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Google has apologized toSohu.com after the Chinese Web portal accused the search giant of illegally incorporating its data in a recently released Google tool that aims to make inputting Chinese characters easier The tool, called the "Pinyin Input Method Editor," is similar in concept to the autofill function in many applications, which suggests a w...

Google has launched Google Voice Local Search, an experimental directory assistance service using speech recognition over telephones that allows people to search for local businesses Callers can dial in from any phone to use the free voice-activated service, which is available on an experimental Google Labs Web site....

Environmentalists were jubilant last week when the Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could regulate automobile emissions, and now a trial beginning Tuesday in Vermont could carry that momentum even further Vermont is one of 10 other states that have chosen to follow California's strict emissions regulations, and for...

Fabrik, a provider of storage and online content-sharing solutions, announced the expansion of its family of Simple Tech SimpleDrive desktop hard drives with the addition of a new line of external storage devices. The drives boast up to 1 terabyte (TB) of storage and also include 2 GB of free online storage through the company's Internet data storage site...

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) firm Vonage will continue to provide service to its 2.2 million customers and sign up new subscribers after an appeals court granted it a stay of an injunction late Friday The stay came after a judge issued an injunction earlier in the day Friday that would have barred Vonage from signing up new customers. That i...

As part of its latest enhancement to the Xbox 360, Microsoft announced Monday it is bringing Windows Live Messenger instant messaging features to Xbox Live, letting gamers text chat with more than 200 million Windows Live Messenger users The new IM feature, which will be delivered in a firmware update scheduled for May 7, will let Xbox Live members...

Flash memory maker Sandisk has partnered with Yahoo to help provide music services for its Sansa Connect digital audio player Unlike other players in an increasingly crowded music player market, Sansa Connect is a WiFi-enabled portable MP3 player that allows users to listen to LAUNCHcast Internet radio, download music, share music with friends over...

Mountain View, Calif.-based Dash Navigation is recruiting 2,000 drivers to "road test" the company's Dash Express automotive GPS, a unit that automatically connects to the Internet to provide real-time traffic conditions and other information for motorists Dash just finished a six-month field trial of the devices in the San Francisco Bay Area and n...

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) will reduce hiring and cut other expenses in response to a first-quarter revenue miss, a likely sign that larger rival Intel has regained the upper hand in recent months AMD expects to report first quarter revenue of US$1.225 billion, significantly below the $1.5 billion being called for by Wall Street analysts who foll...

Welcome to the new frontier of Web 2.0 Imagine sitting in your living room and pulling up a favorite TV show to watch online. Easily distracted -- who isn't these days -- you simultaneously begin a chat with dear friends you've never met in person who live across the country. One tells you about a new gadget you decide you must have, and with a few...

Sometimes it really is about competition and changing the game. In the business space, victory in the race to be the most green has been awarded to one company, while another -- with Al Gore on the board -- continues to come in last Ever since Apple launched the iPod, companies have been trying to duplicate its success. Unfortunately, most tried to...

Right now, music fans around the world can choose from some 10,000 Internet radio stations, each one streaming a unique mix of music to Web-based listeners. Some of those stations are operated by industry titans such as AOL Radio and RealNetworks; others are the Internet arms of traditional terrestrial radio; and many more are tiny operations feeding their often small audiences a steady stream of hand-picked music...

The nation's largest cable TV trade group is dropping eBay from its prime-time lineup, saying it would withdraw from an online advertising exchange program proposed by the auction giant The Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau (CAB), which represents big-named networks such as ESPN, Discovery and A&E, said, "it is the best decision for the industry a...

The battle between Nokia and Qualcomm hit a high note Thursday, just days before the licensing agreement between the two combatants is set to expire on Monday Nokia, the No. 1 maker of mobile phone handsets, announced that it had made a US$20 million payment to Qualcomm to cover second quarter 2007 licensing fees. Qualcomm, however, called the amou...

Drought trends that have affected the American Southwest in recent years are likely to get worse in upcoming decades, according to a new study from Columbia University Using projections from 19 different climate models, the study's authors found that there is widespread agreement that southwestern North America and the subtropics in general will ge...

Leading IT vendors have proposed a new Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) standard to the T11 Committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The new FCoE specification is designed to let organizations transmit Storage Area Network (SAN) traffic over Ethernet networks, which would give organizations more flexible options for deploying and managing existing SANs...

VeriSign announced Thursday it will raise the fees it charges individuals and organizations to register Internet domain names ending in ".com" and ".net." The firm, which controls the two most popular domain name suffixes on the net, said the annual ante for .com will increase by 7 percent to US$6.42, and the .net fee will go up 10 percent to $3.85...

Hewlett-Packard's purchase last year of high-end gaming PC maker VoodooPC is beginning to bear fruit as the computing and printing giant is now offering previews of advanced game technologies it might soon bring to market These are likely to include groundbreaking devices and applications such as a handheld, tablet PC-type game unit that will use G...

Vonage can continue to provide its VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service to current customers, but cannot sign up any new subscribers under an injunction issued Friday on behalf of patent plaintiff Verizon Communications The partial injunction bars Vonage from registering new customers but stops short of forcing the Web-calling service to shu...

Aiming squarely at the SOA/BPM (service-oriented architecture/business process management) market niche, Germany'sSoftware AG has announced it is buyingWebMethods for approximately US$546 million, or $9.15 per share The announcement was hardly unexpected, as it was clear that WebMethods needed to do something to address its scale issue, as well as ...