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Conspiracy theorists convinced that Google wants a footprint in every single business category on the planet got some more ammunition Wednesday: reports that detail the company's possible efforts to extend into both branded smartphones and online music Manufacturers are working on a Google-branded phone that would be offered directly to consumers v...

Enterprises worldwide will begin spending a little more on IT in 2010, according to market analyst firm Gartner However, businesses will hold off on hardware purchases, instead spending money on software, telecommunications and IT service, according to Gartner's predictions.

The following is an excerpt from an eight-page special report, exclusive to ECT News Network. Addressing the power of mobile messaging, social media and other word-of-mouth technologies, this paper provides concrete advice on how to integrate them into an e-commerce business plan. The complete report is available as a free download to ECT News Network subscribers...

Almost overnight, it seems that Apple and its products, led by the iPhone, the iPod and the Mac, are everywhere -- including in the corporate enterprise. Apple's presence as a favorite staple in the consumer market segment is accepted, expected and taken for granted. The corporate enterprise is another matter. Apple hasn't been a significant playe...

I have been studying sales forecasting and forecasting tools a lot recently, and I have come to the conclusion that we need better tools as well as better ways of using them There is a lot that can be said about forecasting, its current state and how to improve it, and I don't want to leave anything out but I will try to be brief. First off, how w...

Unix software firm SCO Groupannounced a corporate restructuring plan Monday to sever ties withCEO Darl McBride and reduced the company's workforce. The restructuring wasdesigned by the firm's Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee, Edward Cahn These moves and other corporate adjustments will help the companycontinue its longstanding court battle against IBM...

It doesn't matter whether Amazon's Kindle has 60 percent market share, or that Sony has its powerful brand backing its Reader. Barnes & Noble wants in on the nascent e-reader market ...

Public betas of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010 will become available in November, CEO Steve Ballmer told the crowd attending Microsoft's SharePoint conference in Las Vegas on Monday Touting SharePoint Server 2010 as the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date, Ballmer pointed to some of the collaboration platform'...

It's an overnight success story that's been almost three years in the making: For the first time since its launch, Sony's PlayStation 3 outsold rival gaming console makers in September, thanks to a price cut that brought the PS3 more in line with Microsoft's and Nintendo's offerings The PS3 sold nearly 492,000 units in the month, compared to 462,80...

On October 30, 2008, the Court of Appeals that handles all appeals of patent cases in the U.S. issued a landmark decision. The Federal Circuit's opinion in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (2008), sent shockwaves through the high-tech legal community. The court held that in order to be patentable, a method must either be "tied to a particular machine," or "transform[ ] a particular article into a different state or thing." Only such methods, according to the Federal Circuit, are eligible for patent protection under Section 101 of the Patent Act. Id. at 954. ...

With the introduction of Fusion applications, Oracle has joined the cloud community. You might want to argue that the company has been involved in the cloud for many years as one of the key technology underpinnings of many of the biggest SaaS companies. That was one of Larry Ellison's big points at the Churchill Club. Cloud computing still needs a ground station to serve it, and Oracle has been at the top of that market for a long time. For example, Salesforce.com uses the Oracle database to support its service, and many other companies do too. ...

There's a pieced-together monster shaking up the campus of Stanford University this fall, and it's named after the legendary, lumbering creature that Halloween nightmares are made of Rather than parts of human corpses, however, this monster was cobbled together from a Texas Instruments system on a chip, off-the-shelf Canon lenses, an imaging chip f...

As a resident of New Hampshire, I can tell you that the Old Man of the Mountain is a very tender topic for Granite Staters. If you've never heard of it, the Old Man is -- or rather was -- a natural rock formation that was the spitting image of an old man's face. It was carved out of granite on the slope of Mt. Cannon, and if you've never seen it you can check out what it looked like on the back of the N.H. state quarter. ...

If the Internet is indeed "a series of tubes," as famously described by former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, then the mother of all plumbing snakes would be needed to unblock the press releases and emails sent over the last two weeks by those backing and opposing Net neutrality. That would include Monday's letter to the FCC from the Open Internet Co...

Microsoft technology used to program applications that can be accessed through a browser continued to be blocked for Firefox users Monday Mozilla had been blocking two Microsoft plug-ins after the discovery that Microsoft's .Net 3.5 SP1 install silently adds a plug-in to Firefox allowing the surreptitious launch of a malicious XAML browser applicat...

Sprint Nextel is acquiring iPCS, an affiliate that sells its branded products, in a deal that will put an end to a number of legal clashes between the two. It will also bring an additional 710,000 subscribers under the Sprint Nextel corporate umbrella The acquisition means that Sprint will not have to divest its iDEN network in certain iPCS territo...

On Oct. 30, Verizon Wireless is widely expected to launch the Motorola Droid, its entry into the Android smartphone market. It's ramping up to the event by kicking off an ad campaign that appears to put the Apple iPhone firmly in the crosshairs....

Cross-site scripting (XSS)/SQL injection attacks have been blamed for numerous data breaches, perhaps most notably the nightmare of the Heartland Payment Systems data breach. This type of attack has been around for at least a decade However, the growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications and the tendency for programmers to continue with old, insecu...

Cloud computing is perhaps the most talked-about shift in the technology industry today. The concept of running applications from the cloud is quickly evolving from a futuristic vision to a commercially viable alternative for mainstream business. A recent survey of global 2,000 companies revealed that 30 percent are already using cloud infrastructure to host their applications, and another 20 percent plan to do so by next year...

I'm getting ready to travel to New York for the Windows 7 launch and what may be my last plane trip ever if this post is correct. So I figured it was time to think about Windows Microsoft and Windows go back to the very beginning of the PC -- when people couldn't afford them, when networks were defined by terminal emulators and floppy disks, and w...