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Yahoo finally gets a leader. The company announced Wednesday the appointment of Scott Thompson as CEO, effective Jan. 9. Thompson was also appointed to the board of directors. Interim CEO Tim Morse will resume his role as chief financial officer. Yahoo fired former CEO Carol Bartz four months ago for failing to turn the company around Thompson's mo...

Cisco has reportedly stopped selling its Umi home videoconferencing system The decision marks the end of a short life for the product, which was launched just over a year ago in October 2010....

Microsoft celebrated the demise of Internet Explorer 6 on Tuesday after usage estimates put the Web browser's marketshare at under 1 percent in the U.S Microsoft was as happy as anyone to see the browser go. The company has been running a kill campaign for IE6 for years, with Microsoft executive Amy Bazdukas stating in 2009 that "friends don't let ...

Wendi Deng, wife of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, started out the year by discovering that her name had been hijacked by a spoofer on Twitter. Twitter had apparently verified the account, "Wendi_Deng," as genuine, but after being informed it was a hoax, quickly removed it and apologized to Deng, according to news accounts. Twitter doesn't discuss ve...

A group of computer enthusiasts have begun working on creating a satellite network that could be used to thwart censorship on the Internet Called the "Hackerspace Global Grid" (HGG), the network could provide a way for activists to access the Net when a repressive regime suppresses access within its borders....

Restaurant owners, dentists, doctors, graphic designers, realtors and everyday people are all doing it: bartering. Though it's an old concept, it's getting a new twist in the world of e-commerce "This is the new method for an old practice, with e-commerce," Paul Bocheck, CEO of BarterQuest, told the E-Commerce Times....

Daily deal industry leader Groupon dropped some 8.9 percent in stock value on Tuesday, following the release of a report from Susquehanna Financial Group and Yipit. The report surveyed some 400 merchants about their experiences with Groupon, LivingSocial and other providers in this space. A healthy majority -- eight out of 10 merchants -- liked th...

Welcome back to the discussion At the top of my list is the idea of resiliency, which I consider a more practical form of sustainability for business. We are now encountering a wave of sustainability-oriented ideas in the popular culture. Forty miles per gallon is the new 30, someone said, and I have seen or heard the word "sustainable" used tent...

YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on "also watched" videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me....

Over a year ago, we presented a list of the top 10 worst practices that you should avoid if you want to maintain the performance and uptime of your Microsoft Exchange email system. Since then, some things have changed, while others have not. So here's a revised Top 10 List of "Don'ts" to point out which practices still hold true and which do not.

Google has become the subject of a series of withering articles calling it out for violating its own advertising policies. The company reportedly has run sponsored marketing ads for its Chrome browser using techniques that last year's Panda algorithm change was designed to prohibit. The paid sponsorships apparently resulted from a misunderstanding...

Research In Motion is moving toward a change in corporate leadership that could have Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie giving up their titles as co-chairmen of the board, according to a Financial Post report. Barbara Stymiest, an independent director who joined RIM's board in 2007, is said to be most likely to replace the co-chairs A committee of in...

Ultrabooks will make a strong showing at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), to be held in Las Vegas Jan. 10-13, with Intel and several computer vendor partners demoing products "The new category is already gaining momentum, with many Ultrabooks powered by second-generation Intel Core processors in the market today, and more than 60 design...

Say this about 2011 -- along with any number of natural and unnatural disasters, the year featured more than its fair share of technology industry melodrama from the highly public wrangling between Oracle and HP to the passing of singular characters, including Apple's Steve Jobs. Both of these events also highlighted the importance of a topic mainly of interest to financial analysts and institutional investors: executive succession...

Cloud computing represents a powerful shift in how your company deploys applications, stores data, implements security and adheres to industry regulations. Cloud architectures can give your company the flexibility to scale resources as the business requires. And you can do so without incurring unnecessary capital expenses Whether your organization ...

Cybersecurity is such a pressing issue that the U.S. government will be dedicating a good chunk of its annual information technology budget to protecting data systems from breaches, hackers and other threats. The number of cybersecurity incidents reported by federal agencies has increased from 5,503 in 2006 to 41,776 incidents in 2010, an increase of over 650 percent, according to a recent report from the General Accountability Office (GAO)...

The Anonymous hacker collective has run riot this holiday season, and security experts predict more pain from cybercriminals at large for the coming year Anonymous also announced earlier that it had cracked the systems of gear vendor SpecialForces.com on Tuesday....

This story was originally published on Sept. 28, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Is there a reasonable expectation of anonymity when defamatory content is posted on the Internet? Is there a difference if the content posted is in the context of political speech? ...

This story was originally published on Oct. 8, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Ejected from Oracle's Open World. An impromptu gathering at a nearby restaurant. Fulsome explanations from PR flacks and tweets galore. The relations between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff went fr...

This month begins the march to 2012 technology with the Consumer Electronics Show just around the corner. Vendors have already started prebriefings for what will likely be a cascade of announcements all happening in the same one-week time frame. This will be the last year that Microsoft keynotes or has a major presence at this show. Like Apple...