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Cepstral, a speech technology company, has decided to open its Media Resource Control Protocol (MRCP) library to the developer community The move is designed to free telephony application developers from the protocol grindstone and lead to greater inroads in software innovation, Cepstral's CEO said....

MTV and RealNetworks have formed a joint venture that will utilizeVerizon Wireless' distribution capabilities in an effort to dislodge Apple's vise-like grip on the online music space As part of the iTunes-killer venture, MTV is merging its Urge music service with RealNetworks' Rhapsody. One of the distribution channels will be Verizon Wireless' V ...

Wells Fargo said Tuesday it fixed a computer problem that left many of its Web banking customers unable to access their accounts over the weekend The problems were first discovered Sunday afternoon, and the San Francisco-based bank said all services had been restored as of early Tuesday, though some information, such as account balances, was expect...

Cisco and Microsoft may be on a collision course in some areas, including the push to bring a single communications platform to businesses, but their CEOs said Monday the two companies will continue to work together to ensure their products remain compatible Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco chief executive John Chambers held a joint question-a...

The battle over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping efforts escalated Monday as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee threatened to hold White House officials in contempt for flouting an already-extended deadline to respond to a June subpoena The subpoena by the Senate Judiciary Committee requested documents providing the leg...

Google continues to win the battle for Internet search dominance, according to the latest findings of Web traffic measurement firm comScore The Reston, Va.-based Internet metrics company said its July numbers show Google leading the field of what it considers the top five search engines. According to comScore, Google snagged a 55.2 percent share of...

Sage Software released a new version of its long-standing ACT! application -- a release timed to coincide with the application's 20th anniversary The biggest change in this application is the introduction of a Dashboard -- a popular type of user interface -- as well as new productivity enhancements and features that make the data more transparent t...

Do you remember the "Perfectly Normal Beast" from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series? If you haven't read about it (or don't remember), the Perfectly Normal Beast is a fictional creature -- kind of like a buffalo -- that migrates twice a year across the fictional "Anhondo Plain." It's (ironically) called "perfectly normal" because it spontan...

While use of on-demand Software as a Service (SaaS) is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years, many organizations continue to prefer in-house application development and on-premise deployment to support a range of key business functions and processes, as is discussed in Part 1 of this series Ease of integration, stronger tool sets for custo...

As colleges and universities nationwide began installing broadband access to their dorm rooms and apartments years ago, they gave students convenient, at-home access to unprecedented amounts of information. The trend also played a significant role in opening the door to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, which were and are often used as a means to freely trade copyrighted material like music and movies...

American Airlines has become the latest and most high-profile corporation to take on Google's AdWords program, claiming the paid search service infringes on the airline's trademarks without compensation American said it filed a lawsuit Thursday in Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas, accusing Google of violating trademark laws...

In the latest report from the front lines in the high-definition format wars, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures have both jumped with both feet into the HD DVD camp, the companies announced Monday The commitment by the companies, both of which are owned by Viacom, will include all movies distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictur...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux distribution Ubuntu, asserted there has to be some decisive Ubuntu community action to make sure it doesn't suffer another outage Canonical had to shut down five of eight servers in order to avert potential hacker attacks earlier this month....

Gamers across Europe woke up Monday to Microsoft's announcement that the company will cut prices on the Xbox 360 Premium and Core models starting August 24, the same day the 120 GB Xbox 360 Elite makes its way across the Atlantic and onto store shelves. The European price drop follows on the heels of a similar cut in prices in the U.S. and Canada during the first week of August. Microsoft launched the Xbox 360 Elite in April...

Skype said that a Microsoft patch downloaded on Patch Tuesday triggered a bug in its software that eventually resulted in the IP (Internet Protocol)-based service going dark for nearly two days The disruption in the free, peer-to-peer (P2P) network began unexpectedly on Thursday. Service was completely restored by late Friday....

Tilera, a startup semiconductor company, has launched its first product -- what it's calling the "world's highest performance embedded processor" -- at the Hot Chips conference at Stanford University. The product is the TILE64 processor, a 64-core processor with an architecture that Tilera said can scale to thousands of full-feature programmable cores, each capable of running Linux...

Beefing up its presence in China as it faces off with Baidu.com in that fast-growing market, Google said Monday it had invested in a Chinese social networking startup Google did not disclose any details of its investment in Tianya.cn, which has about 20 million registered users who turn to the site to share news and post items for sale or swap. Goo...

IBM and TDK are jointly researching and developing a new form of high-speed computer memory that should use less power, last forever and hold information when power is lost The companies are looking into spin momentum transfer technology as a way to create the high-capacity MRAM (Magnetic Random Access Memory). Harnessing the spin momentum transfer...

Dell and SAP are collaborating to offer retailers an easier way to buy computer hardware and SAP for Retail. It is offering hardware certified to be used on SAP for Retail, specifically, Dell's Retail OptiPlex 745 POS systems and Dell PowerEdge servers The end result is that a customer can order a complete POS (point of sale) retail system through ...

Brick-and-mortar merchandisers' shift from a product-centric to a customer-centric mentality is examined in a recent report from Gartner. By starting backwards from the known profiles of shoppers in every ZIP code, merchandisers can create extremely granular assortments for each store -- even down to sizing and color choices -- to increase sales and create loyalty...