Articles by

Analysts say they expect the Federal Communications Commission will require all VoIP providers doing business in the U.S. to offer basic e911 service to their customers. They also say they expect the FCC to force major telcos to make their e911 infrastructure access networks available to VoIP providers The rulings are anticipated at the FCC's Open ...

Do you have a startup that never made it off the ground? What happened? Did you not have all the technical components that you needed? Was your scope too broad? Were your sales and marketing strategies too weak?...

Nadeem Malik, the CTO of Pakistan's oldest software company, tells an interesting story about his company, Systems Pvt. Ltd, a software development and system integration company formed in 1976 The tale has it that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's current president and CEO, was once visiting Lahore, Pakistan, in the late 1970s to attend a wedding of one ...

Vonage, one of the early leaders among independent providers of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, is reportedly working out the final bugs in a WiFi-compatible service that could launch at any time A Vonage spokesman did not return calls seeking comment, but several published reports say Vonage has begun asking customers to test-drive bo...

Microsoft's new desktop toolbar, released today in its final version, adds several new features, but is missing the tabbed browsing function for Internet Explorer that had been previewed in beta versions MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search indexes all files on a hard drive so that users can later search through them. Searches can be done...

In what could be a huge boost for some e-commerce players, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down state laws barring consumers from buying wine and having the seller ship it across state borders The 5-4 decision, handed down early today, dealt directly with state laws in Michigan and New York but it also clears the way for direct-to-consumer, cro...

On the heels of last week's announced intellectual property (IP), cross-licensing deal with Japanese PC and electronics giant Toshiba, Microsoft is reportedly seeking a similar sharing agreement with Hitachi The software giant's effort to cross-license patented technologies from the Japanese companies this month follow in a long line of similar dea...

In a landmark move to address customer interoperability needs, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems on Friday unveiled jointly developed specifications to enable Web single sign-on between the company's competing operating systems The new specs, which are the first fruits of a 10-year technical collaboration agreement announced last year, support single ...

A new variant of the Sober virus reared its ugly head over the weekend and continued to propagate right-wing messages in German and English this morning Sober is a mass mailing worm spread through a .zip file attached to the e-mail. Once the attachment is opened, the worm uses its own e-mail engine to send itself to addresses harvested from the inf...

Marketers have always wanted to track their customers' every move. Now, new scanning technologies linked to the Internet, may enable them to do so. Earlier this month ratings service Arbitron, Inc. and advertising specialty producer VNU disclosed that they have agreed to deploy during the next nine months a pilot project to collect multi-media purchase data from consumers...

A number of companies -- start-ups and established firms alike -- are eying the organic RFID tags market. Venture capital firms, like ITU Ventures, are placing seed investment bets on developers with patented prototypes. But despite the hype, the goal of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag that costs a penny or less is as elusive as ever, experts said...

The very first thought that crossed my mind when I saw the new Xbox was that this is probably what would have resulted if the rumored merger between Sony and Apple had been successful. It borrows heavily from design elements common in the most aggressive products from both companies and seems to miss many of disadvantages both firms have historically suffered...

The adolescent crowd is especially enamored with two items: music and cell phones. Naturally, therefore, handset manufacturers and carriers have begun to find ways to integrate the two. A few devices that integrate static music selections or FM radio signals into cell phones have already started to make their way from research and development laboratories to store shelves, and a slew of others are expected to follow...

Mike Klein, CEO of network security firm Interlink Networks, knows a good marketing tactic when he sees one. When Zone Labs started giving away no-nonsense firewall protection as a free download, he was paying attention "They did it well!" Klein told TechNewsWorld. "We based our free WiFi protection on that same model."

The Firefox juggernaut, which had been slowed recently by a spate of security concerns, has picked up steam again on the strength of a decision by IBM to endorse the alternative to Internet Explorer for its massive employee base Firefox, now the second most popular browser and by far the biggest threat to Microsoft's IE to materialize since the dem...

Microsoft pulled back the curtain on its next generation console, Xbox 360, and announced some impressive features, but that and the fact that it beat its rivals to the public's eye, may not give it an edge in the market, one analyst said "The market is going to be more evenly split this round -- regardless of when the players launch," Jay Horwitz,...

PC giant Dell signaled this week it will stretch the reach of wireless connectivity for its computers by using cellular phone networks and reportedly offering mobile phone subscriptions Although a spokesman for the U.S. PC maker dismissed reports that the company would offer mobile phone service, there was confirmation that Dell is looking to brid...

Google has purchased upstart social networking site Dodgeball.com, a move that could bring together its own social networking efforts, its bid to gain more control over communications tools -- including in the mobile world -- and its ambitions to be more of a Web portal than a search firm, all at once Google did not disclose what it paid for Dodgeb...

Yahoo has licensed CD/DVD burning technology from Sonic Solutions for its recently launched online music subscription service and its media player. The multi-year licensing agreement was announced earlier this week "Because Yahoo Music services are so widely used, Yahoo required a burning engine that was fully featured, easy to integrate, and that ...

Microsoft today announced plans to deliver a consumer subscription service to provide automated protection, maintenance and performance tuning as an all-in-one package for Windows-based PCs. Windows OneCare is being designed to address core safety concerns such as worms, viruses and spyware According to IDC, the need to identify and eradicate spywa...