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Sony Ericsson's president of North America, Najmi Jarwala, has stepped down amid rumors that the joint venture between the two companies may soon be dissolved The announcement comes at a dismal time for Sony Ericsson. The company is expecting first-quarter losses of between 340 million euros (US$459 million) and 390 million euros ($526 million)....

I frequently encounter intellectual property disputes between companies and independent contractors doing work for those companies. Often, the disputes involve trying to determine who owns the copyright to materials developed during their working relationship. Whether you are an employer or a worker, failing to know your rights with respect to copyright can be a costly mistake...

Oracle has acquired Relsys, a small private company that makes drug safety analytics software for the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. The terms of the deal were not revealed Relsys will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which is expected to take place by this summer....

"Guitar Hero: World Tour Mobile" is a mobile version of the popular console game from Activision and Hands-On Mobile. It is available from the Android Market for US$9.99.I'm not what you would call a major gamer, but I've played the console version of "Guitar Hero: World Tour," and I didn't get booed off the stage every time. So that makes me an e...

Office-bound workers at most companies today have a significant amount of IT security available to them when best practices are followed. Their computers are physically secure; their hard drives are hopefully encrypted; secure Web gateways, intrusion-prevention systems and firewalls block dangers from the Internet. Audit trails are in place. Passwords and policies are enforced. Data protection is comprehensive...

Salesforce.com has introduced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, a new social media application. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a free platform that lets people send out messages of no more than 140 characters to as broad a community as they can build. The posts, or "tweets," as they're known, can cover any topic area. Tweets initially were prompted by...

VoIP provider Skype announced on Monday the beta version of its business-user-oriented Skype for SIP (session initiation protocol), which will run on enterprise PBX (private branch exchange) systems SIP is a signaling protocol that lets users set up and tear down multimedia communication sessions such as voice and video calls over the Internet. It ...

It is supposed to revolutionize the way electricity is delivered and managed. It has US$4.5 billion targeted for it in the Obama economic stimulus package. However, the so-called "smart grid," as it is being developed today, won't be able to outsmart hackers looking to damage the U.S.'s utility infrastructure, according to a Seattle-based security firm...

From the perspective of IT users, developer communities and global industry as a whole, IBM may be the worst place for beleaguered Sun Microsystems to land Sure a merger as is rumored is good -- but not urgently or obviously so -- for IBM. Big Blue gains modest improvement in share of some servers, mostly Unix-based. It would actually gain just eno...

Having joined the business software company in 1996, George Klaus, chairman, president and CEO of Epicor, is hardly a newbie by industry standards. However, he tells CRM Buyer that all of his executive team has been with the company even longer -- long enough, in other words, to have weathered several economic downturns, including the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s...

The U.S. stock market had a really happy week last week. The market was on a long rally, and a number of high-profile technology vendors made interesting moves. The first was the release of Dell's Adamo product -- the first laptop offering that really was rethought as more of an art project than a typical laptop. While expensive, it actually feels worth it. The second was the leak that Sun was about to be acquired by IBM for US$7 billion, which has to have old time IBMers dancing in the aisles. Sun pounded on IBM a lot in the '90s. ...

TomTom has responded to Microsoft's allegations of patent infringement with a lawsuit of its own. Close to three weeks after Microsoft filed complaints against TomTom in the U.S. District Court in Seattle and with the International Trade Commission, TomTom has filed a countersuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Its...

Speed kills -- ask any cop -- and browser users are going to find that out very soon The browser wars heated up this week, with Microsoft's launch of Internet Explorer 8, Google's release of a new beta version of Chrome, and the debut ofMozilla's Fennec, the mobile version of Firefox....

The Pre can't come out fast enough for struggling smartphone maker Palm The company reported dismal financial results Friday for the third quarter of its 2009 fiscal year....

The economic wolf is at your door, but acid-spewing aliens are threatening you and your squad-mates on some desolate planet. Or it's the ninth frame and you are one strike down against an opponent whose bowling prowess is considerably better than President Obama's. So those worries about jobs and the banking industry will just have to wait, OK? The...

This is how a major newspaper dies, and is reborn online, in real-time: Shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific on Monday, I find out the fate of the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer on -- where else -- Twitter. P-I "Big Blog" reporter Monica Guzman tweets the breaking news: "Publisher Roger Oglesby just announced in the P-I newsroom: Tomorrow will be...

Data loss prevention (DLP) has traditionally been considered an on-premise activity. Software as a Service (SaaS), by definition, is not. However, DLP and SaaS represent major trends in email security with high visibility, and they are often driven by corporate initiatives and senior level decision makers. Similar to the discovery that peanut butt...

This is the third installment in a four-part series. Part 1 examines how companies can use business intelligence to their strategic advantage. Part 2 looks at the features and functionality of various systems Once upon a time, business was done smartly and logically. New initiatives were part of long-term plans and all new ideas had to pass muster....

This is the third installment in a three-part series. Part 1 outlines the discussions that surround the evolution of the Linux kernel. Part 2 centers on the current state of opinions on the standardization process. Part 3 presents a detailed look at the current state of opinions on the mission of free and open source software If the FOSS community ...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased print publication this week to focus solely on the Web, a transition that frightened some in the publishing business, coming so shortly after the Rocky Mountain News shut down. However, as many in the tech industry are aware, this is simply a form of "creative destruction" that should boost both choice and economic activity in the longer term. ...