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Google has been at work on new technologies and methodologies that could significantly alter the way consumers search on the Internet, as well as how brands can expect to see their ads displayed, according to The Wall Street Journal More emphasis will be placed on semantic search, a process that takes into account the meaning of the search term inp...

Encyclopedia Britannica will switch to an all-digital format, bringing its 244-year printing history to a close. It's time to concentrate on expanding coverage for digital consumers rather than continuing to print the heavy, relatively expensive volumes, said the Chicago-based company that makes the reference books....

The BBC was the target of hack attacks earlier this month, according to comments made by BBC Director-General Mark Thompson in a wide-ranging speech to the Royal Television Society on Wednesday. There was a simultaneous attempt to jam two different satellite feeds of BBC Persian into Iran, and to disrupt BBC's London telephone lines via multiple a...

Microsoft recently issued the first consumer preview of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system, and at least one user isn't wowed by the dramatic design changes found in the new OS Microsoft has been keeping users up to date on the software construction process with a blog called "Building Windows 8," meant to get users enthused and informed about...

After the recent Super Bowl game, Twitter reported that during the final three minutes of the game between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots, an average of 10,000 tweets were sent every second. This sheer volume of tweets is almost unimaginable. My first thought was that all of these tweets were going into the ether at a purely indi...

Comcast has grown from a small cable television company in the 1990s to the largest conglomerate in the space, all thanks to Brian Roberts and his father Ralph Roberts. It was a real bootstrapping, entrepreneurial, family-run company that did many great things over the years and helped to transform the industry. Has it now grown too large? Will Co...

In the UK, supermarket chain Tesco is being pounded right now in social media channels because it's refusing to honor an erroneous online advertisement offering new iPads for Pounds 50 (US$65). The offer went viral, and now the backlash is viral, too. How Tesco responds will tell the tale. I'd recommend a sincere apology, a few well-phrased jokes ...

AT&T and litigant Matthew Spaccarelli are engaged in a war of words that AT&T appears to be losing. The incident began when Spaccarelli sued AT&T in small claims court in California. He charged that the company had violated his unlimited data plan agreement for his iPhone by throttling, or slowing down, his data speed. The court agreed and awarded...

Dell is acquiring network-security and data-protection tool provider SonicWall. Terms of the deal were not announced, but analysts have estimated it at between US$1 billion and $1.5 billion. This is the latest in a series of acquisitions Dell has made in recent months. It has acquired Force 10, Perot Systems and SecureWorks. All of these compani...

In a move that could be seen as a last gasp, embattled 4G LTE developer LightSquared announced this week that it had hired lawyer Theodore Olson to launch a legal battle against the FCC This follows the Federal Communications Commission pulling the plug on the tentatively approved 4G LTE network that utilized both satellites and cellular towers aft...

Yahoo on Monday launched a lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the socialnetwork infringed 10 patents relating to online social networking andadvertising. The move garnered a significant amount of criticism. Itstiming comes just before Facebook is slotted to make its initial publicoffering, and the nature of the suit has even raised concerns that Y...

Even before Google launched its new privacy policy earlier this month, consolidating separate privacy policies for more than 60 applications, legal issues had surfaced. Now, attorneys general from more than 31 States have accused Google of violating privacy laws because of complaints from users that they were finding ads are popping up on YouTub...

One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes." I thought of it again last week when I read about the price war going on in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space. Larry Dignon made the clever observation that he paid more for electricity in January than it cost to get IT infrastructure now that Micr...

Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer for the GNOME desktop. Its lightweight structure includes just enough editing power to make it an ideal choice for everyday use....

The Gutenberg printing press, which was invented around A.D. 1440, truly revolutionized the world. It allowed more people to have access to books, which until that time had to be manually copied by hand. Today the world is seeing another revolutionary advance in printing technology, but this time in 3D printing ...

Intel is rumored to be considering entering the pay-television service market. The chipmaker has reached out to media companies and cable channels as part of its research, according to news accounts. The service would be based on a Web-connected set-top box that could offer both streaming TV and video-on-demand programming, reported The Wall Stree...

The claims that Samsung and Apple have on smartphone market share in China may come as a surprise to people who are familiar only with U.S. trends. Samsung far outpaces Apple in the world's most-populous country, with a 24.3 percent share of the smartphone market, according to new figures from Gartner. Apple, by contrast, has only a 7.5 percent share...

Chipmaker ARM has announced a tiny product with huge implications. The company unveiled its ARM Cortex M0+, a 1mm microchip it says can push the edge of the Internet beyond your laptop or PC. Everything is on the drawing board -- from a network-enabled fridge to devices powered by your body's heat "The main advantage is a balance between energy and...

Yahoo filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook on Monday, ensnaring the social network heavyweight in a legal entanglement weeks before it's scheduled to go public The suit regards 10 patents related to instant messaging, advertising systems, privacy settings and methods for customizing ads and content....

Intel's launch of its new Xeon processor E5-2600 product family (aka "Sandy Bridge") marked numerous firsts for the company and x86 data centers. The new processors deliver leadership performance, best data center performance per watt, and breakthrough I/O innovation features, according to Intel, including the following: up to eight cores per proce...