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The movie and music industries over the past three decades have reaped profits from their vaults. Old music recordings have been rereleased on new formats ranging from CDs to digital downloads to streaming services. Hollywood has experienced its own cash cow from the introduction of DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming movie services. Technological advances in hardware provided new revenue streams for old media...

Despite all the talk about the customer journey, the increasing use of CRM, the omnichannel approach, and the seamless customer experience, stores still don't have the technology down pat for the holiday rush, according to Salesforce's "2015 Connected Shoppers Report," released last month In-store shoppers want associates to know their purchase his...

A District Court in Stockholm, Sweden, last week ruled against an international group of content providers who sought to force a local Internet service provider to block The Pirate Bay, a file-sharing site, said lawyers for the plaintiffs. The content providers -- including Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Nordisc Film and the Swedish Fi...

President Obama last week signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which governs ownership of asteroid resources, possibly triggering a new battle in the commercial space race Section 5103 of the Act gives U.S. companies the right to resources mined from asteroids, although it does not give them rights to the asteroids themselve...

Officials of several U.S. states on Monday opened investigations into a massive data breach that occurred last month at VTech, according to press reports The award-winning Hong Kong-based maker of electronic learning toys for kids on Friday announced that its Learning Lodge database was breached in a hack attack on Nov. 14.

BlackBerry on Monday announced that it will cease operations in Pakistan at the end of the year. The move is the result of a shutdown order from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, which in July notified the company that its BlackBerry Enterprise Service servers would no longer be allowed to operate in the country beginning in December for w...

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that mines the week's gadget announcements for the more intriguing nuggets while wondering just how to survive the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping orgy with financial solvency ...

What I find fascinating is that with all of the focus members of the intelligence community place on violating our privacy, they still aren't able to stop attacks like the one in Paris. Currently they are complaining that it is our fault for implementing encryption that blocks their often-illegal views into citizens' personal lives. I think that...

Dell earlier this week announced that it was notified of a security flaw linked to a certificate that it installed on computer systems starting on Aug. 18. The eDellroot certificate was installed by Dell Foundation Services application as a means to help users more easily perform maintenance and service tasks on their computers, the company said....

Yahoo earlier this week acknowledged that it has been experimenting with a neutralizing agent that can counteract ad-blocking software tools by closing off email access to browsers that use them "At Yahoo, we are continually developing and testing new product experiences," the company said in a statement spokesperson Anne Yeh provided to the E-Comm...

The Austrian Supreme Court will consider whether a suit against Facebook Ireland can proceed as a class action. Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems brought the suit to challenge the transfer of private data to Facebook's European subsidiary in Ireland. The Vienna Court of Appeals previously had ruled that the suit could be filed locally, as Schr...

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket this week made history when it landed intact in Texas. The unmanned crew capsule returned safely from a test flight that took it 330,000 feet into the air The New Shepard could become the first reusable booster -- it's scheduled to return to space in a few months. It's now tucked into a storage facility at a launch ...

TV manufacturers could have a very good holiday season, and the good times likely will continue through 2019 Sales of 4K or Ultra High Definition TV sets will exceed 330 million units by the end of 2019 -- a sharp increase from the 2 million sold in 2013, according to data released last month byParks Associates....

There's a disconnect between the number of connections a LinkedIn user has and the number of post views attracted, one LinkedIn influencer has noticed There are several possible explanations for cases in which LinkedIn influencers with millions of followers average only thousands of post views -- or less -- but the company hasn't offered any....

Facebook last week announced it was testing tools that will let people manage their post-breakup life on its pages "Today social media means that you are guaranteed to run into your ex, and he or she might very well be wrapped around a new partner," relationship expertWendy Walsh said....

Walmart on Monday announced it will release all 2,000 Cyber Monday deals at 8 p.m. EST Sunday That and other retailer moves are making it look as if Cyber Monday might be a nonevent this holiday season: Amazon is running an eight-day Black Friday sale that will take it through Cyber Monday, leading Walmart to launch a price-matching event to compet...

Bankrate.com on Monday released results of a survey showing that even though consumers may have more mobile payment options this holiday season, more than two-thirds of shoppers won't be using them That's because seven out of 10 Americans surveyed said they'll be using cash (39 percent) or a debit card (31 percent) for most of their holiday buys, a...

Samsung last week began fulfilling orders for its Oculus-power Gear VR headset, giving U.S. consumers their first taste of Oculus VR's brand of virtual reality. International preorders have opened and have been expanding It won't be until early next year that Oculus VR begins shipping its full-featured Oculus Rift headset, but as a Gear VR collabor...

Vinux 5.0 is a striking example of the flexibility and usability of the Linux OS....

The term "customer experience" flows from the lips of business people so smoothly these days. It's very clearly the business jargon du jour; its importance has been trending upward for the last decade, and according to Gartner, by 2018 more than half of all businesses will implement significant business model changes in their efforts to improve customer experience...