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Many users of the BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) in Europe, the Middle East and Africa found Monday that their Internet service had inexplicably had gone dark. Some were experiencing a total blackout, with no messaging service, email or Web access available. Others were able to intermittently perform some tasks, such as email or messaging. The problems had not been resolved by this article's publication time.

Netflix cracked under pressure and regrouped its business into a single service offering that includes both streaming content and mailed DVDs. The company announced on Monday it will not split off its DVD-by-mail service under the name "Qwikster," as planned. Instead, U.S. customers will continue to use one website, one account and one password.

Acer released its Aspire S3 ultrabook in the U.S. on Monday ...

Sprint Nextel investors have received some very good news and very bad news. The good news is that the company plans to step up deployment of its Network Vision. This plan, originally described in December 2010, calls for a comprehensive, nationwide rollout of 4G LTE on its licensed spectrum. At the same time, it is moving away from WiMax provider...

The long search for the fabled Higgs boson may be drawing to its end ...

Half of U.S. companies plan to invest more on IT resources in 2012 than in 2011, according to Nucleus Research. In fact, 10 percent of the companies surveyed were planning an increase of 10 percent or greater; only one out of 10 planned to decrease spending next year. "Our survey shows that companies view technology investments as a means to drive...

With Steve Jobs' passing, last week was a sad one for the technology industry, which owes much of its current success to him and will remain forever diminished by this event. Even as people talk about his uniqueness, they also don't seem to get that he can't be replaced like you would replace a shoe or a shirt. Teams are complex, and the team that ran Apple was uniquely successful and powerful. Without Jobs, it is diminished; we just don't know how much yet...

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 from wary and grudging mutual admiration, to red hot rhetoric. How red hot? Well, for starters, Ellison referred to Salesforce.com as the "roach motel" of cloud services this week.

Oracle this week made a slew of announcements around the programming language and computing platform Java, which it acquired when it purchased Sun Microsystems in 2009 At the JavaOne conference, Oracle disclosed a road map for Java Standard Edition (SE) on Mac OS X....

At least 18 million Americans have no access to broadband Internet connectivity, and the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission wants to do something about that. Julius Genachowski sketched out a proposal at the FCC offices Thursday that would shift subsidies from telecom services in rural areas to broadband Internet access The FCC ...

Sprint isn't just the newest U.S. carrier of Apple's iPhone -- it's also going to be the only one in the country to offer an unlimited data plan for new users The wireless provider will join AT&T and Verizon in carrying both the iPhone 4 and the recently announced iPhone 4S, an upgraded version that runs faster, has more memory and has new features...

In a recent decision (Tucows.com Co. v. Lojas Renner S.A.), the Ontario Court of Appeal allowed the appeal by Tucows in a case involving the right to keep the domain name "renner.com" in light of the registered trademark "Renner" owned by Lojas Renner ("Renner"). The issue centered on whether domain names could be considered "personal property" su...

Yesware has gone to market with a new cloud-based email productivity application that is based on the simplest of concepts: Salespeople hate to waste time inputting data into their CRM systems. However, companies need that data salespeople hate to bother with. Ergo, a system that automatically inputs the data from work that salespeople are already doing -- that is, sending emails -- would save a lot of time and frustration.

The link between open innovation and open source has long been documented. That there is a significant correlation is obvious and not arguable, but to what extent is there causation? And in what direction? Open innovation describes a process, whereas open source -- as well as its predecessor, free software -- has traditionally described a product ...

Adolescents growing up in a digital, highly mobile world are increasingly coming to grips with questions of ethics and behavior, with mixed results On the one hand, cyberpranking and cyberharrassment have increased. On the other, more kids are willing to intervene when they see cyberharrassment....

A team of physicists at Rice University have created an "electron superhighway" that could one day be useful for building a quantum computer -- a machine that would utilize quantum particles instead of the digital transistors in today's microchips Rui-Rui Du, a professor of physics and astronomy, and graduate student Ivan Knez describe the new meth...

My friend Hank retired from the Coast Guard after a 20-year career, and now he's pursuing a second career of service as the executive director for the Alameda Food Bank, another truly worthy career path During a recent party, we got to talking about work -- me about CRM, him about the food bank. As it turns out, the food bank had a need for CRM, mu...

The Android community is abuzz with speculation about Samsung's plans for its Unpacked event on Oct. 11 at the upcoming CTIA Enterprise & Applications Conference to be held in San Diego Some rumors suggest Samsung will unveil the latest item in the Android Nexus family of smartphones, while others speculate that the device will be a tablet....

Recent corporate shake-ups at Yahoo and anonymous insider reports to various media outlets added fuel to the fiery rumors that Microsoft is eyeing an acquisition of the search engine Though Microsoft reportedly denied assertions that it was looking into buying Yahoo, the search engine's stock value jumped 10 percent on the rumors that a purchase wa...

In October of 2010, I wrote an article for the E-Commerce Times entitled "Can the USPS Be Saved?" The point of my article was that the U.S. Postal Service needs a new business model that addresses the present-day realities of e-mail and e-commerce. Despite my intent to focus on the need for a new business model, the article drew some nasty comments and blog responses from the American Postal Workers Union.