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Research In Motion has been hit with a lawsuit alleging trademark infringement of the name "BBX." This latest thorn in the company's side follows a mortifying days-long global service outage and lackluster performance of its PlayBook tablet, to name just two recent setbacks BBX is the operating system RIM recently unveiled for BlackBerry phones a...

At Dreamforce, Zuora, like many other emerging companies allied with Salesforce.com, decided to hold a user group meeting. As long as the customers jointly held by Salesforce and Zuora were in town, the logic went, why not have them in for a day of education, listening and a pep talk from the boss? It was a fine idea. Customers came to San Franci...

Software development drives business innovation, but many application development teams are stymied by some common, solvable challenges that can sidetrack the success not only of their project, but also of their company The top three: achieving effective alignment with business concerns; managing time over the course of a project; and building for ...

Is US$185,000 the right price for a single generic top-level domain? No, it's definitely not. If a gTLD is supposed to provide worldwide exclusive use of a name identity with unlimited sub-name-brand-extension-domains, this amount is insufficient for ICANN to add critical features to the same application process. A gTLD is like buying a powerful c...

Two former Apple engineers have released a smart thermostat designed to reduce home energy use. Nest Labs -- a company formed by Tony Fadell, credited with shepherding the iPod's development -- has introduced the Nest Learning Thermostat, a device that learns your daily schedule and adjusts your home's heating and cooling accordingly ...

Microsoft is rolling out a service update for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online for both the partner-hosted and on-premises deployments. The update includes its promised "Activity Feeds," as well as administrative enhancements and stepped-up disaster recovery practices.

The ire exhibited by consumers in the wake of Bank of America's recent announcement that it would impose a US$5 monthly fee for using debit cards for retail purchases does not seem to have been a momentary flash -- at least, not based on findings in a survey by Trig (The Research Intelligence Group). Thirty percent of U.S. consumers would leave th...

Unexpectedly high customer losses for Q3 sent Netflix stock into a tailspin in after-hours trading Monday, driving share prices down more than 30 percent overnight. The online video and DVD-by-mail provider also projected a net loss for the quarter ahead as it attempts to expand into new overseas markets After a price reshuffling in July, the compa...

The potential for saving money through data center consolidation among federal agencies is so great that the newly installed federal chief information officer has now challenged information technology managers to move further and faster to implement the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel revealed on Oct. 7, 2011, that he was "expanding the project to more aggressively consolidate our data center footprint." ...

Anyone who attended last year's McAfee Focus conference was likely struck by the strangeness of the event. Since Intel had announced plans to acquire the company just a couple of months before Focus, McAfee was officially in "quiet" mode -- unable to discuss literally any and every business and product issue that might in any way influence the deal or the company's share price. In other words, at an event designed to spotlight McAfee's innovation and value, its executives' and employees' lips were legally, effectively sealed.

Oracle has scooped up RightNow Technologies, a cloud-based customer self-service application vendor, for a reported US$1.5 billion. The acquisition price is a hefty 20 percent premium over RightNow's closing price last week. The acquisition fills a missing gap in Oracle's cloud-based CRM functionality. The deal also provides an excellent exit stra...

The passing of Steve Jobs earlier this month triggered reactions that spanned the gamut -- from expressions of appreciation and sober reflection to some tasteless extremes of zealotry from a subset of the open-source community We can learn a lot from Steve Jobs, even if we ultimately have different goals....

We've been having a jolly good time lambasting the United States federal government and, by extension, its various CIOs for Washington's problems in cybersecurity implementation It turns out now that the fault, dear readers, lies not with the CIOs but with the government itself....

A number of major U.S.-based financial institutions have blockaded payments to Wikileaks, forcing the site to temporarily cease publication. Wikileaks is asking supporters to immediately start donating money through other entities in order to keep the site running. The blockade has cut off 95 percent of its revenue, the group claims Companies ...

Verizon Wireless has disabled the bootloader unlock feature in the software on the Droid Razr, the Android smartphone that Motorola unveiled last week Motorola had shipped the Droid Razr with a bootloader that can be unlocked and relocked, company spokesperson Becki Leonard told LinuxInsider....

New research concerning ISPs' BitTorrent throttling habits indicates Comcast took the FCC's 2008 slap on the wrist seriously, dramatically reducing its practice of slowing BitTorrent data. Other ISPs such as Clearwire, Canada's Rogers Communications and some overseas providers were found to be throttling BitTorrent users to a greater degree The rep...

Sprint Nextel notified subscribers late last week that it was doing away with its unlimited 4G wireless broadband for tablets, netbooks, notebooks, USB cards and mobile hotspot devices -- almost every mobile device, that is, except smartphones, which it has famously promised to allow to consume unlimited data. The company is clamping down on users...

Those tactical robots some police departments use to deal with dangerous situations are great, but they have one drawback -- they're specialized and so are limited to a few uses What if a police or fire department could create a bunch of robots as needed for different uses?...

Predixion Software has introduced Predixion Insight 2.0, the latest version of its collaborative predictive analytics solution. The new release includes enterprise collaboration features, interactive visualizations and automated workflow capabilities, as well as an on-premises version of its predictive analytics solution. With Predixion Insight 2....

With the U.S. elections ramping up and IBM's 100-year anniversary event in New York focusing like a laser on what makes a good leader, I'm finding it hard not to compare both the incumbent and Republican challengers to the top leaders in technology and find them wanting. Recently, I listened to Sir Richard Branson, one of the most well-regarded ...