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In AMC's Breaking Bad, high school chemistry teacher Walter White, although starting out as a protagonist, descends into depravity and ruin. Clearly, not all high school chemistry teachers are Walter Whites. Similarly, not all scientists, innovators and patent owners are evil. Yet Congress, at the urging of lobbyists, is ready to label many innovators and patentees as "patent trolls," categorically unworthy of participating in the patent process and subject to stiff penalties...

As the prolific trend of adoption would suggest, the case for cloud is compelling from both a business and technology perspective. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the more compelling reasons from a technologist's point of view has to do with the ability to abstract lower levels of the application stack. Specifically, depending...

There are many reasons marketers today are gearing up their mobile strategies for the holiday season, and not all of them are as obvious as one might think. Yes, revenue and competition are of course key factors, but in this Internet era, so is a third: Namely, a proactive, aggressive mobile CRM and marketing campaign is the only way to play offense in a season and industry now characterized by showrooming...

Software quality is a topic close to most developers' hearts, whether they work with open-source or proprietary code Assessing quality, however, isn't a simple matter. As a result, several efforts have sprung up to tackle the challenge, including the Coverity Scan project....

A teacher standing at the front of the room at a chalkboard is one of the iconic images of education. Smartboards and other digital technologies, however, are changing how classrooms are structured, how teachers teach, and how students learn "We're all about increasing student engagement and achievement," Neil Currie, director of education marketi...

Valve Software on Friday announced the Steam Controller, the third part of its trio of initiatives designed to bring Linux-based gaming to the living room. Valve dubbed the controller "a different kind of gamepad." ...

In France, data protection officials announced that they will impose sanctions against Google for the company's failure to stick to a three-month deadline to tweak its privacy policies The fine stems from Google's melding of different privacy policies in Europe into a single policy that applies to all its platforms -- Gmail, YouTube, Google+ and s...

Apple has displaced Coca-Cola as the leading global brand in Interbrand's 14th annual Best Global Brands report, ending the soda maker's 13-year rule Google took second place, pushing Coke into third....

Almost all cyberattacks these days require an element of social engineering. Spammers are always looking for that hot button to induce a click on a link or an attachment. Drive-by artists continually experiment with poisoned banner ads designed to steer the curious into an online dark alley. Spearphishers put together persuasive pitches pretending to be friends or a trusted institution...

Scientists from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have demonstrated that light can behave in a way previously observed only in works of science fiction -- that is, photons can bond and create a molecule ...

Silicon Valley loves an underdog. That's partly because such tales feed the industry's self-mythologizing and the IPO culture that attracts fresh money and new investors. To be honest, IT can boast more than its fair share of such successes: Hewlett and Packard, Jobs and Wozniak, and Page and Brin all helped make the industry what it is today and, in turn, inspired a Gold Rush mentality of remarkable durability...

Both BlackBerry and Microsoft have been in far stronger positions with regard to personal technology. At one time, Microsoft was contending for leadership in smartphones against Palm and BlackBerry, and BlackBerry took leadership only to lose it to Apple and then Samsung. Microsoft put tablets on the map in the early part of last decade, but it missed a memo and Apple refined them to success -- pointing out that beauty, price and battery life rule in something you hold. ...

Ford on Thursday announced the acquisition of Livio Connect, a 5-year-old Michigan company that wields influence in the car connectivity field out of proportion to its size That's partly because Livio's technology is used by some major players, including General Motors, and partly because Livio's Keys marketplace is a B2B exchange where automakers...

Imagine you're walking down a city street heading for a vegan restaurant that you've heard good things about. You get to the address only to discover it has gone out of business. Hungry and disappointed, you pull out your smartphone and wail to the Twitterverse, "Veggie Delight is closed! I'm starving and there is nowhere to get a vegan meal!" ...

Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws by machine-scanning Gmail messages in order to deliver targeted advertising, U.S. District Judge Lucy H. Koh ruled on Thursday. As a result of the ruling, a class-action suit against Google over the issue can now proceed. The suit, which is being heard in the U.S. District Court for ...

Evernote and 3M on Thursday announced a partnership to digitize the Post-it Note with a new feature on the Evernote app optimized to capture and save messages. ...

Google on Thursday introduced a new search algorithm called "Hummingbird." The company actually started rolling out the algorithm about a month ago, but it formally unveiled it on Thursday, the 15-year anniversary of Google Search's launch....

Members of the European Parliament's internal market and consumer protection committee voted unanimously Thursday in favor of a new law mandating universal chargers for mobile devices In addition to convenience -- German parliamentarian Barbara Weiler called the current situation "cable chaos" -- the measure is motivated by a desire to curb electr...

An ever-increasing proportion of the world's communications and activity occurs online, but that doesn't mean everyone has bought into the concept. In fact, a full 15 percent of American adults remain offline, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project While a small number of the 15 percent of Americans...

If you talk to any sales consultant -- or marketing consultant, for that matter -- you'll probably get an earful of comments laden with the jargon of "sales-marketing misalignment." To the layperson -- or business person who refrains from paying for expensive consultants -- all this means is the ongoing conflict between sales and marketing, the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle...