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Having unwillingly ceded Web search leadership to Google, Yahoo is not about to also let the growing world of mobile services slip through its fingers The Internet veteran chose the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show to announce a number of mobile initiatives, including a decision to open its mobile platform for developers and publishers....

Comcast and Panasonic are upping their strike capabilities in the consumer entertainment tech wars with the introduction of the AnyPlay portable digital video recorder. With a standard-definition, 60-gigabyte hard drive and DVD/CD player, AnyPlay gives consumers more flexibility in how they watch TV shows and movies The portable device records and ...

On New Year's Eve, Richard Rabins, cofounder of Alpha Software, posted a thank-you to readers on his blog "Your suggestions, advice, criticisms, peer support and sweat equity were crucial to expanding the Alpha Five universe in 2007," he wrote. "Every new application you deployed, every peer you supported in the Alpha Forum, every feature you reque...

The word "connected" appears no less than 13 times in the press release Microsoft issued to broadcast its DVR Anywhere launch at CES:Microsoft Mediaroom Brings Connected TV to Life The software system allows people to view recorded TV content all over the house. Just imagine: You can start watching a movie while cooking in the kitchen. Others can w...

Understanding the business and technical reality of your software assets is imperative in order to align them with corporate priorities The ability to predict a body's responses to environmental triggers can have significant therapeutic benefits. A researcher could analyze the "compliance" of your genes with standards to identify medical condition...

The new year is here and marketers are putting the finishing touches on their budgets and plans for 2008. However, before we move forward, there are some trends from 2007 that are worth continuing in the coming year. One trend that is top of many minds is the increased focus on customer relationships -- after all, these relationships can make or break a marketer's year...

Introduction by Dominic Sartorio, president of the Open Solutions Alliance 2007 was an eventful year for the commercial open source industry. We have seen many new entrants, and now there are hundreds of viable companies that are based on open source, filling nearly every segment of the software market. We have seen significant exit events from com...

There have been many indications in recent months that the music industry is on the cusp of a sea change, and two announcements on Monday suggested that the change is nigh First, as anticipated in reports last week, Sony BMG Music Entertainment officially announced the launch of its Platinum MusicPass, a series of digital album cards that enable co...

Bidding to reshape its image, Xerox is launching a major rebranding effort meant to encourage business customers to think of it as an innovation company, not just a leading maker of copiers The new image is meant to reflect the needs of today's business and to be "a bit less formal, a lot more lively with links to our heritage and a nod to the futu...

As sales numbers for the holiday season begin to surface, it appears the video game console industry sustained the heavy momentum it enjoyed throughout 2007 Releases put out in the last week from both Microsoft and Sony point to a solid season for the Xbox 360 and PS3. While Nintendo has not released any sales totals for the Wii, estimates indicate...

Intel unveiled 16 new Penryn processors at the International 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Monday. Coming in a variety of form factors, all of the new chips are based on Intel's 45-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process, and five of them represent the first Penryn-based processors built for laptops. Four are for servers, and the remaining seven are for desktops...

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates gave his 11th and final keynote address at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday, a speech laden with predictions that technology will grow ever more personal and interconnected in coming years Gates, who first addressed CES as keynote speaker in 1994, noted that this speech will likely be his la...

Amid warnings by its creators that users shouldn't expect much yet, an alpha version of open source-based Wikia Search launched Monday with the goal of eventually becoming a user-regulated challenger to Google and other search engines Created by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, Wikia Search is a for-profit venture that will be funded, in part...

If you lived under a rock throughout 2007 and recently surfaced to catch up on technology news, you likely will not recognize Google Sure, the company still dominates the search market, its logo looks the same, and it continues to offer Gmail and other Web-based products. However, the "don't-be-evil" empire has vastly evolved and expanded over the ...

Behavioral targeting has been around since the first dot-com days, but it got really hot again in late 2007, thanks to a few big promoters like Facebook. So, What exactly is it, and does it really work the way it sounds? BT tracks a Web visitor's browser clickstreams -- typically in the last six visits -- to predict what the visitor may want in the...

Return on investment figures for a Software as a Service implementation can be surprisingly difficult to generalize. One measure often cited in the industry is that one year is a reasonable period in which firms can expect to see a project deliver returns, with the larger-sized investments bringing home results faster than smaller-cost deployments ...

It's 2008, and that means the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here! According to some, that is. As 2007 drew to a close and the new year dawned, the mood has waxed somewhat more philosophical and contemplative than usual on the Linux blogs Discussion was understandably more subdued over the holidays, generally creating less controversy and ...

There are two mistakes a vendor can make that it may not be able to recover from. One is to build too many products, which stay in inventory and prevent future sales; and the other is to have too few products and lose out of sales as a result Nintendo did the latter, and that will be a problem for the company in 2008. With CES and Macworld starting...

Internet banking and stock trading was all the rage during the late 1990s. Now, two emerging areas of e-finance -- peer-to-peer lending and microfinance -- are disrupting the status quo even further and moving their markets into a new stage of development Facilitators of peer-to-peer borrowing and lending, such as Prosper.com, GlobeFunder and Lendi...

MyEclipse integrated development environment (IDE) vendor Genuitec is stepping up to the general developer downloads plate to take a swing at the task of automated and managed updates, plug-ins and patches to such widespread tools as Eclipse, Android and ColdFusion The free Pulse service helps bring a "single throat to choke" benefit to downloads b...