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Several mobile carriers, including AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, are working on a project that would allow consumers to use their smartphones to make purchases, thus displacing debt and credit cards. The project, reported by the Bloomberg news service, appears ready to roll out with a test scheduled for Atlanta and three other U.S. cities. Discover Financial Services and Barclays are said to be working on the trial project...

Enabling people to register and check out using an existing identity from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or other provider is one of the most powerful tools to emerge in the last few years. Signing people in through an established online identity not only streamlines the process, but also gives your business a head start on building deeper relationship...

Over my 30-year career as a supply chain business process consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with some of the largest corporations in the world -- so imagine my surprise when many of these companies told me that they were continuing to have problems with their supply chain. Even more surprising was that most of their problems stemmed fro...

The latest version of the Linux kernel was released on Sunday, offering not just a host of bug fixes but also new features designed for multicore environments Most notably, tapping technology contributed by Google, Linux version 2.6.35 includes Receive Packet Steering (RPS) and Receive Flow Steering (RFS) features that help to spread network handli...

As much as I'd like to review the Verizon Droid X from a perspective utterly unpolluted by bias, preconceptions and ingrained habits, that's just not going to happen. The problem is, I'm a human being. Not only that, but I'm also a human being who's been using a certain other smartphone of note as my daily driver for a few years. No matter how oft...

The time Americans devote to social networking sites and blogs has jumped dramatically in the last year, according to new figures from Nielsen. People in the U.S. spent nearly a quarter of their online time -- 22.7 percent -- on social networks and blogs in June 2010. That was up from 15.8 percent in June 2009, for a 43 percent increase The next mo...

The United Arab Emirates announced on Sunday that BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry Web browsing services will be suspended in the UAE as of October 11 "BlackBerry data is immediately exported offshore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organization," the federation's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) exp...

Entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists worldwide are being offered US$1 million for developing a better way of cleaning up crude oil spills from oceans The competition is being organized by the X Prize Foundation, and it will run for one year.

There's no question that the substantial growth of the cloud computing market has become a hot topic, generating almost as much debate and conversation as it has confusion. Many etailers have already realized the benefits of cloud computing, but the different types of public and private clouds and cloud services -- such as Infrastructure as a Serv...

There's a slew of CRM applications heading to mobile app format, available at online venues such as Apple's App Store and the Google Apps Marketplace. Social CRM, in particular, is on the vanguard as vendors optimize their applications for mobile use. One example is BatchBlue Software, a company targeting small business users. BatchBlue launched i...

Last week, Microsoft held its Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM). Companies hold these to showcase their offerings and initiatives to the analysts that take positions on the firm, and given how regularly Apple and Google have appeared to be kicking Microsoft around lately, it is well past time Microsoft got up and told its own story. So I figure i...

Facebook has jumped into the online Q&A space -- typified, up until now, by such websites as Quora, Aardvark, Hunch, Ask.com, and Yahoo Answers -- with Facebook Questions, a beta feature that can be viewed by all Facebook users. The service is being released on a rolling basis, with reportedly some three million to five million people able to use ...

Microsoft's tablet project is a top priority for the company, CEO Steve Baller told financial analysts at a presentation Thursday However, he remained coy on the details....

YouTube uploaders who wish to follow 60s pop-art icon Andy Warhol's advice and grasp their 15 minutes of fame now can do so fully. YouTube has raised the maximum length limit on submissions from 10 to 15 minutes, announced Product Manager Joshua Siegel on the company blog. While an additional five minutes may seem trivial to some, it represents an increase of 50 percent in video length, which is significant...

Amazon's new, slimmed-down Kindle devices are notable for several things, not the least of which are the upgrades to their experimental WebKit browser It's faster and easier to navigate, says Amazon, and its new "article mode" feature extracts the main text-based content from Web pages for easier reading....

When many individuals attempted to watch the recent World Cup games online, depending on where they were located and from which website they tried to view them, they may have found the following statement on their screen: "The requested video cannot be displayed in your region" rather than the game itself. That pop-up message was due to "geo-bl...

As companies continue their search for the elusive "360-degree view" of their prospective clients, harvesting all the scattered information from social networks (free) and other content providers (paid) about these prospects can potentially be beneficial for the purposes of deploying more finely targeted sales and marketing campaigns. In fact, rec...

Personal data about millions of Android users could be sent to a mysterious Chinese website thanks to a set of wallpaper apps in the Android Market That's according to mobile security firm Lookout, which discovered the questionable apps as part of its new App Genome Project, an effort to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight int...

Microsoft recently announced record revenues of US$16.04 billion for its fourth fiscal quarter of the year, which ended June 30. This was 22 percent up year over year. Operating income, net income and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were up 49 percent, 48 percent and 50 percent, respectively, year over year The company provided relativel...

It's likely not illegal, and it may not even be improper, but the fact that security consultant Ron Bowes gathered and aggregated the information from about 100 million Facebook profiles has created quite a stir. Bowes created his data torrent to aid the development of a password-cracking-protection tool, he has said in interviews with a number of media outlets. To do that, he needed the names of many thousands of individuals and the user names they likely would have on an account...