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Facebook filed it's long-awaited S-1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, announcing its intent to raise US$5 billion and begin public trading The highly anticipated move caused enough of a stir to clog traffic on the SEC's website and provided some insight into the social network's financial situation. According to t...

Apple has suffered a setback in its multicountry, extremely complex, and seemingly everlasting patent fight with Samsung. In the latest episode, its request to ban Samsung from selling two devices in Germany -- its Galaxy Tab 10.1N tablet and its Galaxy Nexus smartphone -- was rejected by the Munich Regional Court. This particular dispute began la...

Every day we hear about how AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless are running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to grab as much wireless spectrum as they can. We all remember the quality problems AT&T smartphone customers suffered. That same future is in store for every carrier and every customer unless we come up with a solution. ...

Every tool has a purpose. That's never more clear than when you see a neophyte do-it-yourselfer trying to use a tool for a purpose other than what it was designed for. For instance, anyone wielding a hammer while trying to fix a car's engine is probably not going to succeed. I've also seen people trying to drive nails with the rubberized handle end of a screwdriver. This was equally unsuccessful...

Twilio's cloud-based communications platform allows anyone with rudimentary Web-development knowledge to build a voice and SMS text application. An API, client, and various XML and other helper code is available that lets you build in PHP, C# and more ...

Superbowl Sunday, the biggest, flashiest U.S. sports event of the year, is also the country's biggest advertising event of the year, carrying some of the cleverest ads on TV This year, Superbowl Sunday may also mark a watershed in advertising, with advertisers reaching out beyond TV to go into digital media in a big way....

AOL delivered a little bit of something for everyone with its Q4 earnings report -- good news, bad news, and hope that its many different initiatives are on track to pay off for the company. First the bad news: AOL reported a profit of US$22.8 million, or 23 cents a share, that was down from the $66.2 million, or 61 cents a share, it earned in the...

Sony announced on Wednesday that Kazui Hirai is being appointed as its president and CEO, effective April 1. Current Chairman, CEO and President Howard Stringer will become the chairman of the board of directors in June. Sony has had a turbulent year, including several incidents in which it had to defend its systems from hackers, so a switch in le...

Someday, people whose ability to speak has been damaged by illness or injury may be able to vocalize anyway with the help of technology. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have made strides toward translating the words a person thinks into real speech The researchers used 15 patients undergoing neurosurgery as subjects....

Amazon's stock took a pummeling Wednesday after the online retailer released quarterly figures that fell short of Wall Street expectations, which had been built up in part by past years' holiday performances Amazon's net income was US$177 million, or 38 cents per share, a 57 percent percent drop from a year ago. Sales for the three months before De...

Andreessen Horowitz announced that it has raised US$1.5 billion for a fund aimed at investing in technology startups. The new fund is launching just as one of the firm's well-known bets, Facebook, prepares to go public. Andreessen Horowitz has an unspecified stake in the social network. Indeed, among the many reasons tech investors will be scouring Facebook's S-1 will be to learn the extent of Andreessen Horowitz's ownership.

Fitness instructor and personal trainer Yu Hannah Kim has always believed that fitness should be available to anyone. Now, with the launch of her new site, Yufit, she's making that dream a reality Yufit offers streaming videos for everything from cardio kickboxing and core burn workouts to yoga and stretching....

When it comes to playing audio and video files in Linux, media players pretty much all work the same way and have a very similar user interface. It usually all comes down to features. With SMPlayer it depends on what you want to play....

Twitter is on the defensive over its new tweet-filtering policy, which it considers a progressive, forward-looking approach to complying with local laws around the globe. If a particular tweet might be illegal in one country -- such as a pro-Nazi sentiment, which would be illegal in Germany and France -- Twitter will block it in the country or cou...

Already battered, flailing and in the throes of a corporate shakeup, RIM is now being savaged by critics over an infographic it created to depict the result of a Twitter campaign it launched over New Year's Eve ...

Google has responded to a letter from members of Congress with its own 13-page missive explaining changes to its privacy policy that will take effect on March 1. Among other things, the letter signed by eight legislators stated that "consumers should have the ability to opt out of data collection when they are not comfortable with a company's ter...

The European Union has begun looking into whether Samsung Electronics has engaged in antitrust behavior Samsung years ago pledged to license its patents that are essential for the implementation of European mobile telephony standards on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. However "it appears that Samsung has sought injunctive rel...

Samsung's new Galaxy Note Android phone, which will feature one of the largest screens on a smartphone to date, will hit shelves on Feb.19. ...

A bit over a year ago, the conventional wisdom related to enterprise IT vendors was fairly straightforward: Sheer size and depth of expertise gave end-to-end systems vendors unlimited access to the high ground. As markets recovered from the 2008 recession, enterprise customers would naturally stick with or gravitate toward large established players that could fulfill their every need. Being one-stop shops allowed systems vendors to engineer killer deals for cost-conscious enterprises and still walk away with healthy profits. Plus, the smartest of the bunch were leading the way in exotic new areas including cloud computing and dedicated big data appliances.

Zero hour is approaching as the certainty grows that Facebook will be filing for its initial public offering this week. Zero hour for excited investors and Wall Street banks -- and zero hour for privacy advocates, who see a public Facebook as a very dangerous Facebook, at least as far as privacy is concerned. Even as a private company, Facebook ha...