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Banks have still not made important reforms or improvements in their checking account practices, according to an update Pew Charitable Trusts made to a report it released in April 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts." The original report set out a discouraging list of banking practices that added fees to consum...

The adoption of tablets has reached critical mass in the U.S., according to comScore. In fact, one in every four smartphone owners also used a tablet during the three-month period ending April 2012 What stands out most about this particular study, though, is the link it makes between TV and online video content and the growth of tablets. Tablet use...

On May 18, the day social media giant Facebook went public, Nasdaq CEO Bob Greifeld was flying high. However, it wasn't from anticipation that the social network would see sky-high levels of trading -- it was because Greifield was on plane flying across country, according to reports that surfaced Monday Greifeld was present at the opening bell cere...

The Flame malware has reportedly begun to self-destruct Some command-and-control (C&C) servers for the malware sent an order recently that completely removes it from infected systems, according to Symantec....

A European telecommunications agency in December proposed that the United Nations collect a tax on some of the largest websites and network providers in the U.S. for their overseas activities, according to documents that recently surfaced ETNO, the main telecommunications operators association in Europe, proposed the policy at a meeting with the In...

The deluge of spam dropped on members of LinkedIn last week perhaps could have been expected after a data breach at the site exposed 6.5 million of their passwords. Those messages, though, are more likely to harm members unaffected by the breach than those victimized by it That's because members who had their passwords compromised also had them wip...

If a customer walked into one of your brick-and-mortar stores -- assuming, for this exercise, that you have brick-and-mortar stores -- and asked if you had any Sleepytime Pajamas, how would you want your sales associate to respond? Whether you only carried Sweet Dreams Pajamas, you'd just sold out of Sleepytime, or you didn't sell pajamas at all, you'd never want the employee to say, "I'm sorry, we don't have that," and walk away. You'd train your staff to suggest alternatives or guide the conversation toward what you did have, to improve your chances of making a sale...

Windows 8 is a make-or-break platform for Microsoft and likely the most complex operating systemlaunch ever attempted. It comes at a time when Microsoft is losing share on both operating systemsand browsers, when Apple has once again replaced Microsoft at the top of the tech heap, and manywould argue Google is on a fast path to second place. Microsoft is bringing out its big guns, but itis far from the user-focused company it was when it rose to dominance. Still, it has far moreresources...

Text messages are intimate, to-the-point, and readable, and they bring marketing messages straight to where people spend much of their time -- their phones Texting, it turns out, is more than just a series of LOLs or smiley faces between friends. Increasingly, it's also a savvy and effective marketing tool....

Facebook has cut the ribbon on its App Center -- a hub that lets users access apps from Facebook and related third parties. There are about 600 apps in the center so far, including favorites like Draw Something, Pinterest and Nike+ GPS Facebook is taking a curated approach to the apps. Besides the popular ones, it is suggesting newer apps users mi...

One in three high school students has texted or emailed someone while driving a vehicle over the past 30 days, a study by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found The CDC said motor vehicle crashes account for more than one-third of U.S. teen fatalities each year....

Epic Games on Friday officially announced its upcoming Unreal Engine 4 technology, which could be the foundation for the next decade of graphics technology in video games. This comes the day after the close of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the video game industry's largest trade show, and it's notable in that the current video game console systems will not be able to take advantage of this technology...

Eight months after the multinational Opera research team caused an uproar among physicists with its findings that some neutrinos appeared to travel faster than light, its findings have been officially refuted CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on Friday said that four experiments have found that neutrinos actually travel no faste...

Best Buy Founder and Chairman Richard Schulze announced Thursday he is leaving the company immediately and plans to explore all available options for his 20.1 percent ownership stake in the electronics retail chain His departure comes two months after former CEO Brian Dunn left the company under a cloud of scandal and as the retailer faces increase...

The Apple v. Motorola trial scheduled to begin next week in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has been cancelled, with the judge presiding over the case deciding it should be dismissed because neither side has established a right to relief However, Judge Richard Posner wrote in the order filed Thursday that he would del...

Today's rapidly expanding array of cloud-based applications are quickly deliveringquantifiable business benefits, as three years ofTHINKstrategies Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards have clearly proven. However, it is also becoming clear that poorly manageddeployment of today's cloud alternatives can generate needless costs that must bebetter co...

Ntractive, the developer of Elements CRM, a cloud-based CRM app for Macs only, has expanded its product line to include the iPad and iPhone. Ntractive is taking a different approach from other CRM vendors that have pushed their applications onto these devices, CEO Justin Bartak told CRM Buyer....

Visual Voicemail Plus, an app from PhoneFusion, is available for free at Google Play, with voice-to-text service starting at US$1.99 a month.Visual voicemail functionality is the visual element in a voicemail application that allowstext to be transcribed and displayed on the phone -- or more simply, message headers, orenvelopes, are displayed text...

On today's information technology landscape, one thing is glaringly obvious: Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an inescapable concern for IT managers at every company. Security concerns associated with employees bringing personal devices onto the corporate network -- both internal and external -- are keeping IT managers up at night. The "consumeriza...

Citrix is acquiring privately held Bytemobile, a provider of data and video optimization applications for mobile network operators. The deal will give Citrix exposure to a burgeoning market -- mobile infrastructure -- and extend its reach to points around the world The acquisition builds on a partnership the two companies announced earlier this yea...