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Clicker Media on Thursday publicly launched Clicker.com, its programming guide to Internet television. This comes less than a year after the company began building what it describes as the "ultimate programming guide for Internet television." ...

Rival chip companies Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have forged an agreement to settle their legal conflicts. AMD has agreed to drop its litigation against Intel. In exchange, Intel will pay AMD US$1.25 billion and promise to follow certain business rules as the two continue to compete head to head. The deal includes a five-year cross-license renewal. ...

Ten years after national commercial platforms for mobile commerce were launched in the Philippines and Japan, the United States is slowly beginning to creep into the field. Residents in rural parts of the Philippines and other developing nations routinely pay bills through their smartphones, while people in Japan and Europe can buy products as wel...

Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social media monitoring activities for more than two years, while 44 percent have put their toes in the water only within the past 12 months.

In the world of search engine optimization, a perennial argument is whether Google's ranking factors look for clean code in a Web site. The W3C has developed two popular tools that check Web sites for errors: The W3C validation tool looks at HTML code, while the CSS validation tool checks the CSS Style Sheet. These free tools scan all of a site's code to make sure it is compliant with current Web standards. [*Correction - Nov. 12, 2009]...

Users of Google's location-aware mobile software can now track their whereabouts over time and receive alerts when contacts are nearby, thanks to two features added to the software on Tuesday The free application, Google Latitude, introduced earlier this year for a variety of cellphones, was originally designed to let friends see each other's locat...

Google on Tuesday announced an experimental new computer programming language called "Go." This combines the development speed of dynamic languages such as Python with the performance and safety of compiled languages like C or C++, the Internet search giant said....

PC peripherals maker Logitech has announced it is acquiring LifeSize Communications for US$405 million in an all-cash transaction. The purchase of the high-end video equipment manufacturer places Logitech squarely in the middle of the enterprise video-conferencing industry. Acquiring LifeSize's high-definition video communication applications -- n...

The Xbox Live community forums are buzzing loudly, but it has nothing to do with online gamers fragging each other in the much-anticipated new video game "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2." Some Xbox 360 users are ready to stage their own military coup against Microsoft after they were told this week that their Live accounts had been banned from the service...

Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,000 people, but despite that number of people, t...

Two federal agencies are charged with disbursing broadband expansion stimulus money, but critics say they've been stuck at dial-up speed since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was passed by Congress earlier this year. So on Tuesday the agencies announced they would streamline the approval process and try to get funding to worthy projects in December...

Many consumers are still afraid of shopping online, and it's not hard to see why, with reports of fraud, identity theft, data loss and other security breaches regularly making the news. The fact is, though, online shopping is safer than ever before, and new and emerging security technologies, methods and standards are being implemented every day. ...

I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. There are still 6,600 mainframes in operation in the U.S., according to Tma...

Does the mobile phone world really need yet another platform, opensource or otherwise? South Korean-based electronics firm Samsung answered yesto that question on Tuesday when it announced thelaunch of Bada Bada, the Korean word for "ocean," is a new open platform that Samsunghopes will become a top phone OS in the future. Samsungenvisions its new ...

Civil liberties groups continue to lock horns with the Department of Homeland Security over border searches of electronic equipment, although relatively few people have been affected. The Department's statistics show that only 1,000 laptops were searched between October 2008 and August 2009, a time period in which more than 221 million travelers c...

The scales of justice definitely don't tip in grayscale's favor when it comes to the overall e-reader device experience for consumers. Whether it's an Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook, 16-level grayscale means nothing more than a digital version of the weather in Seattle between November and April: different shades of gray I realiz...

Europe is ratcheting up its opposition to Oracle's proposed US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The European Commission has issued a formal statement of objections to the deal, based on a perceived threat to competition. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes raised those concerns last month in a meeting with Oracle's top executives, ar...

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in Bilski v. Kappos, a case that has been making its way through the legal system for more than 10 years -- and along the way has morphed into the software industry's worst nightmare. "It's been called 'the case of the century,' and to a large extent I have to agree," John Squires, an attorney with Chadb...

The majority of global markets are growing significantly faster than the United States. Bill Gates has even stated that in the 21st century, a business must use e-commerce to survive. In this economy, thinking outside the proverbial box and expanding a company without taking on significant overhead or structural changes means selling beyond geographic borders.

With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious. However, there are also many ways for CRM to go into the field, and it's crucial to match the needs of your workers with the IT and security priorities of your company...