Articles by

Christmas is coming in a few days, and many of you are kicking back with some eggnog for a well-deserved rest before the day arrives, and you are looking forward to the annual family who-is-the-biggest-ass competition. Yes, this is the time of year when relatives feel the need to overimbibe and tell us how we should live our lives, or they critique our kids or spouses, and we, unfortunately, are likely to do the same. ...

A federal judge has dismissed a criminal case against a man accused of using Twitter to conduct a threatening campaign against a religious leader. William Lawrence Cassidy had been jailed for predicting that violence would befall Alyce Zeoli, a Buddhist religious leader, and for urging her to kill herself.

The Future Enterprise, Part 5: User-Friendly Delivery There's a new bit of conventional wisdom regarding the future of computing, and it's gathering momentum in some corners of the business world. Advocates of this particular piece of wisdom argue that the best way to reduce the cost and complexity of corporate computing for the data centers of the...

Kindles have caught fire this holiday season. The e-readers and tablets are the top-selling products on Amazon, according to numbers released by by the e-commerce giant this week. Consumers have purchased more than a million Kindles in each of the past three weeks, the company said. The new Kindle Fire tablet -- which sells for US$199 -- is Amazon...

Google has been awarded a United States patent for what, in legalese, is "transitioning a mixed-mode vehicle to autonomous mode" -- essentially a self-driving car To be more precise, U.S. Patent 8,078,349 covers a car being driven by a human that transitions to being autonomously driven....

Research In Motion posted its third-quarter earnings data on Thursday, reporting a 71 percent drop in net income and revealing that its long-awaited next-generation smartphone platform will arrive later than expected The company reported revenue of US$5.2 billion, up 24 percent from last quarter but still under Wall Street expectations. It also dis...

It looks as though Zynga was right to err on the side of caution when it priced its long-awaited IPO on Thursday evening. The social media gaming company priced the offering at a very conservative US$10 per share, below the rumored $12 price per share that it was said to be considering.

The market for local commerce has been the holy grail for Internet companies since the dawn of the modem. However, that market has been more like "Monty Python And The Holy Grail." Until now....

Zoho has rolled out a major update to its CRM app, completely redesigning the user interface and adding new social and productivity features. It is a massive overhaul, Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna told CRM Buyer -- one the company plans to extend to other applications throughout its business suite of products.

Cybersecurity experts have been murmuring for some time that the United States' power supply is open to cyberattacks "If someone were to think about attacking another nation, the first thing they'd do is take out the power grid, since it's the hub around which other infrastructure spokes revolve," Patrick Miller, president and CEO of the National E...

Facebook will be disrupting the online lives of its members in the coming weeks with the redesign of their profile pages....

Microsoft will automatically upgrade earlier versions of its Internet Explorer browser beginning in January The updates will be for PCs running Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, Redmond said....

Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, the first phone to run Android Ice Cream Sandwich, will be available in the U.S. starting Thursday from Verizon. The 4G LTE phone sells for US$299.99 with a two-year plan. There are 2GB, 5GB and 10GB data plans starting at $30, although for a limited time through the holidays customers can get double data for the same month...

Ask just about any research company that tracks online spending about this holiday season and you will get bombarded with cheer: "good," "strong," "robust," and "surprisingly strong" are among the adjectives used to describe online shopping activity this month and last. The latest indicator is a report on the holiday season-to-date: US$24.6 billio...

Over the last 25 years, I have had a ball as a tech analyst following who is hot and who is not and what is next. I look at companies and technologies. There was plenty to follow in 2011. What about 2012? Believe it or not, it may be even busier with winners and losers. At the end of every year, I look around the industry and try to call the winn...

Social media is often held up as the wind sock to gauge how fast the winds of change are blowing. When Google+ gained 25 million users in just six weeks, it was used as evidence that people had become willing to shift the channels and methods they used to communicate at the drop of a hat in our new, technologically accelerated age Of course, since ...

Facebook's recent acquisition of location-tracker heavyweight Gowalla is an indicator of the potential strategic importance of location-tracking technology in the social network arena. Players in this marketplace include Gowalla, which lets users share favorite places with fellow Facebook and Twitter friends and then be rewarded with deals from lo...

Nokia and T-Mobile jointly announced on Wednesday the coming of the first Nokia Windows Phone smartphone in the United States The Nokia Lumia 710 will be available starting Jan. 11 at for US$50 with a two-year contract after a mail-in rebate. It will run on T-Mobile's 4G network....

It seems that every day a new crisis hits the news about our privacy, but not many news stories are as astonishing as the recent revelation by a 25-year-old researcher about the Carrier IQ software that is installed on most modern Android, BlackBerry and Nokia phones. Carrier IQ software collects massive data from these devices, then "correlates and aggregates the data for near real-time system monitoring and business intelligence" for phone operators and manufacturers, ostensibly to improve their services. ...

Sprint Nextel and C Spire have agreed to postpone their lawsuits against AT&T's troubled merger with T-Mobile. A federal judge approved motions filed jointly by the companies and AT&T on Tuesday. Sprint originally sued to block the merger in September The deal has drawn attention from the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commiss...