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The U.S. Supreme Court Monday declined to take up an appeal brought by Microsoft and Best Buy, who wanted the high court to overturn a lower court decision that allowed a lawsuit alleging fraud and racketeering to move forward Without comment and with no apparent dissent, the justices refused to hear the appeal of a federal appeals court ruling in ...

Chinese Internet company Alibaba.com will try to raise as much as US$1.33 billion in an initial public offering (IPO) slated for next month, according to reports In what promises to be the largest such offering in history by a Chinese technology firm, the business-to-business operator will reportedly sell 858.9 million shares, or 17 percent of its ...

Bolstering its online portfolio of informative offerings, Discovery Channel owner Discovery Communications is buying HowStuffWorks.com and planning to merge content to create a sort of "video Wikipedia." Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Silver Springs, Md.-based Discovery noted HowStuffWorks attracts about 11 million unique visitors...

Many video providers, particularly in the television and movie spaces, made significant strides to provide their content via a growing number of on-demand channels, including the Internet, in 2005 For video providers, the decision to embrace on-demand distribution was born as a response to both the opportunity and the dilemma posed by broadband Int...

"Free software" is a term that's often used interchangeably with "open source," and often understood simply to mean software that is obtained without charge. However, the idea of free software is neither about openness nor about price; it is a matter of freedom, and its implications extend into the political, philosophical and ethical realms So arg...

There are some weeks when I wonder if we have too many executives and politicians who truly don't have the sense to come in out of the rain. Last week was one of those weeks The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) may have lost a war by winning in court and creating a martyr....

While many companies are focused on their business online, they tend to put up sites that turn off rather than turn on potential customers. Because there are so many potential options, a business needs to be careful about how it designs its e-commerce site Part 1 of this two-part series features tips from e-commerce experts on how to entice consume...

Microsoft has added a new feature to its Windows Live platform that lets users take advantage of the Web to send invitations to parties, business meetings or other happenings Similar toEvite, Windows Live Events provides an array of graphical templates and other tools, such as maps and calendars, to design the invitations. There are templates for a...

Armchair tourists traveling the globe via Google Earth can now watch YouTube videos related to each destination they visit, Google announced Thursday A new YouTube layer in Google Earth's Featured Content folder allows users to zoom in on any location and view YouTube videos related to that place. For example, by zooming in on Maui, Hawaii, a user ...

Oracle announced it wants to acquire BEA Systems, a provider of Web-based business productivity and integration software, for US$6.7 billion, or $17 per share in cash. BEA has already rejected the offer, according to news accounts, saying that Oracle's bid seriously undervalues the company's overall worth The market apparently shares that view, des...

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are the joint winners of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced Friday The 10 million kronor (US$1.5 million) award was jointly made for the recipients' efforts to increase and disseminate knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundati...

Wii owner wannabes hoping for a dip in pricing for the holidays will have to wait a while for the Nintendo console to drop below it US$249 retail price, the company said Thursday. George Harrison, Nintendo's U.S. marketing chief, quashed any hopes for a lower price citing the continued strong demand for the Wii in an interview with Reuters Nintendo...

Electronic Arts will pay more than US$800 million to buy two video game studios from the private equity firm that purchased them two years ago EA, the largest publisher of video games worldwide,will acquire VG Holding from Elevation Partners. VG consists of BioWare and Pandemic Studios, each of which Elevation acquired at fire-sale prices in 2005....

Governments, international development organizations and transnational corporations are looking to technology transfers and the growing number of budding green IT initiatives to address economic and social development, as well as concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, climate change and environmental degradation resulting from industrial processes, as was discussed in Part 1 of this series...

Two committees within the U.S. House of Representatives have approved a bill put forth by Democrats this week as an alternative to the broad surveillance legislation rushed through in August to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 Known as the "Restore Act," short for the Responsible Electronic Surveillance that is Overse...

This past July, a joint FBI/Chinese effort seized about US$500 million worth of counterfeit Microsoft and Symantec software The seizure and arrests came at a time when our government was pressuring China to do something about its traditional tolerance of software piracy....

Linspire released its Linspire 6.0 Linux distribution, which contains a mix of open source and proprietary drivers and software and is the first commercial offering from Linspire to provide customers with Microsoft patent covenants There was only one word missing that could have made the announcement complete: controversial....

Online marketplace eBay paid too much for the Internet phone service Skype, but its head was in the right place when it made the buy, according to a report released Tuesday by a major technology research firm "eBay's September 2005 acquisition of telephony vendor Skype was overpriced by any direct measure: technology value, user base and revenue," ...

Few industries in this online era can lay claim to a longer or more venerable history than newspapers can -- but today, it's no secret that newspapers are in trouble The rise of the Internet has wrought changes to the competitive landscape that are drawing away both readers and advertisers, leaving newspapers in a struggle to survive. Traditional p...

While Linux has come a long way in the past 10 years, I think it's safe to say that it hasn't yet taken over the world -- nor has Linux reached its full potential. Linux continues to become more mainstream every day -- we now see Linux hosting mission-critical servers in the enterprise, large financial banks run their financial trading applications on Linux, Linux is even running manufacturing operations, and Linux is beginning to emerge as a serious player on the desktop from engineering workstations to consumer desktops to business desktops...