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Consumers love their smartphones, but a substantial number of them don't love using them to pay for purchases. With Samsung's introduction of its Galaxy S5 phone last week, the company is betting it can change some of those consumers' minds on that subject Like Apple's iPhone 5s, the S5 has a fingerprint scanner. Unlike the Apple product, though, t...

Pegasystems has rolled out Next-Best-Action Marketing 7.1. Built on Pega 7, it aims to provide marketing executives with the best customer service strategy -- the next best action -- for any given scenario, based on customer data captured by the system, along with rules configured by the user The differentiator between this and other platforms on t...

CEO Satya Nadella has begun his much-anticipated shakeup of Microsoft's leadership ranks, just weeks after taking the helm Tony Bates, executive vice president of business development and evangelism, and Tami Reller, executive vice president of marketing, are on the way out, Re/code reported....

Several members of Hollywood's elite walked out of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles clutching golden statues on Sunday, but it might have been Samsung that landed the largest victory at the event Partway through the show, host Ellen DeGeneres stopped to capture the moment by using a Samsung phone to take a selfie while on stage. She repeated the gi...

Less than two months after publicly announcing that he was pulling out of the RSA Security Conference, which took place last week in San Francisco, because RSA had accepted a US$10 million contract from the United States National Security Agency, F-Secure Chief Researcher Mikko Hypponen appeared to take a somewhat mellower stance He alternated betw...

A student at Boston College may have cost her family US$80,000 -- and cost herself a trip to Europe The student, Dana Snay, posted a Facebook status update boasting of her father's victory in an age discrimination case. The father, 69, was the headmaster of a school for years, but his contract was not renewed in 2010. This prompted an age discrimin...

At nearly 30 hours per week, video consumption in the average U.S. broadband household has increased approximately 29 percent since 2010. Although the TV set remains the most popular platform, its usage rates have remained relatively constant. Eighty-three percent of U.S. broadband households participating in a recent survey reported having watched video on a television in the past 30 days, a figure that hasn't changed significantly since 2010.

At last week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the major players showed up loaded for bear. Wearable computers became more robust, we got another Android fork, phones acquired superpowers, and it became clear that big -- really big -- is going to be all around us. Oh, and if you are into power and performance, this is the beginning of your e...

CRM has always purported to be about relationships, but it's often used primarily for sales. That's kind of a good news, bad news situation. The bad news first: CRM got a bad rap when it didn't become a sales panacea (mostly for adoption issues). The good news: It exposed a void in the mix that marketing automation rushed to fill Marketing automati...

There is a new wearable fitness device on the horizon that may take this emerging technology niche to an entirely new -- possibly mainstream -- level. Moov, developed by former tech specialists from Apple and Microsoft, promises not only to capture data about users' activities, but also to give them performance-improvement tips.

Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in Tokyo, Just days after going offline following the publication on Scribd of an internal memo that alleged hackers had stolen nearly 745,000 Bitcoins from its servers over the years Blaming a weakness in the company's systems, CEO Mark Karpeles apologized publicly ...

Google has added hands-free voice search to the latest beta version of the Chrome Web browser Users need not have to interrupt messy housework and first wash their hands in order to search for a recipe for homemade glass cleaner, for example. All they need to do is open a new tab or go to the Google homepage, say the words "OK Google," and dictate ...

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, reportedly intercepted and collected millions of images of people via Yahoo webcam chats, some of which were sexually explicit As part of the surveillance program, dubbed "Optic Nerve," GCHQ saved images from webcams on agency databases regardless of whether or not the individuals were an i...

A British intelligence agency indiscriminately collected photos from the webcams of Yahoo users and stored them on its servers over a period of several years, The Guardian reported Over one six-month period, 1.8 million Yahoo users were targeted by a surveillance program called "Optic Nerve," run by the UK's NSA counterpart, GCHQ, according to a to...

Chrome apps are the newest form of extension and helper for the Chrome Desktop environment, and as of late last year, any computer, including Macs, could use them. Here are five recently updated free Chrome apps that are worth a look. All of them can be run offline, outside of the browser, on the desktop....

U.S. companies can be forgiven, perhaps, for their near-sighted view of global markets. North America and the more exotic European markets are enough for most companies, short of those with multinational aspirations, seeking foreign-based revenues. For those that do want to access markets in, say, Kenya or India -- that is, the high-growth but hig...

The first Tizen phones may still be on the horizon, but at least one software provider is already planning ahead. This week at Mobile World Congress, Infraware Technology debuted software that can port Android apps to Tizen Both Android and Tizen are based on open source Linux, of course, but that doesn't mean their native apps are compatible. With...

eBay on Wednesday announced it was leading a US$134 million investment in Snapdeal, which claims to be India's largest e-commerce marketplace eBay's first investment in Snapdeal came in mid-2013, when it poured $50 million into the company. Snapdeal merited additional financing because of its complementary business model and strong overall brand, e...

Boeing this week filed an application with the United States Federal Communications Commission for a secure Android smartphone called the "Black" that will self-destruct if anyone tries to physically open the case The company will offer it to the U.S. defense and security communities....

Google is ramping up its plans to bring the Project Ara modular smartphone to market by scheduling the first developer conference for the device The company will hold the conference on April 15-16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. A limited number of developers will be able to attend the conference in person, but anyone can pa...