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Internet of Things, Part 1: God's Gift to the NSA So there I was, grinding my coffee beans when the grinder's AMOLED screen lit up with a message....

John Chen, BlackBerry's new chief executive, lashed out at T-Mobile after it sent an email to BlackBerry users imploring them to ditch their current devices and switch to an iPhone BlackBerry was not notified about T-Mobile's email blast beforehand, causing Chen to become "outraged" over what he dubbed a "clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived mar...

Technologist and serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman on Wednesday announced his new company, Artemis, and demoed its pCell technology ...

LinkedIn is making a fresh push into the original content market by opening up its publishing platform The company until now allowed only selected "influencers" to use the service's long-form publishing tools to craft posts offering professional advice, insights and inspiration to other users. Such influencers have tended to be well-known figures, ...

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

IBM and AT&T on Tuesday announced they were forming a global alliance to develop solutions for the Internet of Things. They will be combining their analytic platforms, cloud and security technologies -- all with privacy in mind -- to gain insights from machine-to-machine data collected by a variety of industries Initially, they will focus on soluti...

U.S. government agencies have faced significant obstacles in meeting a federal mandate designed to foster the use of cloud technologies, but those challenges are unlikely to derail federal adoption of the technology, and there are indications that cloud deployments will accelerate at a much faster rate over the next few years Through the Office of ...

The nascent wearable devices market so far has focused more on function than on form, but Tuesday brought word of a company that aims to change all that. Specifically, Cuff unveiled a new assortment of safety-focused fashion wearables its founders call technology "you'd actually want to wear." ...

What if commercial software developers for popular Windows products sold Linux versions to a waiting market of open source users? Think in terms of paying a subscription fee to use a Linux version of Adobe's Photoshop image manipulation software, for starters Is porting commercial products like Photoshop as a licensed -- that is, paid -- product fo...

Smartphone sales have been rising.The 968 million smartphones sold surpassed the sales offeature phones for the first time, Gartner noted earlier this month. However, sales actually topped 1 billion, according to IDC. What's the difference of 32 million betweenfriends? Not much. Here's a more important point: High-end smartphone sales have been sl...

HP's problems following its 2011 purchase of Autonomy for US$11.1 billion are getting worse Various documents and internal emails indicate HP knew about the existence of loss-making hardware sales Autonomy allegedly used to bolster its revenue figures well before May 2012, when HP claimed to learn about them from a whistleblower, the Financial Time...

King Digital Entertainment, creator of the blockbuster social game Candy Crush Saga, is planning to go public The company filed its initial public offering paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week.

Aimed at improving the security of payment card data and reducing fraud, PCI DSS 3.0 standard, which took effect on Jan. 1, introduces changes that extend across all 12 requirements. It no doubt will mean some shakeups for many organizations when it comes to their day-to-day culture and operations. That's not a bad thing, because transitioning to meet the new requirements will help e-businesses build a stronger, safer, lower-risk environment for their customers.

This story was originally published on Nov. 15, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The Internet of Things has been receiving quite a bit of attention. Definitions vary, but at its core the concept is a simple one: Extend computing and data-processing capability to the physical world around us. The earliest m...

This story was originally published on Oct. 30, 2013, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. I go to a lot of conferences. Usually they're a combination of customer user group meetings and analyst days, and we all hear more or less detail about product futures, new functions and features, and policy rollouts....

I spoke last week with a woman who built a house in Belize. Apparently it was burglarized several times. After she moved away, her husband mysteriously died there -- he had stayed to protect the house before they sold it. Then I got a visit from a friend who'd retired to Brazil but badly wants to come home. He has seen a massive increase in crime...

Facebook on Thursday added custom gender options for users to identify themselves other than "male" and "female." Users now can identify themselves as bigender, androgynous, cisgender, or in one of more than 50 ways. The move initially applies only to the company's 159 million monthly users in the U.S....

The U.S. speedskating team's high-tech suits -- which theoretically are supposed to help shave seconds and accrue medals -- have been identified as a suspect in the team's stunning faceplant at the Sochi Games Before the Games, the suits, designed by U.S.-based sportswear giant Under Armour, were deemed to be on the cutting edge of racing technolog...

A group of 18 organizations on Thursday announced the formation of WifiForward, a coalition that aims to persuade policymakers to open more unlicensed wireless spectrum for use by WiFi-enabled devices. Members include the American Library Association, the ARRIS Group, Best Buy, Comcast, the Consumer Electronics Association, Google, the International Association of Venue Managers, Microsoft and Time Warner Cable...

Computer and software companies have been battling for the hearts and minds of students for decades, and now school administrators are becoming the target of smart Software as a Service and cloud computing service providers. The most notorious examples of using classroom marketing tactics to gain a long-term strategic advantage are Apple and Googl...