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President Barack Obama on Thursday signed an executive order intended to make broadband construction along federal roadways and properties in the United State more effective and up to 90 percent cheaper Building a nationwide broadband network will strengthen the U.S. economy and put more Americans back to work, the president said....

The Department of Justice is investigating whether cable companies such as Comcast and Time Warner are violating antitrust rules through practices that limit their broadband customers' access to online video, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing anonymous sources. The Justice Department apparently has questioned these companies, as we...

Sony has launched its first Xperia smartphone since buying out Ericsson in February. The Xperia Ion is a 4G LTE device that will be available from AT&T June 24 for US$100 with a two-year agreement ...

Skype has begun plastering display ads across its calling interface The Microsoft-owned VoIP service refers to them as "conversation ads." The ads, according to Sandhya Venkatachalam, Skype's general manager and VP of advertising and monetization, could spark additional topics of conversation and generate interactivity between families and circles ...

We all followed AT&T's attempt to acquire T-Mobile last year. That should have been our wake-up call to a growing industry problem: spectrum shortage. Yet it wasn't. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson says regulators need to quickly figure out how to get more spectrum into the hands of wireless operators or the industry will run out. That is true, and it...

Customer satisfaction with the airline industry took a dip in J.D. Power and Associates' 2012 North America Airline Satisfaction study after two consecutive years of improvement The drop was not a large one; overall, passenger satisfaction dropped to 681 index points on a 1,000-point scale. In 2011, the score was 683....

Wireless carriers sell you "postpaid" contract phones at a considerable discount. The carrier expects to recoup its outlay -- the full price of the equipment -- over the life of the contract that you sign Often, it will lock the equipment to its network through a technique that stops the phone from working if the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) ca...

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) published a list of proposed generic top level domains (gTLDs) on Wednesday, including such brand-specific Web suffixes such as ".jpmorgan," ".walmart" and ".microsoft," as well as more generic terms such as ".book" and ".love." ICANN, the nonprofit Web-management group that operates ...

AMD on Wednesday announced it will develop a platform security processor based on the ARM Cortex-A5 processor. The company has entered a strategic partnership with ARM that will let it use ARM's TrustZone technology AMD plans to provide development platforms with TrustZone security features on select APUs in 2013 and expand that to more products la...

Facebook can be an effective platform for advertisers, according to a report released Tuesday by comScore The results appear to counter the findings of a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll in which four out of five respondents claimed they were never influenced by advertisements or comments on the site regarding products or services....

Zynga's share price dropped to a record low after an analyst's research note revealed that its usage declined in May due to players migrating to mobile platforms. At close of business on Tuesday, the stock had dropped to US$4.98 per unit, the lowest level since its December initial public offering at $10 per share. Wednesday morning the stock made a slight recovery, reaching $5.20 per share...

After several missed deadlines, Asus has finally introduced a combination smartphone, tablet and notebook computer aimed at consumers who are tired of toting around disparate devices ...

Oracle re-introduced its new cloud/social constellation of stuff last week that it had announced back at OpenWorld. If I count the analyst briefing I got in Redwood Shores in April, it was a re-re-introduction. Oracle is not the only company to follow this strategy. For example, Salesforce follows a conventional triple-tell approach too -- tell them what you're going to say, say it, tell them what you said. But each time Salesforce repeats itself, the messaging gets clearer. When Oracle does it, the message only gets louder...

Linux Feed Reader, aka "Liferea," is part of a highly specialized category of apps. It is an aggregator for online news feeds, weblogs and podcasts. As such, it provides a tool for pulling into one spot an eclectic collection of your newsfeed content so you do not have to go to each separate source....

Nanomachines are, simply, very small machines, and the goal of medical nanotechnologists is to create these tiny machines in order to treat diseases at the molecular level The body, however, already has plenty of its own nanomachines in the form of proteins that assemble themselves to transform their environment. Proteins are composed of long amino...

PayPal has been working for a year or more to translate its brand of safe online payment to other channels. It has rolled out several products to establish bona fides in the mobile payment space, as well as among brick-and-mortar retailers. Now it is making the same push for the TV viewer It is joining forces with such companies as TiVo and Comcast...

Verizon Wireless announced Tuesday a new shared data plan that will work across 10 devices. It will be folded into the carrier's Share Everything Plans, which are scheduled to begin on June 28 for new and existing customers The shared data plan will offer unlimited voice minutes, text, video and picture messaging. It will allow Verizon customers t...

Sprint, a carrier that offers at least five smartphones preloaded with Google Wallet, is reportedly working on its own digital wallet system, separate from Google's offering Slides from a presentation on the so-called Touch wallet were recently posted by Android Central....

Microsoft put its updated cloud offerings and business tools in the spotlight Monday for the start of its annual TechEd Conference In the keynote address kicking off the confab, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft server and tools business, discussed Microsoft's focus on helping consumers transition to cloud computing....

The U.S. government is determined to find new and better ways of using information technology. As part of that effort, different approaches to IT contracting are in the offing for vendors providing hardware, software, consulting and other services, including social media and mobile device solutions One of the emerging IT management concepts is the ...