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Apple, Google and others have entered into a bidding war for the patents held by Nortel Networks, which is liquidating its assets in bankruptcy, Reuters reported Monday. Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2009 but failed to emerge successfully and began selling assets in mid-2009 Nortel holds 4,000 patents grouped int...

By any measure, IBM Connect, the annual IT analyst summit hosted by the company's Software Group (SWG), should have been a walk in the park. After all, the event followed close on the heels of IBM's System and Technology (STG) analyst briefing, and the central purpose of both events was to punctuate the company's 2009 decision to unite SWG and STG under a single banner and leader -- SVP and Group Executive Steve Mills.

LiveOps is a cloud-based company that has two businesses. It began by providing call center outsourcing services through a network of more than 20,000 independent home-based agents, then began offering its contact center Platform as a Service Monster.com describes LiveOps as the nation's largest domestic outsourced call center....

A tweet that may prove sweet for Google's bottom line has sparked discussion about what constitutes public relations in the age of social media "There are over 300,000 Android phones activated each day," Google Android development director Andy Rubin -- aka Twitter user "Arubin" -- tweeted Dec. 8 to 18,205 followers....

The U.S. government has largely failed to achieve the same productivity gains that private sector firms have experienced from utilizing IT -- despite spending US$600 billion on information technology over the last decade or so. As a result, the federal Office of Management and Budget has initiated a new program to improve the way federal agencies acquire and manage IT resources...

Hackers struck at the Gawker blog network's servers over the weekend, stealing more than 1 million rows of data, including cracked passwords Gawker has been scurrying to revamp security on its servers as a result, and has put up an FAQ page on this issue....

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a patent lawsuit Interval Licensing -- Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's company -- filed last August in Seattle against 11 firms, including Apple and Google. Interval claims the defendants violated four patents owned by Paul Allen's company Interval Research on technologies it developed before it folded in 2000. When the company closed, it transferred the patents to Interval Licensing...

Google's testing program for its open source Chrome operating system is no ordinary beta. The company is inviting applications to be one of the reportedly 60,000 users who will be part of the beta test and receive a Cr-48 netbook loaded with Chrome OS. Google reportedly is signing up beta testers by U.S. ZIP code -- rather than on a first-come-first-served basis -- to get broad input...

Dissident staff members at WikiLeaks, led by that site's former spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg, reportedly plan to launch a spinoff to be named "OpenLeaks." This may be unveiled as early as next week....

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides customers with a complete customer service solution, including marketing, service automation and sales capabilities. Microsoft currently offers Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as either an on-premise option or a partner-hosted version; Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is a version that customers can subscribe to on a per-us...

As we end 2010, 2011 is looking to be a relatively violent year when it comes to technology and technology companies. As I write this, there are folkscalling the attacks by Wikileaks supporters a cyberwar, but I think it is more of a cyber-revolt, and the difference is important. That difference is highlighted by the now declared war between Ora...

Some of the busiest shopping days are right around the corner, as more consumers wait until the final weeks before the holidays to cross everyone off their lists. With holiday online shopping numbers at an all-time high, retailers understand that the Web is a critical sales channel. What they might be overlooking, however, is just how influential social networks have become in the shopping process -- both online and off...

In the wake of Pentagon-based U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's leaks of thousands of files from SIPRNET -- the Defense Department's internal version of the Internet -- to Wikileaks, all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces are ordering troops to stop using portable or removable media Military personnel caught using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives or other rem...

In protest over what it sees as excessive control over Java by Oracle, the Apache Software Foundation has resigned from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee on Thursday. Apache has served on the Java Executive Committee for more than 10 years Apache's departure follows the EC's approval of the specifications for Java SE (Standard Edition) 7 and ...

A long-simmering legal dispute between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and two former Harvard University classmates is back in the public eye after partially redacted court documents filed this summer in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court surfaced on Radar Online.com. The documents, which apparently were leaked to the site, were fi...

In what looks like a poke in the eye at Microsoft, Google has introduced Google Message Continuity, a service designed to safeguard Exchange messages through Gmail. The Postini-based service targets those who run Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007. It is designed to make sure users never lose access to email during an Exchange outage -- whether planned or unplanned...

As the year winds to an end, it is incumbent on all industry pundits to make predictions about what they envision for the coming year. Since I'm often lumped into this category, I'm obliged to offer my views about how the world will evolve over the next 12 months from a cloud computing perspective. First, I'd like to quickly review the pivotal opp...

Email marketing has been a mainstay marketing tool for 10 years or more. When social media's clout with consumers became apparent -- Facebook now has 500 million users and counting -- there was much talk about whether email marketing was even still relevant Email marketing providers responded quickly with the argument that it is not only still rele...

Once again playing coy with a major company announcement, Google engineering vice president and Android development director Andy Rubin tweeted Thursday that more than 300,000 Android phones are activated daily It was only Rubin's second tweet, and followed his sneak-a-peek presentation of Android's new Honeycomb tablet computer Monday night at the...

In today's world of converged communications, businesses are relying more than ever on VoIP-based technologies to fuel work group collaboration and drive advanced business processes that are expected to reduce costs and deliver significant ROI. But successfully achieving these benefits means VoIP-based communications must deliver high availability...