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Google has introduced a change to its search offerings -- a new feature called "Google Instant" -- that has online advertisers wringing their hands over its implications. Google Instant lets users see results as they're typing a query. Each letter and word triggers its own predictive search. The user, who doesn't even have to hit the enter key any...

T-Mobile officially unveiled its G2 smartphone, the successor to the world's first Android-powered mobile phone, touting its faster Web-browsing experience and direct integration with Google services The G2, which is designed specifically for T-Mobile's new HSPA+ network, features downloads at "4G speeds," according to T-Mobile. The network is expe...

Adobe has acknowledged that its widely used programs for creating and reading PDF files currently are under attack by hackers, but it has offered little information about how it plans to thwart the assault. In an advisory posted on its website Wednesday, Adobe said essentially all versions of its Acrobat and Reader programs running on Windows, Mac...

I love smartphones, but I have not found the perfect one yet. I have tried countless devices for years. I come close, but I've never settled on the perfect phone -- and trust me, I have tried many. The good news is there are many great features to choose from. The bad news is they are all on different devices. Trying to find one device with all the features you love seems to be an impossible task.

If you're in the CRM industry, you may have a slightly skewed view of the world when it comes to CRM penetration. Many of my peers, when they hear about a company that still uses a home-brew system to manage sales, marketing and service, are aghast. With hundreds of applications out there and thousands of man-years of thought behind it, how can a business remain without a formal CRM application? To paraphrase Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, it's inconceivable!...

YouTube's daily tally of roughly two billion downloads proves that viewing video is among the most popular activities among Internet users. Now Adobe, creator of the ubiquitous Flash Player, has introduced several solutions that could make video standard fare on corporate networks as well These new tools are embedded in Flash Media Server 4, the la...

Google on Wednesday announced what it says are even faster Web search capabilities in its new "Google Instant" service Billed as "search before you type," the new feature uses predictive analysis to search the Web for the most likely matches as the user is typing in a query and streams results in real time according to its predictions....

Salesforce.com has announced it is making its social tool Chatter available for mobile devices within the next several months Chatter Mobile offers much of the same functionality that's available with the desktop version of Chatter, which was generally released in June....

A federal appeals court has ruled that prosecutors may need to get warrants to access cellphone location data The decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Justice Department's argument that the Stored Communications Act requires judges to issue orders for access to such data whenever prosecutors show that it would be materi...

With little fanfare or warning, in 2006, the U.S. enacted the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). This legislation outlawed Internet gambling and restricted how financial institutions could pay monies to Internet gambling sites. The UIGEA resulted from four major policy concerns of the federal government. First, the Internet was...

Have you run a virus scan lately? Nope? Don't need to, you say. That's because you run a Linux OS Think again. To quote the title line of Bob Dylan's third studio album, "the times they are a-changin.'"...

Online commerce is in its prime. Never before has a similar priority been placed on Web presence by organizations in every industry. Even brick-and-mortar companies are scrambling to put their best foot forward in the online world and not be eclipsed by their more technology-savvy competitors. E-commerce vendors spend huge amounts of resources on elaborate, logical websites that are designed to lead the end-user to conversion. There is one factor, however, that is commonly overlooked in the process: performance...

Mark Hurd, the former CEO of HP who resigned in disgrace last month, has joined Oracle as co-president. At the same time, Charles Phillips, co-president and a member of Oracle's board of directors, has resigned. Hurd will serve alongside Co-President Safra Catz Wall Street investors are excited about the move: Oracle's shares wereup by 5 percent on...

Samsung may begin building televisions with the Android operating system built in, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday Yoon Boo Keun, head of Samsung's TV business line, reportedly said the company is reviewing whether to use Android, an OS more commonly found in various smartphones, in a new line of TV sets....

First a caveat: As part of my work, I attend a lot of IT vendor conferences and high-tech trade shows. Objectively speaking, most shows provide the means to literally and figuratively peek under the hood of usually interesting, sometimes intriguing vendor products and solutions. But conferences also have a subjective side; along with trumpeting the latest/greatest IT advances, they provide an ideal opportunity to consider how much buzz a given vendor or technology is generating.

Part 1 of this three-part series discusses the "positive feedback loop" tying the evolution of mobile device technologies to the evolution of cloud computing. Part 2 addresses the cloud's role in shifting the balance of power among from carriers and manufacturers to end-users While the cloud appears to be the ultimate jailbreaker, it is prudent to ...

This story was originally published on June 1, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Empty office space litters skylines, freeways and office parks. Once-busy hives of cubicles have become empty steel and concrete caverns. Their previous occupants met with a variety of fates: Some were victims of a deep recessio...

This story was originally published on June 3, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. Business software has long been described as "front office" and "back office," which essentially mirrors the arrangement of real-world processes within most businesses. That arrangement made sense in the past -- what went on wit...

The entire future of a company or industry can hinge on one little deal. The US$50,000 IBM paid to license Windows was the foundation for Microsoft and the technology industry for the last couple of decades. Apple's licensing contract with Portal Player to create the iPod was nearly as big -- and certainly huge for that company. The sale of 3Par could also be one of those pivotal deals, as huge firms like HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, Cisco and EMC position themselves around the new "cloud" opportunity. ...

This story was originally published on June 3, 2010, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. With the rise of connected devices, mobile app developers are now center stage -- but juggling all the operating systems and form factors is an increasingly difficult act to perform. The challenge is to deliver a crowd-pleasing ...