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Once-prominent social news aggregator Digg has announced its sale to Betaworks, which will fold Digg into its News.me daily briefing service After Digg's startup launch in 2004, it quickly became one of the most popular social sites on the Web by letting users collect their own assortment of digital news and content and vote on their favorites. But...

Not too long ago Amazon had an important card to play as it competed for -- and went on to win -- online customers: "Buy with us," it promised, and "you will not have to pay sales tax." It was a potent argument -- possibly one of the reasons for the etailer's wild success -- and thanks to a murky legal landscape, Amazon was able to sell online with...

The complexities of modern life amuse us, confuse us and confound us. The vast majority of people using computers and smartphones have hardly a clue as to their inner workings. These devices are a mystery. They are magical, and we are much like Alice in this technological wonderland Even more complicated are the patents that cover the many manifes...

Personal computer sales are down across the industry as consumers turn toward newer devices such as smartphones and tablets and await the arrival of system upgrades like Windows 8, according to reports from Gartner and IDC PC sales for the second quarter in the U.S. were down between 6 and 11 percent compared to the same period last year, the firms...

Despite light sales of its Chromebook laptops, Google on Wednesday released version 20 of its Chrome operating system. Chrome 20 contains various new features and tweaks, as well as improvements to security and stability features. It also now supports Google Drive and lets users edit Google Docs offline....

Hotels.com, an app from Hotels.com, is available for free at Google Play.Here's a likely familiar summer scenario for many Americans: You've been drivingall day, and it's getting late. You're tired. You're ready for a hotel bed in an unknown towncoming up ahead....

Pluto may no longer be considered a true planet following its official reclassification in 2006, but that doesn't appear to be stopping the tiny dwarf planet from amassing a considerable number of celestial "followers." Just this week, in fact, a team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope announced their discovery of yet another moon o...

On Thursday a federal judge in New York denied a request by several broadcasters including ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to shut down startup Aereo's streaming video platform, which utilizes arrays of dime-sized antennas to receive free, over-the-air programming and then streams the content online and even to mobile devices "Today's decision shows that whe...

The passwords and usernames of more than 400,000 contributors to the Yahoo Voices website have been stolen and posted on the Internet The hack was carried out by an organization calling itself "D33Ds Company," which posted the data on the Web....

A months-long disagreement over the fees DirecTV should pay to Viacom for some of its most popular programming has turned into steely-eyed brinkmanship between the two companies -- and DirecTV's customers caught in the middle Viacom proposed increasing the fees DirecTV pays for programming offered on Nickelodeon, MTV, and Comedy Central by 30 perce...

Google introduced a pilot program Wednesday to allow more e-commerce merchants to add Search as You Type results to their product search tools Search as You Type works within a retailer's existing search system but adds Google's predictive text, spelling suggestions and product photos and information. The added suggestions will help improve sales b...

Making use of sleek black gloves, sophisticated sensors, a microcontroller and a smartphone, students from the Ukraine have created a device that translates sign language into speech Called "Enable Talk," the system won first place in the software design category at Microsoft's 10th annual Imagine Cup, held this year in Sydney, Australia.

New details about a possible forthcoming smartphone from Amazon continue to surface. The Internet retailer's testing a smartphone right now and may begin mass production late this year or early in 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported. The phone could have a screen measuring between four and five inches The putative Amazon smartphone could use a T...

Just when we thought this whole Net neutrality thing was over, Verizon threw a little gasoline on the burning embers. The thing is, there are many good points on both sides of the Net neutrality argument. So how can we decide which way to go? It turns out the best solution may be on the third side....

Votigo has debuted a full-fledged social marketing suite that builds around its original core functionality of social promotions. The 6-year-old company is offering a price point that is reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as functionality that can scale to enterprise level fairly easily, Mike La Rotonda, co-CEO and founder, ...

Microsoft is involved in a project geared toward self-programming and extending the functionality of the Android smartphone environment. That's surprising, because Microsoft has got its own phone OS that competes However, on{X} (pronounced "on-ex") in beta is bringing some unique JavaScript APIs tothe table that let you program your phone remotely....

Many a parent or teacher has probably encouraged kids playing video games to read a book, but now the world's largest book retailer is getting further into games. On Tuesday, Amazon announced a new social engagement layer for video game developers GameCircle for Amazon's Kindle Fire will allow developers to add achievements, leader boards and even ...

Salesforce.com experienced a global outage early Tuesday, the second major outage in two weeks for the CRM company Salesforce.com customers in the company's NA1, NA5, NA6, CS0, CS3, CS1 and CS12 regions lost access starting just before 1 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday. Access was restored gradually, returning to full online status by about 10:30 a.m....

Oracle is snapping up another social media company: It announced this week that it has entered into an agreement to buy Involver, a platform provider of SML, or social markup language. SML is a developer tool used to create customized marketing applications for social media sites and Web campaigns. The transaction is expected to close this summer T...

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have announced a smart headlight system that could improve visibility for drivers of automobiles in bad weather The system uses cameras and a processor to predict the path of raindrops and snowflakes in front of an automobile and redirect headlight beams to shine between those particles...