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Oracle announced Tuesday that it will acquire Art Technology Group (ATG) -- a provider of e-commerce applications and platforms -- for US$6.00 per share, or approximately $1 billion in cash. Oracle and ATG both pointed to the complementary nature of their applications ATG provides an e-commerce platform that includes a cross-channel blend of o...

Google has filed a federal suit against the U.S. Department of the Interior, alleging that the agency inappropriately favored Microsoft as it crafted the requirements for a messaging platform it wanted to procure The suit, which seeks to have DoI conduct a competitive procurement process for the contract, is valued at US$59 million over five years....

Last week's announcements centering on Intel's "Cloud 2015" vision represent one of the more intriguing cloud computing efforts to date. How so? First, out of the gate Cloud 2015 is resolutely client-facing. The related Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) boasts over 70 large enterprise members such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed ...

The very same corporations that are making small fortunes with Linux servers give short shrift to Linux Desktop, I argued in a recent article, setting off a spirited discussion. Many of you responded with counterarguments, siding -- surprisingly -- with businesses. Perhaps not surprisingly, I continue to maintain that my original centention -- tha...

Google's wow factor is still at large -- this time in a self-driving car that's tootling about California in a series of test runs. It's easy to get carried away with the dream of a personal (albeit automated) chauffeur and the implied robotic "get out of jail free card." The inebriated and textholics among us -- and possibly speeders, light runners and the accident prone too -- are relishing the thought. But is this dream likely to blow into reality -- or just get blown apart?...

Nearly one in four stars similar to the sun may host planets as small as Earth, according to a new study funded by NASA and the University of California. Astronomers used the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii for five years to search 166 sun-like stars near our solar system for planets of various sizes, ranging from three to 1,000 times the mass of ...

Apple ousted Research In Motion from its top spot in the U.S. smartphone market in the third quarter, according to a report Canalys released on Monday, which showed no letup in iPhone shipments. In terms of smartphone operating systems, Google's Android OS held a commanding lead, with a 44 percent share of the U.S. market....

It was pretty much all about the cloud at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, held last week at its Redmond, Wash., corporate campus CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives spoke about how the software giant's latest developments span the PC, the mobile phone and the cloud....

If you're responsible for supporting product sales through the retail channel for your client, there is no doubt you're experienced in search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), keywords, SERPs, ad banners, click-through rates and more. Most search activities involve either driving a consumer to the manufacturer's site or to the retail site where the product is sold. Yet it's what happens once a consumer gets to the retail site that is often the most important. ...

Online consumers are more demanding than ever. They have little, if any, tolerance for website issues, poor site design or longer-than-necessary processes. For organizations with e-commerce channels, this leaves little margin for error. In fact, research indicates that when saddled with an unsatisfying online experience, visitors are likely to abandon their transactions and take their business elsewhere. ...

This may be election week, but the big political battle isn't really the mid-term elections -- it's the drama going on between Oracle and HP with the unprecedented action of Oracle's CEO and founder calling HP's new CEO a thief in what appears to be a massive pre-emptive effort to discredit the man. However, like the elections, I think this is mostly smoke to cover up other problems Oracle has, and that's what I'll focus on this political week.

Microsoft reported strong revenue and solid earnings Thursday, with particular strength in Windows sales during its first fiscal quarter ending September 30. Revenue set a Q1 record of US$16.20 billion, up 25 percent year-over-year. Net income was a healthy $5.41 billion CFO Peter Klein pointed to strong consumer demand for Office 2010, Windo...

Samsung is reported to be working on the Google Nexus Two smartphone that will run Gingerbread, the latest version of the Android operating system The buzz is that Samsung will unveil the phone at a press conference it called for Nov.8....

Facebook has introduced another new product to keep its 500 million user base engaged -- Friendship Pages, a new element to a Facebook page that displays content and connections shared between two friends. The page may contain photos in which they've both been tagged, wall posts, comments exchanged, events to which they've both RSVP'd, mutual friends and mutual "likes."

E-commerce continues to experience significant growth. In fact, in 2009, e-commerce sales grew by 5.5 percent to US$205 billion. Online retail sales are expected to increase by another 12.7 percent in 2010, according to Javelin Research. While the research proves that e-commerce sales will continue to gain popularity as technology advances, there ...

Swix has enhanced its original application, Swix Analytics -- a dashboard that tracks ad campaigns and subsequent user engagement across 20 social media communities -- with a new product that tracks the returns those campaigns are delivering. Swix Social Marketer, currently available in beta, is embedded in the original dashboard once a client sig...

There is no doubt that the complexity of managing IT continues to grow. Transaction volumes are ever-growing, applications are interwoven with Web services, and workers are adopting the newest mobile devices-du-jour. The impact of social media and the Web continues to vex IT security managers. Then there's the case of enterprise software, which runs the business...

China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, at a high-performance computing conference in Beijing ...

Consumer privacy advocates are outraged that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided to stop investigating why Google was collecting personal information transmitted by users over private WiFi networks. Google has admitted to collecting such data -- which in some cases included individual emails and user passwords -- in the course of mappin...

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison insisted on Wednesday that recently appointed HP CEO Leo Apotheker knew of the theft of Oracle's software while he was CEO of SAP Ellison also dismissed HP chairman Ray Lane's statement that Apotheker didn't know anything about the theft as an "absurd lie."