Articles by

Yahoo has purchased SkyPhrase with the intention of enabling computers to deeply understand natural language and intentions. SkyPhrase will be joining Yahoo Labs "Yahoo uses Bing for their search engine, so it's unclear why they would buy a natural language technology for search because they can use Microsoft's technology," Rob Enderle, principal a...

Alan Rusbridger, the top editor for The Guardian, told British parliament that government agencies in Britain and the U.S. have tried to "intimidate" the newspaper since it obtained and leaked loads of secret documents from Edward Snowden Over the course of 100-plus meetings, American and British government made it clear to The Guardian that the ou...

Virtually all IT companies favor measures to curb patent abuses, especially those generated by so-called patent trolls. However, the IT community is split on the best way to approach the abuse problem. Patent trolls, otherwise known as "patent assertion entities," or PAEs, generally obtain patents from parties that do not intend to commercialize an innovation.

The new customer era that we're all a part of accepts that the direct contact between a vendor and customer or potential customer is being augmented by non-human intermediaries like websites, software robots that triage customer issues, e-commerce systems, social media, and who knows what else. The good news in all of this indirectness is that cu...

Despite the ever-increasing sizes of mobile-device screens -- many smartphones are now close to or even more than 5 inches -- it's still a pokey and fiddly affair to configure them -- or even look at them, for that matter. Stabbing around those minuscule on-screen keyboards can be a tedious affair However, there are PC-based solutions out there tha...

Digital Santa, Part 1: It's a Mall World Steady mall work might be the bread and sugar-plum butter for many working Santas, but there are good fees and tips to be earned at Santa gigs -- photo studios that invite Santa in for special portraits, kids' preschool events, private parties and more. ...

Salesforce.com has taken an interesting step in stemming the fallout from its recent hackathon by deciding to award a second prize of US$1 million to another team of developers At the Dreamforce software conference last month, Salesforce.com held a Salesforce1 Hackathon, in which more than 4,500 developers were encouraged to build apps using the co...

The Google Compute Engine became generally available on Tuesday, almost 18 months after its introduction at last year's Google I/O "We have been taking time and doing careful work to ensure that as we open Compute Engine to developers, they have a great experience with things like billing and support, tools, and our operating system support -- and ...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it would not hear an appeal by Amazon and Overstock.com challenging a New York law that requires e-commerce companies to collect taxes from shoppers in the state even if the retailers don't have facilities there The decision is the latest twist in an increasingly complicated issue focused on whether states...

Nearly 700 websites pushing counterfeit products were seized by American and European authorities, according to Europol U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement teamed with European law enforcement agencies to execute the holiday cybersting....

Microsoft's wave of operating systems updates planned for 2015 has been code-named "Threshold," ZDNet reported. They involve the addition of a set of common elements -- high-value activities such as Microsoft Office, possibly the coming "Remix" digital storytelling app, Bing, Intune and Workplace -- to Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone....

My regular job involves writing and talking almost exclusively about business IT, but every once in a while I like to consider how personal technology impacts my day-to-day life. Three acquisitions have come my way in the past couple of months: the Nexus 5; the Mohu Curve 30; and a 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV....

Email marketing will be a key strategy in retailers' advertising playbooks this holiday season, but not just any email. Increasingly, it is becoming clear that more consumers are reading emails via their mobile devices -- in many cases, only that way. They are also using their mobile devices in stores for last-minute product research, and that includes the emailed offers from local merchants.

The Linux OS lacks an effective yet simple checking and banking tool There are money-management tools for Linux users, of course, but most full-fledged offerings are overkill for monitoring spending patterns and balancing financial accounts. In general, Linux financial applications are either too complex to use without an accounting degree or too s...

If you've ever had the opportunity to sit through a retailer's comparative demonstration of high-end audio equipment, you'll know that the more expensive the living room audio gear gets, the better it sounds. Amazing, but true -- they're not lying The big problem, once you've sat through one of these comparisons, is that you're going to come to the...

Akamai Technologies is buying Prolexic, which offers protection against distributed denial of service attacks. The deal, which is expected to close in the first half of 2014, will cost Akamai about US$370 million in cash plus the assumption of outstanding unvested options to purchase Prolexic stock....

Sony's PlayStation 4 may have had a weeklong head start in building sales momentum, but on Black Friday, Microsoft's competing Xbox One appears to have edged out its rival -- at least in the United States The new Xbox One -- along with the previous-generation Xbox 360 -- together accounted for 61 percent of console sales on Black Friday, InfoScout ...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is looking to the skies for his company's latest splashy venture, with a plan to start making deliveries by drones within the next five years The initiative, Amazon Prime Air, will allow the company to make deliveries via the unmanned devices within a half-hour of ordering in some cases. Bezos revealed the plan during a 60 Min...

China has launched a rover that is en route to the surface of the moon, marking the first time the Middle Kingdom has embarked on a moon-bound rover mission The rover, called "Jade Rabbit," is affixed to a rocket that launched at 1:30 a.m. Monday morning local time. If all goes to plan, it is expected to land on the moon in mid-December....

More than 131 million shoppers -- or 54.8 percent of the shopping population -- are planning to hit the online deals this Cyber Monday That is one finding of a National Retail Federation survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics over the weekend. For comparison, the corresponding figure from last year's survey was 129 million....