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By now the shock is wearing off and the steely-eyed calculations have begun following Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's announcement on Friday that he will step down from his post some time within the next 12 months "This is a time of important transformation for Microsoft," Ballmer said in an internal email....

Amazon Web Services were impacted in some areas on Sunday, six days after Web stores on the service in the United States and Canada went down for about 30 minutes, causing losses estimated at up to US$45 million The outage lasted about an hour and impacted Facebook's Instagram app, Twitter's Vine app and Airbnb, among others....

Google's Chromecast dongle may be built primarily to stream content from the likes of Netflix and YouTube, but that hasn't stopped app developers from expanding its reach. On Sunday, however, one such developer said that a recent Chromecast update had blocked his Android application "Google's latest Chromecast update intentionally breaks AllCast," ...

Delta Air Lines has outfitted its more than 19,000 flight attendants with Windows Phone 8 mobile devices that it expects will further customer service and facilitate on-board transactions Specifically, the flight attendants are now using Nokia Lumia 820 devices equipped with a Delta-specific application developed by Avanade on the Microsoft Dynamic...

MakerBot last week unveiled its Digitizer desktop 3D scanner, a US$1,400 device that promises to accelerate the growth of 3D printing. ...

Amazon has run tests on WiFi technology that could give Kindle users direct Internet connectivity, according to a recent Bloomberg report The technology uses spectrum controlled by satellite communications company Globalstar, which is perhaps best known as a global satellite phone service provider....

Echopass recently unveiled a new enterprise edition of its software for corporations that use the cloud to manage their contact center operations. The offering consists of more than 40 applications and services aimed at centers that support between 500 to 20,000 agents One early adopter typifies the type of company for which this application was de...

At some point, as an analyst, you have to look for what ails an industry, and right now, it isn't the economy or even a lack of innovation behind the tech industry's woes. Instead, it is what appears to be a massive attempt by the U.S. government to destroy it While I call out the administration in the title, Congress is clearly equally to blame --...

Standards can be a way to get organizations to do things you want them to do, but oftentimes they don't get them to do much more The writers of payment-card standards appear to have been acutely aware of that phenomenon when the PCI Security Standards Council previewed their new PCI DSS 3.0 standard earlier this month....

Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, who shocked the high-tech industry when he abruptly parted ways with the company shortly after Windows 8 was launched, has joined venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as a board partner Sinofsky, a 23-year veteran at Redmond, led the creation of Windows 7 and 8 and six versions of Microsoft Office. He...

You likely already know the things you like to do, like watching a sporting event, as well as the things that you don't like to do, such as sitting in traffic We all experience feelings when participating in such activities, and those feelings form the basis of a personal body of knowledge that we draw on to know whether we like doing a thing or no...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced on Friday that he will step down from his post some time within the next 12 months, depending on when a successor is chosen. Stocks in the company surged 7 percent in early trading following the news "This is a time of important transformation for Microsoft," Ballmer said in an internal email that was posted on...

China's Communist Party used Twitter-like social media platform Sina Weibo to report the details of the trial of Bo Xilai, a former Party star who is in the process of being taken down on corruption charges The court overseeing the case, located in the eastern city of Jinan, set up a Weibo account to peddle information about the proceedings. Such t...

With nearly a month to spare, startup Omate burst through its Kickstarter goal of US$100,000 this week and is on its way to shipping its TruSmart smartwatch in time for the holiday season More than $250,000 have been pledged so far toward the device, which is perhaps the closest thing yet to an Android smartphone that can be worn on a wrist....

Hewlett-Packard announced some changes to its executive lineup on Wednesday -- the same day it posted a quarterly earnings report that fell short of analyst expectations. Revenue for HP's third fiscal quarter was US$27.2 billion, the company reported, down 8 percent from the $29.7 billion it posted a year earlier. HP earned about 86 cents per shar...

Canonical raised more than US$12 million over 30 frantic days of crowdfunding its ambitious Ubuntu Edge superphone project, but it was still short some $20 million by the time the effort closed on Wednesday The company's target was $32 million....

What are the three objects that you're most likely to grab as you leave the house today? They are likely to be your keys, your smartphone and your wallet, complete with cash and plastic bank cards. Well, if some forward-thinkers have their way, within a short time you'll just be grabbing the keys and phone only -- the plastic stays at home....

Top brands continue to push the envelope in customer service generally, but that's particularly true in the online sphere So reports StellaService, which just this week published new data that ranks the top retailers in terms of customer service performance over the last month....

Listening to radio on a smartphone or tablet via headset is one of the killer features of the mobile platform In this week's All Things Appy, we take a look at the must-have, free radio apps for Android, including ones for terrestrial and Internet-based radio aggregation, music, news and talk and public safety....

The hacker who uncovered a bug on Facebook earlier this week may indeed get a reward for his efforts, but not from the social network itself After it became clear that Facebook would not pay Khalil Shreateh a bug bounty for his discovery, arguing that he had violated the site's Terms of Service, a crowdfunding effort launched on GoFundMe to raise f...