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After a year of testing and much feedback, Twitter on Monday released a set of tools for small businesses and self-service advertisers -- tools that will give businesses more of an opportunity to speak directly to consumer interests Targeting was the most requested feature in the feedback that the social network gathered from select advertisers, ac...

Florida has again made election-related headlines -- this time for an attempted hacking of online election systems during voting last August in Miami-Dade County. It is the first certified case of an online election attack in the U.S., according to NBC News Fraudulent requests for about 2,500 absentee ballots were sent to the election system from v...

The Federal Communications Commission last week issued citations to two service providers for delivering unauthorized robocalls -- that is, automatically dialed calls with prerecorded voice messages -- to millions of wireless phones. The companies that received the citations are the Dialing Services and Richard Gilmore's Democratic Dialing. The ca...

John Riccitiello, who was at the helm of video game publisher Electronic Arts as it tried to navigate major shifts in the industry, will step down as CEO on March 30 Chairman Larry Probst, EA's CEO when Riccitiello took over in 2007, will serve as the company's executive chairman and temporary leader while it searches for a new chief executive.

Verizon Communications is proposing a novel and potentially disruptive fee structure for its FiOS pay TV service: It wants to link the fees it pays to television channels to how much traffic they get, according to a Wall Street Journal report Verizon is in negotiations with several mid-tier and smaller media companies over a fee structure based on...

Chinese telecom ZTE may have ended 2012 in the red, but a new report alleges there was enough in the coffers for bribes ZTE's Mongolia office is being investigated for bribery, according to China's IT Business News. The outlet is also reporting that Mongolian anti-corruption officials have already unearthed proof of bribes doled out for that countr...

Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application. With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior director of marketing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

From the first day of the tablet computing revolution -- April 3, 2010, when Apple's iPad became publicly available -- users have willingly traded limitations in computing form/function for innovations in access/interface. In part, that was because Apple maintained a careful line between the iPad and its traditional Macbook and iMac products to av...

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known f...

Looking for an Internet connection when out and about may soon become a lot easier.There's been an uptick in public WiFi availability Recent public WiFi launches include Google's free WiFi project in New York City,starting with parts of Chelsea. London's tube network went hot in 2012 with 92 underground stations WiFi-enabled; Virgin Media is connec...

Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker known as "Weev," was sentenced Monday to 41 months in prison for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T's publicly accessible website and sending the information to the media. The ruling immediately sparked an outcry from a digital rights group that claims the punishment does not fit the crime...

A U.S. District Court judge from the Ninth Circuit found that the government's controversial use of so-called National Security Letters violates the First Amendment and the concept of separation of powers. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ordered the government to stop issuing the national security letters and to stop enforcing the gag order. Ill...

BlackBerry's new Z10 handset will be available in the United States later this week, and CEO Thorstein Heins believes it to be a quite the game changer. BlackBerry has seen its share of the smartphone market plummet in recent years as Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems have taken the top two spots with touchscreen devices.

Lenovo on Monday announced a new $950 business ThinkPad, the T431. The company launched the Ultrabook into a market that had a dismal showing in 2012; IHS iSuppli had to slash its Ultrabook estimates for 2013 from 61 million units to 44 million The device was designed after research conducted over nine months worldwide of the user habits of both pe...

Dropbox announced Friday it has inked a deal to acquire Orchestra, owner of the popular Mailbox iOS email app that aims to help users with crowded in-boxes simplify their lives. The Mailbox app's 14-person team will join Dropbox, but will continue to develop separately as its own app....

March 15 marks Consumer Rights Day in China. To honor the day, state-run CCTV runs a special program to out scams, malpractice and defective products This year, CCTV set its crosshairs on Apple, declaring that the company downgraded post-sale customer service to Chinese consumers. The network claimed when Chinese customers return iPhones for repair...

Just when we thought the spam scourge was over, it appears it's making a comeback After four straight quarters of decline, spam volumes on the Internet rose 92 percent in February, according to security firm Eleven Research Team....

KXEN has launched Predictive Offers, a real-time next best action tool for customer service and call center agents, on Salesforce.com's AppExchange. The product's goal is to improve customer retention, boost upsell and cross-sell, and improve the overall customer experience by providing agents with the best recommendations for the customers they...

Andy Rubin was Google's Steve Jobs, and with him now booted off the Android product, that platform in its current form will pass. It is kind of funny to see the spin on this, which suggests this was Andy's decision. Yeah right, and I'll be buying that bridge in Brooklyn shortly. While there likely were a number of reasons for this decision -- from...

Samsung Electronics has named two new chief executive officers, bringing the number of company heads to three: Joining the current CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon as coCEOs will be Boo-keun Yoon and J.K. Shin. They are the head of Samsung's consumer electronics and mobile divisions, respectively. Both men have scored notable achievements in their roles. Under Y...