internet....

Ask.com is looking to women for answers. The 12-year-old search engine is reportedly narrowing its focus to appeal to married women, mostly in the South and Midwest, in its first major move under the direction of new CEO Jim Safka Ask.com is trimming 40 jobs, according to published reports, as its shifts emphasis from the broader model it featured ...

Seeking to buy time for its directors to explore alternatives before Microsoft can mount a campaign to win seats on its board, Yahoo has modified the way it nominates board members The portal amended its bylaws to extend the deadline for nominating directors. The deadline was originally March 14 but will now fall 10 days after the company announces...

For anyone doing business online, commerce meets collaboration at a Web 2.0 portal -- a mutual touchpoint for a company, its partners and customers (plus all their contacts) as well as a personalized filter of information and services found on the Web The goal: aggregating high-value information about people, products and services -- reducing time ...

To long-time promoters of mobile Linux, Google's announcement of Android marked a critical market inflection point. At long last, mobile Linux is emerging from a niche to quickly gaining broad acceptable in the mobile world alongside Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Mobile While Android's entrance has generated a great deal of interests throughout t...

In Part 1 of this five-part series, we define virtualization; in Part 2, we look at the business drivers for virtualization. Now we will look at the challenges enterprises face when they virtualize their IT environment So, we know virtualizing the IT system will save a lot of time, money and effort, and we know there are lots of tools out there we ...

Microsoft launched its Office Live Workspace to the online world Monday, though the free document sharing and collaboration service is still officially in beta -- and limited to English Essentially, Office Live Workspace is a Web-based extension of Microsoft Office that lets people access their documents online and share their work with others....

Hoping to become the portal of choice into the mobile Web, Yahoo on Tuesday unveiled onePlace, a content and services management tool meant to become a customized mobile Web starting page onePlace's bookmarking tools will enable users who access the Internet from smartphones and other handheld devices to automatically organize content they seek out...

AMD on Tuesday introduced its latest motherboard GPU (graphics processing unit), the AMD 780 Series, in Hanover, Germany, at CeBIT 2008 Styling it as the most advanced motherboard GPU in the industry, AMD said the platform is intended to provide a "rich computing experience" for both casual gamers and multimedia enthusiasts running mainstream, low-...

Last December, Microsoft's Windows Internet Explorer group announced that Internet Explorer 8, the next iteration of its Web browser, would be standards compliant, interoperable and backward compatible when it's released in the second half of 2008 The group announced that IE8 has rendered correctly in Acid2, a complex Web page design that uses comp...

Semiconductor giant Intel has lowered its profitability forecast, sending stock prices tumbling across the board The company cut its first-quarter gross margin forecast from 56 percent to 54 percent "due to lower than expected prices for NAND flash memory chips," Intel said. All other expectations remained unchanged....

Microsoft is bringing its video technology to millions of smartphones in collaboration with Nokia, the largest cell phone manufacturer in the world Microsoft's Silverlight brower plug-in first will come to handsets built on Nokia's S60 platform, and soon thereafter will be available on Nokia's S40 phones, as well as on Internet tablet devices, the ...

It may not have been noticed in the whirlwind of online transactions on Web sites like eBay or Amazon, but e-commerce turned 25 on Tuesday On March 4, 1983, the husband-wife team of Alex Randall and Cameron Hall quietly launched a business revolution that was then the stuff of dreams, when their year-old company, Boston Computer Exchange, sold a co...

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been increasingly adopted during the past five years, with its promised benefits validated by early adopters. One of the clearest lessons learned is that SOA is all about finding a better approach -- rather than a better technology -- for enterprise application development. In 2008, we will see a critical emphasis on establishing a new IT culture in which SOA-based projects have a better chance of success...

PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and a host of others succumbed to the pull of its tractor beam. Could Salesforce.com be next on Oracle's list? Though this rumor has been around for several years as idle speculation, in the last several months it's taken on new life. The tenor of the gossip has changed since a San Francisco tech publication and some ...

The Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley is nestled into the Berkeley Hills just off the fire trail where runners from around the area come to take on the brutal 3.5 mile climb. The lab, though, doesn't feel like it's part of Berkeley. It's located a few miles from the iconic Sproul Hall and People's Park, Berkeley institutions that were home to numerous student rebellions during the '60s. It's easy to miss, removed as it is from the school's infrastructure, which dominates much of downtown Berkeley...