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Late on a summer morning recently I got a call from my wife saying "On Point," a public radio program, was doing a show on about cloud computing. "Isn't that what you write about?" she said. "You should listen or call in." Well, I tried, and all the lines were jammed, but I was able to make a comment on the Web site. It was a funny show in some ...

LiMo Foundation, a Linux mobile operating system consortium, announced that two of its members -- NEC and Panasonic -- are shipping the latest round of LiMo-compliant devices. NTT Docomo plans to use the new handsets in its Prime and Style series of phones, marketed primarily in Japan The eight new phones are purported to have advanced features, i...

Google's social network Orkut reportedly plans to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, igniting a long-simmering debate over continued use of the 8-year-old version of the browser. The current version is IE8 Microsoft intends to maintain support for IE6 in conjunction with its support for Windows XP -- the OS that originally delivered it. Ext...

VMware is acquiring SpringSource, an enterprise and Web application development and management company, to eventually build out a Platform as a Service offering. Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will pay approximately US$362 million in cash and equity, and it will assume approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options....

As if its widely acknowledged dominance of the U.S. search engine market is not enough, Google on Tuesday revealed that it's working on a next-generation architecture for Web search The formerly secret project, code-named "Caffeine," is the first step in a process to improve the search engine in various areas, including indexing speed, accuracy and...

In a continuing bid to make itself ever more relevant to advertisers and open its doors to the broader Internet, Facebook has acquired social media aggregatorFriendFeed Terms were not disclosed, but The Wall Street Journal -- citing anonymous sources -- valued the deal at US$50 million in cash and stock....

If Toshiba's announcement 18 months ago that it was dropping the HD-DVD format was the anticlimatic thud that ended the DVD format wars, Tuesday's announcement by the Japanese technology company that it would join the Blu-ray Disc Association was little more than a dull echo However, it did settle one important question for some technology revoluti...

While it would be difficult to define a single theme of meetings as diverse and sometimes as contentious as the recent ICANN consultation sessions in July in New York and London, the most broadly based concern was clear. Rights holders, whether they own trademarks and brand names, or whether they own other intellectual property on the Internet, ar...

Oracle is giving users of JD Edwards -- one of the myriad enterprise software suites the company has acquired over the last decade -- a new set of tools to leverage through its value chain planning applications. It's upgrading the JD Edwards offering with a bundle of supply chain management (SCM)-related applications and best practices that Oracle...

Motorola's long-awaited Android phones are about to hit the market at last -- one will reportedly go to Verizon, the other to T-Mobile. None of the three companies will comment on the devices, but the blog Android and Me has posted what it says are tech specs on both devices The Verizon device, called the "Sholes," will focus on gaming, according t...

For professionals in the business continuity field, it is that time of year again: hurricane season. If you haven't started to exercise hurricane planning procedures, it isn't too late I believe that it was The National Hurricane Center that stated that 2009 would be a moderate or "near-normal" year for hurricanes, and it's not likely the southeast...

The Department of Defense has warned that military use of social networking sites could pose a security threat, and the U.S. Marine Corps has banned Marines from accessing these sites on government computers. However, an Associated Press report published Monday indicates the U.S. Air Force tracked Twitter and YouTube, as well as various blogs, to assess the public backlash from the Air Force One flyover of New York this spring.

eBay and General Motors announced Monday that 225 of the carmaker's California dealers would begin selling new cars through the e-commerce powerhouse in what appears to be a limited promotion that could nevertheless presage a more permanent, national approach to selling cars online Sales will begin Tuesday and go through Sept. 8, the companies said...

Nambu is shutting down Tr.im -- a Web service that allows users to create a small URL to stand in for a long one, usually to save space in a blog post or tweet. Its reason? It has not found a way to make the service pay -- or a buyer interested enough to gamble on it. The logical partner, according to a corporate blog post announcing the decision,...

Internet search giant Google has released the latest beta of its Chrome browser, and it's come with several tweaks The new version is faster; it lets users customize the Tab page, it allows for the addition of themes, it has HTML 5 capabilities, and it spiffs up Chrome's controversial Omnibox....

Nothing like a recession to spur business growth In the business process management (BPM) space, the current downturn has presented a major marketing opportunity for software and IT service firms. Sparked by customers seeking to cut costs and by innovations in e-commerce, the BPM market could easily double over the next several years....

Summer is a time to relax, a time to take a vacation, a time to do things you can't do during the work year. However, I'm not sure any time is a good time to send your brain on vacation, and I'm starting to wonder if the leaders at Google and Apple have done just that. Granted, Steve Jobs has a good excuse. He should be taking it easy, and I think he also should take a vacation from his vegan diet -- have you seen this picture? He and I both have this obsessive/compulsive thing, and man is he ever an example of that getting out of control. ...

If you were unable to log on to Twitter or Facebook Thursday morning, you can consider yourself collateral damage in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia Facebook has confirmed that a pro-Georgia blogger was the target of a widespread distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that hit the top social networks and other Web sites. Facebo...

Target is taking control of its e-commerce operations and striking out on its own. The discount retailer plans to build and manage its own platform for Target.com when its current contract with Amazon.comruns out in 2011 Target has outsourced its Web site's platform and fulfillment operations to Amazon for the last eight years. In announcing the de...

U.S. military service members who want to keep up with friends and family back home have often turned to social networking Web sites to stay in touch. But the Department of Defense hasn't quite made up its mind whether these kinds of sites are friends or enemies. It definitely loves social networking when it comes to recruiting -- you can follow o...