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Buoyed by a significant increase in the number of RIM Blackberry's, the PDA market is showing surprising growth, according to sales figures from research firm Gartner. Gartner, which breaks the market into data-centric or voice-centric devices, said that worldwide data-centric PDA shipments increased 25 percent to 3.4 million in the first quarter of 2005...

Google has released a beta version what is believed to be the first Web accelerator designed specifically for broadband users, a move that quickly met with criticism over privacy and security concerns Other firms have developed similar technology, but it is designed mainly to streamline page downloads and related activities for users of dial-up con...

The bottom line is that today the analytics used in many small manufacturing companies starts and ends with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are entire manufacturing operations run off Excel, fulfilling the roles of demand planner, manufacturing scheduling, and the continual maintenance of bills of materials, in addition to many other tasks Iro...

Late last month, the British House of Lords approved a so-called "designer baby," escalating the debate over genetic engineering and other body enhancements. Fortunately, the new book More Than Human helps to calm hysterics and explain the issues Zain Hashmi is a six-year-old boy born with beta thalassaemia major, a potentially fatal genetic disor...

IBM wasted no time announcing the first product suite to come out of its US$1.1 billion acquisition of Ascential Software, which closed Monday. Big Blue also released today technology that enables companies to manage all their electronic records even if they are housed within different document-management systems The company announced that it woul...

Continuing its efforts to head off a heavier regulatory hand and increasing litigation, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) player Vonage announced it would offer emergency 911 calling services with its VoIP products and services in some states with help from local phone giant Verizon The new and old phone companies announced this week their collab...

Spending on Internet advertising in 2005 will grow even faster than previously believed, a market research firm said, although it also predicted a slowdown in growth rates starting next year EMarketer cited the booming first-quarter earnings results for the likes of Google and Yahoo as reason to revise its already robust forecast even higher....

Phishers are using a new bait to steal sensitive information from Internet users -- keyloggers. A new phishing trends report from Websense Security Labs and the Anti-Phishing Working Group reveals a sharp rise in schemes involving this type of malicious program Keystroke logging, or keyloggers, are diagnostics used in software development that capt...

Yahoo, racing to stay ahead of its competitors who are eying the same technological niche and its potentially deep well of advertising dollars, has launched a public version of its video search tool Yahoo Video Search, which had been in beta form since December, was formally launched by the portal yesterday along with a slew of new partnerships tha...

Microsoft is on the hunt for 20 volunteer bloggers to help it hype Longhorn, the upcoming version of its Windows operating system. "Team 99" will be made up of Longhorn enthusiasts nominated by Microsoft community members, according to a company employee "Microsoft can't deal with millions of people all at once," Microsoft employee Robert Scoble wr...

Anyone who has ever bought a car knows that one of first hard choices they must make is how to service it. Do you stick with the dealer who sold it to you, or do you take it to one of the 495,000 businesses providing after-market service to auto owners? However, as vehicles become more and more dependent on computer systems, consumers have found fe...

Enterprise is far from the days when it was enough simply to have a Web presence. More and more sophisticated consumers are shopping for services based not only on what a company offers, but what it offers online and how easy it is to negotiate A recent study by Keynote Systems, which offers e-business performance management services, focused on ba...

Former California governor Jerry Brown -- once a darling of the mainstream media, or "MSM," -- now has his own blog, where he can get his message directly to voters, without any interpretation by print or electronic journalists. Politicians in North Dakota, similarly, have taken to blogging to market their message Is this a good thing? Should the p...

Broadband access equipment provider Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe has signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a reseller agreement with Airspan Networks The agreement with Airspan, a broadband access wireless communications company, would allow Fujitsu to resell its AS.MAX family of WiMax broadband wireless access products....

IBM is adding a host of new XML developers' tools to its Emerging Technologies Toolkit in what analysts are calling a nod of acceptance forthe popular programming language Developers can download the toolkit for free at Alphaworks.IBM.com to access new tools and technologies that could wind up in future IBM products. Theseare untested versions of t...

Linking a wireless technology of today with the higher data rates and reach of tomorrow's wireless, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) group announced plans to collaborate and combine their technologies for the betterment of both The wireless groups said details have yet to be worked out and issues loom including in...

Google has filed a patent application for improvements to its widely used news search and aggregation feature, one that some say will result in a future version of the still-beta product favoring corporate-backed news sites Currently, Google's news search returns results based on how recently a story was posted online and how closely the story appe...

Sony's latest DVD burners, announced today, add compatibility for the DVD-R DL format to its 800 line of dual-layer drives. Its earlier versions supported only DVD+R DL The ability to create drives that support both DVD recording formats has been "one of the things that's been cool about the current vendors," according to Michael Gartenberg, vice p...

In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little situation, but instead of crying "the sky is falling" they were crying "the code is infringing." Nearly ten years later, very few intellectual property lawsuits...

Underneath their dueling dual-core processor announcements, demonstrations, and, most recently, actual releases to the market, Intel, which unveiled its Pentium Extreme Edition chips last month, and Advanced Micro Devices, which unleashed its Opteron chips, represent very different approaches to dual-core. Both, however, achieve a significant increase in computing power for their customers, who are getting what is generally described by industry analysts as the biggest computing boost in more than two decades...