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Dell announced Thursday it has entered into merger talks with Compellent Technologies, offering US$27.50 per share for a total of nearly $900 million. The offer is below Compellent's stock price on Wednesday of $33.65 a share While acquisition bids are typically slightly above stock price, Dell may see Compellent's share price as distorted. Be...

The VGA port, the connection that's bridged computers to their monitors almost from the birth of the PC industry, is on its way out Chip manufacturers Intel and AMD, with backing from various computer vendors, have announced their support for the venerable technology will be phased out by 2015....

Former President Bill Clinton's keynote speech Wednesday at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco was delayed because his flight came in late, so Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff got entertainer Stevie Wonder on stage to talk about his life When president Clinton finally appeared almost an hour late at 5:50 p.m., Wonder introduced him....

Netflix is spending big time to become the dominant video streaming player in the nascent Web-TV world. On Wednesday, Netflix announced it has reached an agreement with Walt Disney to stream ABC programs through its online service The deal will last one year with an option to extend for an estimated US$150 to $200 million, The Los Angeles Time...

Cyberattacks this week by supporters of Wikileaks on the home sites of Visa and MasterCard may have been designed to grab headlines rather than actually disrupt the companies' financial operations The wave of electronic assaults, referred to as "Operation Payback" by the activists mounting the attacks, were aimed at the home sites of the credit car...

At Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2010 conference this week, EDL Consulting showed off version 2.0 of CloudCraze, which it touts as the first e-commerce platform built natively on Force.com CloudCraze is claimed to provide the functionality of more expensive enterprise multi-channel commerce packages at a fraction of the price, and its implementation ...

Every opportunity has a life span. Think about its course like a line or a wave that goes up then it comes down again. Fortunes are created, then lost, then created again. New technologies replace old technologies, and then they are replaced by newer technologies. If you know what's coming next, and what point the wave is at, you can take advantage of these opportunities in your work or investments. Let me explain.

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event is now 10 years old, and it's reached the stage where it draws a true sample of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, there are plenty of Salesforce personnel and vendors whose products work with Salesforce, but there is an increasing number of real customers. For me, one of the really exciting things is how many o...

Without breaking the bank, Microsoft's research division and the University of Washington astronomy department have teamed up to bring new light to an old technology: the planetarium Nearly three thousand planetariums dot the U.S. terrestrial landscape, featuring celestial shows about stars, planets, solar systems and galaxies, often projected onto...

Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will add a "do not track" option to the next version of Internet Explorer 9 when it is released in 2011. The Tracking Protection feature is a privacy tool designed to help keep third-party websites from monitoring users' Web behavior by letting users filter content on a page that may have an impact on privacy ...

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff devoted much of his keynote speech at Dreamforce on Wednesday on lashing out at Microsoft "There are forces out there that want to stop us," Benioff told his audience at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco. "We're trying to transform our industry, and when you try to transform an industry, you have an old indus...

Private commercial space travel took one small step for humankind Wednesday morning as the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. Dragon space capsule in tow, the Falcon 9 represents a US$400 million investment from, among others, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who cofounded online payment company Paypal.

At Google's Chrome OS event and demo on Tuesday, one of the participants was Amazon. The company chose this venue -- a competitor's product strategy launch -- to introduce an upgrade to its own go-to-market approach: the Kindle Web app. Now users can buy and read entire books from their browser without having to download special software. Also, publishers, authors and bloggers will be able to sell Kindle books through their own sites...

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Heroku, a cloud application platform It will pay about US$212 million in cash, net of cash acquired....

What's the difference between a browser and an operating system? Or, can Google take on Microsoft is its sweet spot -- the Windows operating system? Google held a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday announcing Google Chrome OS, an Internet-based operating system that has been launched in beta version on a laptop known simply as "Cr-48." By next summer, both Acer and Samsung will release laptops with Chrome OS and Intel chips...

Well, it's Wednesday at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce in San Francisco, and the excitement is palpable. A huge crowd stood in line waiting for the doors to the keynote conference room to open, which they did at about 8:15 a.m. They were supposed to open at 8 Once again, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff came on late. This time he appeared ...

IBM has released the second Software as a Service offering in its Tivoli Live portfolio: its IT service desk. Called "Tivoli Live-service manager," this release follows last year's Tivoli Live-monitoring service, a SaaS app that manages the health and performance of IT resources The IT service desk SaaS is identical to its on-premise counterpart, i...

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said in his 1964 Order that he could not use words to describe pornography, but "I know it when I see it." Even though judges may not be able to define "social media," they generally understand the complex circumstances in legal disputes. However, social media is transforming the way we communicate...

It's sort of like the funny story about a young person discovering that Paul McCartney was in another group before Wings. Marc Benioff had another company sandwiched in between his Oracle days and founding Salesforce.com. So for those of us who knew that, Database.com had the same kind of retro vibe when it was announced at Dreamforce. Database....

Mind map tools offer users a system to graphically think through complex ideas in a somewhat controlled space on the computer screen. This type of software makes it easy to link related ideas with lines, branches and multiple colors in much the same way you would "think" about a topic with a scratch pad and pencil. Think of mind mapping as a form of electronic brainstorming...