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Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause: theCenter for Digital Democracy; theConsumer Federation of America; Consumers Union; Consumer Watchdog; theElectronic Frontier Foundation; Privacy Lives; thePrivacy Rights Clearinghouse; Privacy Times; theU.S. Public Interest Research Group; and the World Privacy Forum.

Gmail's 100-minute outage Tuesday was the result of a cascading series of router failures caused by a combination of hardware maintenance and traffic policies, Google said The failure of the third-most popular Web mail service left users around the world who access the system online instead of through an email client unable to send or receive new m...

Pity the early technology adopters in this world. Just as they have accepted the fact that three years ago, they paid more than US$5,000 for a 42-inch flat-screen HDTV that now sells for close to $1,000, a new image starts to coalesce in front of their eyes -- an image so real, so lifelike, it could only be ... a 3-D TV It may be back to home enter...

Nokia on Wednesday unveiled three new smartphones at Nokia World 2009 in Stuttgart, Germany ...

After a tough year of cuts, layoffs, and the pressure to do even more with less, many of you are facing the toughest fiscal environment of your professional careers. Can you achieve your key objectives in 2010 with reduced spending and a smaller staff? It is possible, and many of the answers can be found in your data. You can achieve significant c...

Last week, I made the suggestion that we have overdone our reliance on customer experience as a customer intimacy tool -- something that I stand by. The idea of customer experience looms large, and there is no denying its power as a theme in CRM. But if our interpretation of customer experience is off the mark, as I think it is, then what is the right approach?...

Openbravo announced on Tuesday its next-generation enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) product, called "QuickStart," an alternative to thecompany's generally more labor-intensive community package QuickStart represents a change in strategy for Openbravo. Unlike the ERP product that bears the company's name, QuickStart is not open source. It is propri...

When they were designing the latest generation of video game consoles -- the generation we're currently right in the middle of -- two of the three major players envisioned their systems as hubs not just for games but for all sorts of digital entertainment. Downloaded movies, songs stored on a PC, high-definition discs, etc., would all run through their platforms, so they built their systems with HD video capabilities. The results appear to be what they intended -- three or four years on, the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 still look spectacular on a big screen. But their prices, at least at the time of launch, were enormous...

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud "enables end-users to have the same capabilities of the traditional desktop, but with a thin client and delivered from the data center," said Arthur Chiang, VP of global end-user services in I...

Online auction site eBay has finally managed to divest itself of Skype, the VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) company it bought back in 2005 for US$2.6 billion A group of venture capitalists led by Silver Lake Partners has purchased 65 percent of Skype for $2.1 billion in cash and a note, eBay announced on Tuesday....

Wal-Mart has changed its logo. It's sprucing up many of its stores with new looks. Now, the world's largest retailer is expanding its online sales channel, adding a trio of carefully selected third-party vendors to its Web site in a bid to increase sales WalMart Marketplace debuted Monday, offering 1 million products from three partners:CSN Stores,...

The smoke and haze from the 190-square mile Station Fire near Los Angeles isn't just making it difficult to see in the area of the San Gabriel Mountains. It's also having an impact on advanced forms of communications in Southern California: cellphone signals, television and radio broadcasting, even transmissions among the police, sheriff and fire crews battling the blaze and directing evacuation procedures for suburban residents...

VMworld, VMware's signature annual user and partner event, is kicking off this week in San Francisco, so it seems worth reconsidering the company's recent acquisition of SpringSource. Along with critical human assets, the deal brings a host of tested technologies to VMware, including the Spring Framework, a Java programming model that makes applic...

Having secured funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners,Lightspeed Venture Partners and Morgenthaler Ventures, MuleSourcecofounder Ross Mason turned what was the Mule Project into an opensource player on the fast track. Re-invigorated with new CEO GregSchott when another cofounder, Dave Rosenberg, left the company, MuleSource hasbeen ramping up its business in the wake of a recession that hasgutted some proprietary legacy players...

Web 2.0 enables companies to build dynamic networking communities and foster ad hoc collaboration among employees, customers and partners. This can be great for businesses, as they can gain insights and feedback in hours instead of weeks or months. However, the trusting, collaborative and open nature of the Web 2.0 environment is precisely what makes it ripe for malicious exploitation. ...

Wikipedia plans to roll out a new feature with the goal of enhancing the site's credibility. Called "WikiTrust," the optional feature color codes entries based on reliability, according to a Wikipedia page describing the new development.

An Alaska technology company hopes to hit the market with the world's first laptop boasting two identical 15.4-inch displays by the end of this year At nearly 12-pounds and equipped with two 15.4-inch screens and a full-sized keyboard, gScreen's planned US$3,000 Spacebook series definitely doesn't track the "smaller is better" ethos prevailing in t...

You can look at it as the beginnings of real interactive television -- or simply one big episode of the cult comedy TV series "Mystery Science Theater 3000" brought to life. In any event, thanks to forthcoming plans from IBM and Fox, viewers will soon be able to talk back to their flat-screen televisions via social media such as Twitter and Facebo...

Korean electronics giant Samsung on Monday announced that it will launch a mobile application store in Europe on Sept. 14 This follows the release of its mobile widget software development kit (SDK) around mid-August and its unveiling in July of the Samsung Application Seller Site, a portal geared toward mobile app developers and resellers....

As the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) approaches its self-imposed deadline to make high-tech prosthetics that begin to approach the abilities of natural limbs by 2009, the research communities that have made it happen are beginning to ask, "Can we create companies that can turn a mind-blowing prototype or demo into real products?"...