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In a bid to settle a dispute arising from an aggressive effort to ban gambling by its residents, the United States has agreed to trade concessions meant to make it easier for some European companies to compete against domestic rivals The U.S. has approved concessions dealing with easing trade restrictions on mail services and warehousing as well as...

Zumobi, a new mobile widget platform and zooming interface based on Microsoft technology, has launched in beta mode after more than a year of development The trial version of the service is available for phones running Windows Mobile 5 and 6. In the second quarter of 2008, Zumobi is planning to offer compatibility with BlackBerry and selected Java ...

The European broadband market is growing rapidly. At the end of Q2 2007, there were close to 100 million broadband subscribers in Europe ...

Several years ago when Salesforce.com burst onto the CRM scene it was difficult to imagine how the upstart firm could make a dent in the space. At the time, the gorilla in the room was Siebel and the thought of an Internet-based application -- an experimental delivery mode then -- besting the deeply entrenched, feature-rich iconic CRM provider was laughable...

Linux fans love to debate the pros and cons of myriad technologies, but none more than operating systems -- and you can bet the usual winner isn't based in Redmond or Cupertino This week the question was raised once again on Slashdot, spurred by a Linux Magazine comparison of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon and Mac OS X Leopard and drawing well nigh 600 commen...

One of the things you learn quickly when you work for a large company is how well executives can cover up failure. I think, to a large extent, that is what is happening with Linux Folks are covering up its failure with rhetoric, and that is keeping it from growing to its potential. I'm an analyst, and particularly when we challenge popular views, f...

Online retailers agree that it's better to give than receive, yet they stand to receive more than most. Santa will barely have time to shuck his boots for his slippers before the merchandise misfits begin a return journey to the warehouse to wreak havoc on the season's sales numbers "The reality is that returns are nearly always higher for e-commer...

Amazon has added a new component to its Amazon Web Services (AWS), the online retailer announced Thursday. SimpleDB, a new Web-based service for running queries on structured data in real time, joins Amazon's other offerings, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as a computing solution for individual developers and small companies with big ideas and undersized budgets...

Google is launching a new effort to capture human knowledge on theWeb, test-driving Google Knol, a Web-publishing approach that is drawing comparisons to Wikipedia A "knol," according to Google, is a unit of information or knowledge, and the new publishing platform is being tested by individuals who have been invited to take part in a beta version,...

Microsoft took a big leap forward Thursday in its virtualization effort. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant released a public beta for its hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, which is now called "Hyper-V." Previously code-named "Viridian," the Hyper-V beta was expected in early 2008, Microsoft said. Now, however, Hyper-V will sh...

China-based software company CDC raked in the most revenue for a third quarter of its history but nevertheless suffered a net loss of more than US$7 million, a situation blamed in part on "pirate" servers allowing people to play its online game Yulgang without authorization The Q3 report by CDC, which provides enterprise software, mobile services a...

Google's proposed US$3.1 billion merger with DoubleClick encountered another stumbling block this week when two privacy groups filed a petition with the Federal Trade Commission, asking its chairwoman, Deborah Platt Majoras, to recuse herself from voting on the deal because of what they say is a conflict of interest There is a conflict of interest ...

After a one-week delay, Novell released its fourth quarter earnings Thursday, saying that higher-than-expected costs associated with an ongoing restructuring would weigh on results even as sales of its Linux products surged higher The restructuring effort could now cost as much as US$70 million, Novell said, which is significantly higher than the $...

Back-to-back announcements -- first from Facebook and then Bebo -- have upped the ante in the social network application development game. Facebook, which launched its Facebook Platform for developers last May, will make its developer platform architecture available to other social networking sites as a model and through licensing deals Soon therea...

There is no doubt that the dollar seems to be heading in one direction: down. Though I have faith in the long-term prospects for the dollar, it's very important to be aware of the dynamics of a falling currency. Because the United States is an international economic powerhouse, the implications of a falling dollar are multifaceted and leave our leaders with some difficult alternatives as to how to create and apply a "fix."

Major IT companies are fashioning themselves into leading worldwide proponents of clean technology as they put into use a growing battery of tools that can reduce organizations' carbon footprint -- while at the same time increasing the power, efficiency and flexibility of IT systems' architecture While virtualization and more energy-efficient heati...

As mobile video gains popularity, new content providers are cropping up all over the place to compete for the attention of consumers -- and their recreational dollars GoTV, a made-for-mobile television network, has a horse in this race. The company, based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., creates its own mobile programming and distributes content for other ...

Cognos has wasted little time in rolling out an integration map for its newly acquired analytics best of breed vendor, Applix The deal, which closed at the end of October, is bringing to Cognos -- itself in a pending US$5 billion acquisition by IBM -- financial performance management capabilities....

New data released this week shows that human evolution is speeding up -- an interesting development given that many in the scientific community are hopeful that humans can take greater control over the process. At a recent conference in San Diego, scholars discussed how various religious orders may perceive radical life extension, one potential path of human evolution...

Sun Microsystems on Monday plans to announce several key enhancements to its StarOffice and OpenOffice.org office productivity software suites StarOffice 8 and the corresponding open version, OpenOffice.org 2.3, have both been updated with a variety of new features, including the ability to edit for blog servers along with enhanced charting capabil...