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Oracle President Mark Hurd delivered a speech before Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo that emphasized the rapid buildup in analytical functionality the company has made in recent months. He touched upon previous developments, such as the Big Data Appliance announced at the start of the year, as well recent news, such as its update of Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management.

Smart Diagram Pro, an app from Sillycube, is available for US$4.30 at Google Play. The much talked about demise of the laptop in favor of tablet device, it could be argued, will be dependent on the tablet offering much of the functionality of the laptop. Gaping holes in tablet function will likely perpetuate the laptop as a tool.

Of late, people working in specialized fields such as industrial design, architecture and the medical and dental industries have been going gaga over 3D printing, a process in which three-dimensional solid objects are produced on a special printer using materials such as molten polymers However, this technology may be trumped by research on so-call...

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." This quote, often bandied about, is attributed to Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), who was a French diplomat, dramatist and novelist. And, judging by his best-remembered quote, kind of a jerk....

U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn has upheld a permanent injunction on a Colorado law that would have required out-of-state online retailers to report their in-state customers' purchases to Colorado tax authorities and notify those customers of the resulting sales tax owed to the state The reporting requirement was a violation of the commerce cl...

Hackers purporting to be members of the nebulous online hacker community Anonymous have reportedly hit almost 400 websites in China The attacks have apparently been going on since March 30. They are listed on the Anonymous China Twitter page....

Facebook accused Yahoo of violating 10 of its patents Tuesday, a response to a similar suit Yahoo filed just under a month ago. The two Internet competitors are embroiled in a patent duel that started last month, when Yahoo sued Facebook for 10 counts of patent infringement. The litigation came at a particularly delicate time for Facebook -- it's ...

Rumors that Yahoo was prepping for a huge round of layoffs have turned out to be true. On Wednesday, the company announced it would lay off 2,000 employees under a plan designed to prepare it for the future Scott Thompson, the company's recently appointed CEO, said Yahoo's larger goal was to focus on its core competency of online advertising -- and...

Books and e-books are becoming the No. 1 sales and marketing tool for many small and mid-sized businesses. Large companies have successfully used them for years, but they were much more expensive and took much longer to produce. Now print on demand and e-books are transforming the space, allowing every company the same opportunity. I recently lear...

This story was originally published on Jan. 26, 2012, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. The way the concept of CRM is defined during the sales process can sow the seeds of its ultimate failure. Because the decision makers are often sales managers rather than actual salespeople, the pitch is usually made that CRM m...

The more devices that I accumulate, the more I'd like to move seamlessly from one to another. I'm finding more and more that I'm hopping from one device to another, and one Web browser to another I've got a mini-laptop hooked up to my TV, a larger laptop on my desk, a 7-inch tablet in my back pocket for reading at coffee shops, a 10-incher that flo...

Google has revealed its long-rumored plans to create augmented reality (AR) eyeglasses ...

The Nokia Lumia 900 Windows Phone-powered handset is slated to be released next week, and so far gadget critics are giving the smartphone a generally warm welcome ...

Amazon is testing a service that will let tablet users purchase items through mobile applications, according to Bloomberg. It is expected to enhance the Kindle Fire tablet's de facto role as a shopping conduit for its users. It already is second nature for users to download books and movies from Amazon's content library. With an in-app purchase me...

Research In Motion has been accused of infringing six patents owned by Dutch semiconductor company NXP NXP claims in a lawsuit filed in U.S. federal court in Florida that the BlackBerry maker has infringed on patents pertaining to data transmission, GPS receivers on mobile phones, and circuit design and manufacturing. NXP claims that the BlackBerry...

The European Commission has opened two formal investigations of Motorola in response to grievances Apple and Microsoft filed against the company. The licensing fees Motorola charges for patented technologies used in products like the iPhone and Xbox are set unfairly high, the companies have alleged. The EC approved Google's US$12.5 billion acquisi...

I have great admiration for the work of Daniel Kahneman. He's an Israeli psychologist whose work with the late Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, even though neither was obviously an economist. The pair built the foundation for behavioral economics and did early work on framing, or how we perceive issues based on what other information surrounds them...

Not all search tools are the same. Just like users have a variety of Linux distros that appeal to a wide range of needs, search apps do different tasks for different users....

The Modern Parent's Guide to Kids and Video Games, by Scott Steinberg, Johner Riehl & Rusel DeMaria, is available from Amazon's Kindle Store and Apple's iBook Store for US$3.99....

If you find out everything about someone by talking to lots of people, then put the information together and tell everyone else, are you being creepy? Or are you just a gossip? That's the gist of the argument raging around the controversial Girls Around Me iOS app....