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Google will launch a Chrome OS tablet on the Verizon network Nov. 26, know to retailers as "Black Friday," according to the Download Squad The device is being built by HTC, a company that's made several Android devices in the past....

Roughly six months after it launched an investigation into the allegations at the heart of the Blake Robbins v. the Lower Merion School District school spying case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced on Tuesday that no charges will be filed "After a thorough review of the evidence in this matter by my office, the Federal Bureau of Invest...

Search engine optimization is the least expensive method of getting visitors to a website, Ralph Wilson, founder and editor-in-chief of Web Marketing Today, told the audience at the SES Conference and Expo in San Francisco Tuesday In a presentation on SEO basics, Wilson outlined tips on how to get the most out of SEO....

In the mid-to-late 1980s, colleagues and friends were surprised when I transitioned from working as an on-camera investigative TV reporter to cover the then-fledgling high-technology industry for specialized trade magazines After all, they reasoned, how could I be content covering semiconductors, memory boards, server hardware, software and compute...

Part 1 of this two-part series explored the tendency of some disgruntled customers to air their gripes online Last week I looked at an interesting downside of social media. Social media makes it possible for anyone with very little effort to start a blog or social group that thrashes a vendor. Generally speaking, the people behind these sites hav...

The world of open source software has ample choices for editing andmanipulating audio and video media files. But when you just want putyour feet up and relax, fewer really ideal options are available. Onesolid choice is the Gxine is a media player (See my review here). Butan even better pick is the VLC Media Player ...

Lyric Semiconductor, a spinout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, announced on Tuesday a new approach to a technology called "probability processing." Probability processing uses probability bits, which calculate the probability of an event happening. This technology required the company to redesign processors to natively process proba...

The BlackBerry Torch 9800 has been widely viewed as Research In Motion's best shot at regaining even footing in its battle with rivals Apple and Google in the smartphone arena, but after just a few days on the market, the device's price has already been slashed Some 150,000 of the handsets were sold over the weekend, according to a report in The Wa...

How many times have we all seen comments like this on a Facebook status update: "Not like, but dislike," or "I'd press Dislike if there was a button." It's a common complaint about the social networking site's comment options; one can press the "Like" button to give a thumbs-up to a friend's post, but there is no analogous "Dislike" button Now, ent...

While financial cybercrime against card-not-present retailers has many forms, "friendly fraud" has emerged as a particularly painful thorn in the side of e-commerce merchants. Defined as a situation in which a customer disputes a legitimate credit card transaction, falsely claiming fraud or non-delivery of goods, friendly fraud is extremely hard for retailers to identify and nearly as costly to their business as criminal fraud. ...

Less than 15 years ago, establishing a global presence was a conscious decision that a company made. It usually involved long and complex discussions about offices, physical presence and physical travel. With the advent of the Web, all of that changed in an instant. With the establishment of a website, every company, no matter how big or small, wa...

Just a day after Oracle filed suit against Google for its use of Java in Android, the FOSS community received another blow at the hands of the tech giant in the form of news that it plans to kill the OpenSolaris project "All of Oracle's efforts on binary distributions of Solaris technology will be focused on Solaris 11," reads an internal e-mail th...

Imagine this situation: A coworker calls you in a panic. He's facing a fast-approaching deadline, and you are the only person who can help him succeed in getting some critical task done. This hypothetical coworker explains to you what he's working on and how it's critical to the success of the organization in some way; he's at his wits' end in trying to accomplish a portion of that task (say, downloading a critical file from an internal file server), and he's asking you in desperation to help him out. Would you help him? ...

There was a time, early this decade, when every day saw a new technology company make an initial public offering (IPO). Talk of stock options and vesting schedules was common coffee break fare. Lately, the flow of capital for startups is much more like a trickle, and IPOs are sparse. Still, some partnership or venture-backed companies are managing to make it to market, and Hulu may be one of the next big ones, according to widely published reports...

The US$1.15 billion that Dell has pledged to spend for data storage vendor 3Par could turn out to be a wise investment if Dell is able to use 3Par's assets -- its product line and its sales and support staff -- to carve out a position at the high end of the storage market Dell announced its intent to purchase 3Par on Monday. "This definitely seems ...

Green tech company A123 on Monday launched a spinoff, 24M, which will commercialize next-generation energy storage systems based on its technology 24M has received funding from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, as well as venture capitalists....

The Stuxnet worm, which targets industrial control systems, or "SCADA" systems, is one of the most sophisticated bits of digital malware security researchers have come across in a long time. Now, those researchers want to know where it came from. Was Stuxnet the product of a den of hackers working on their own accord, or did a national government somewhere in the world have a hand in its creation?...

Young folk under 30 may not remember this, but years ago "plug and play" referred to hardware installation for computers. As the information revolution penetrated American households, consumers demanded setup procedures that did not require an advanced degree in computer science. Today, this process is standard for almost all hardware This plug-an...

Sybase has only recently formally entered the SAP corporate family. However, the two companies have collaborated on software integration projects for years: hence, the introduction of Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM, a native iPhone app When designing the app, Sybase took the iPhone user needs into account, Bryan Whitmarsh, senior product manager i...

I spent last week on Mark Hurd's firing, er involuntary resignation, and watched the backstory develop, and it isn't pretty. Hurd was likely the third-hardest guy to fire in Silicon Valley behind Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison -- and yet, at least initially, he seemed to be fired as a result of a false accusation of sexual harassment leading to a global WTF moment.