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Sony will be offering 500,000 public domain books that have been indexed by Google on its Sony Reader -- an e-book product that is the primary competitor for Amazon's Kindle, now in its secondgeneration.However, the offering doesn't challenge the sexiest feature of the Kindle -- namely, its ability to download books, magazines and newspapers wirelessly...

Networking giant Cisco Systems continues its aggressive push into the consumer sector with the acquisition of Flip Video camera maker Pure Digital Technologies for a whopping US$590 million in stock "The acquisition of Pure Digital is key to Cisco's strategy to expand our momentum in the media-enabled home and to capture the consumer market transit...

Microsoft's unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was marred by news that the browser, touted to be its most secure ever, already has been hacked The launch has also kicked off a new round of browser wars, with Google unveiling a new beta of its Chrome browser, and Mozilla releasing Fennec, the mobile version of its Firefox browser, in beta....

As organizations are reducing their budgets due to the current economic climate, they are looking to maximize their return on investment, and a recent Aberdeen Group study shows that technology solutions that would allow these organizations to experience improvements in end-user experience without adding more bandwidth capacity would resonate with their needs...

This week, the gaming industry saw a challenger in the portable gaming market grow more powerful, and its name is iPhone. The platform's upcoming 3.0 software, which Apple previewed, includes new ways for game makers to make money, which may attract even more developers with even more serious offerings In other reaches of the gaming universe, it lo...

Successfully leveraging an organization's collective knowledge has been an aspirational goal for decades, but many companies have deemed the effort as a "mission impossible" after investing time and money into these projects. Companies have built out information strategies that leveraged sprawling data repositories and sophisticated business intel...

This is the eighth in an ongoing series on building a Web site for your small business. Part 1 looks at essential elements of a business Web site. Part 2 offers basic site design guidelines. Part 3 tackles some advanced design issues.Part 4 examines social media tools for building traffic.Part 5 compares outsourcing against doing maintenance work in-house.Part 6 offers tips on marketing your site. Part 7 covers analytics for measuring effectiveness...

Google opened a new channel onTuesday to distribute its latest beta release of the Chrome browser.The company also began on Tuesday a blog devoted exclusively to theChrome browser Google launched Chrome as a beta in September of 2008; a final-release 1.0 version come out in December. By last month, it had grabbed 1.12 percentof the market behind In...

Computing giant IBM could be close to buying struggling server maker Sun Microsystems for US$7 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report Though Sun is best known for making high-end servers, the crown jewel of the company's technology portfolio is its software, especially the widespread Internet programming language known as "Java."

Privacy rights organization EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, has asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to shut down Google's cloud services on grounds that the company is misleading consumers This follows a breach in Google Docs on March 7, which was caused by a software bug that led users to inadvertently share some of their fil...

Someone has floated a trial balloon, through a leak to The Wall Street Journal, that IBM is in "talks" to buy Sun Microsystems for US$6.5 billion. The only party that would leak this information is Sun itself, and it smacks of desperation in trying to thwart an unwanted acquisition, or to positively impact another deal that Sun is weak in If IBM wa...

Have you shopped online in the past month? Week? Day? If you are like a majority of the American population, you likely answered yes to one, if not all, of those questions. Consumers appreciate the ease and convenience that online retail offers, but with this convenience often comes disappointment during the shipping process. Despite the down econ...

In our age of instant gratification, no one likes waiting for anything. That's why the sluggish launch time of a typical personal computer can make a consumer irritable. It's also why instant-on computing has become a sort of Holy Grail for hardware and software makers in the industry. The pursuit of instant-on is a quest that's given Linux traction in an arena that for years it has found a tough nut to crack -- the PC...

After 146 years of publication, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer print edition is no more. Seattle's oldest newspaper, which is owned by media giant Hearst, will continue as an online-only publication starting Wednesday, but with a much-reduced news staff "The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the ...

Dell has unveiled its version of a high-end ultra-thin portable laptop -- the Adamo. The Adamo, which was derived from the Latin word meaning "to fall in love," will be the flagship product in a line that will focus on design aesthetics and personalization choices. Specs for the product include Intel Core 2 Duo processors with Intel Centrino techn...

HTC was the first mobile device maker to introduce a smartphone for the Android platform. Now it might be the second, third and fourth as well Peter Chou, CEO of the Taiwanese handset manufacturer HTC, told The Wall Street Journal that it will bring out at least three new Google Android smartphones this year....

The current market for MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) that are free to play and generate revenues through virtual goods is similar to the casual gaming market of five years ago. Entry barriers are relatively low, and many new publishers are entering the market. Even established players in the market are operating under the gaming industry's radar screen. Compared with AAA, subscription-based MMORPGs and retail console games, the development or licensing costs for free-to-play games are relatively low.

The new top-level domain .tel began the go-live process on March 6. Unlike older domain iterations, .tel is not designed for hosting conventional Web sites. Instead, it uses the domain name system to store and transmit contact information that domain holders customize for content, keywords and privacy Here we examine how .tel will revolutionize soc...

Do you know what your people are working on? Do you know why your project is late? Do you know if you are getting the return on investment you need? You may not realize it, but what you don't know can hurt you and your organization. You might be planning projects that your resources cannot accommodate, or spending too much money through labor hou...

QuickOffice for Android, a productivity application by QuickOffice, is available from the Android Market for US$7.99.If nothing else, you've got to give the people over at QuickOffice credit for being early movers. They are the first to bring us an application that will open Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets on an Android-based phone...