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Reports surfaced recently that SAP shelled out US$120 million to Oracle agreeing not to seek punitive damages in the latter's lawsuit against the company. However, SAP spokesperson Saswato Das ducked questions on this topic....

You may recall that even though this is a technology column, I did predict that Nancy Pelosi would be a problem for Obama, and that both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina would lose. A few of us have been discussing this, and what was missing in all three cases is leadership. In the technology market, the most visible leader is Apple and the stron...

Dell plans to relieve its employees of their company-provided Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones in favor of Dell's own devices, company spokesperson Jess Blackburn told the E-Commerce Times Many of its 25,000 employees could begin receiving Dell's Venue Pro, which runs Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7, as early as next week, and they eventua...

Microsoft's Kinect game device has been flying off retailers' shelves since its release Thursday, according to reports. So far, some users have been impressed with the video game device's ability to track a player's body movement, while others have discovered problems with it ...

Information Technology managers often find themselves between a rock and hard place when it comes to IT budgets. Spend too much and they come under scrutiny; spend too little and they find themselves at the center of frustration and dissatisfaction. Unfortunately, Information Technology is a beast with an insatiable appetite -- it has to be consta...

Shoutlet, which last year launched an app designed to help companies manage their social media operations, has expanded its feature set to include CRM functionality. ...

Google on Wednesday released mod_pagespeed, a module for the Apache HTTP Server that will automatically perform various website speed optimization tasks This includes 15 or so on-the-fly optimizations....

Over the past year, the IT world has seemingly fallen head over heels for the cloud. Cloud computing has great potential in terms of collaboration and efficiency, and it's already delivering strong results for organizations that have leveraged the cloud model. For all the hype, though, it's important not to overlook one of the most basic yet cruci...

In her third trial, Minnesota resident Jammie Thomas-Rasset -- whose fame has extended well beyond the proverbial 15 minutes -- was once again slapped with a fine for sharing 24 songs. On Wednesday, the jury awarded US$1.5 million in damages to Capitol Records. That's $62,500 for each of the 24 songs Thomas-Rasset illegally shared through Kazaa in 2006...

Facebook pulled the wraps off its new mobile platform Wednesday at a special event held at its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. The offerings in the platform were designed to appeal to consumers, businesses and developers and to expand the reach of the social network's geolocation technology, Places For many of the social network's fans and follow...

When you think of wireless networks, which companies do you think of? Companies like AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile, right? Next question: Which do you think are the marketing innovators in that same space? Would you believe it's not the big four? Instead, it is companies like U.S. Cellular and Cellular South. I'll discuss why these t...

Cisco on Wednesday announced two products and a rich media capture platform to extend its contact center capabilities One product is SocialMiner, software that lets companies search the Web for relevant material. The other product is Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care representatives....

Have you ever held a magnifying glass to your computer monitor and counted the pixels one by one? That's the level of detail revealed about your website by search engine crawlers: every word, title, image, meta tag and load time for every page. They know more about your site than you do What crawlers learn feeds search engine algorithms that determ...

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association -- a case stemming from a 2005 law passed in California that forbids the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. Lower courts subsequently struck down the law, pointing to precedent that establishes the government's ability to rest...

If you use Gmail, you received an unusual email late last night from Google. The company sent a notice to its millions of U.S.-based Gmail users announcing the settlement of its privacy class-action lawsuit over Buzz. Google launched the social networking service last February. Soon after, a privacy uproar ensued One problem was that Google ad...

Since the early 1990s, companies have moved applications development and maintenance work to lower labor-cost countries, to varying degrees. Often referred to as "offshoring" or "outsourcing," this labor arbitrage has had an important effect on businesses' ability to reduce costs of ADM. Although cost take-out continues to be a primary CIO focus -...

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable Last week, Harvard Business Review released a report sponsor...

One of the lingering concerns potential Linux users have is the worry of leaving behind Windows software they have relied on for playing audio and video files. That used to be a valid concern. But it isn't something to worry about any more ...

Managing a data center is more complicated than ever with the growing sophistication and interconnectedness of enterprise applications, networks and now private and public cloud resources. The challenges created by these interwoven infrastructures are difficult to overcome without the right tools. One important weapon in the data center manager's...

SCVNGR, a Boston-based company that offers a mobile real-world game ofthe same name, announced on Tuesday that it's going global SCVNGR's a social game based on geo-location that lets players link upwith friends on Facebook and Twitter....