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What Hulu giveth, Hulu taketh away. At first applauded for its openness in providing its content to other distributors, the online streaming video company -- a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. -- this week pulled back that content from Web-to-TV software provider Boxee and TV.com, CBS's digital video service. However, CBS is now pushing back at Hulu, and those rumblings you hear on the digital horizon may be the first shots fired in a new round of major media company battles over the right to watch TV shows on your computer...

Note: This is part of an occasional series of columns profiling former members of the traditional media who are now working in the digital arena It's June 1991, and I'm starting a new job as a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Dallas, WFAA-TV. It's intimidating as hell because the station's reputation in the industry is stellar, and I'm not sure I ...

With just two weeks remaining before the auditors arrive, the entire staff is working feverishly, checklists in hand, to review tests of controls, past audit results, known issues and compliance guidelines. Even the janitorial staff is feeling the crunch from lugging trash bags full of pizza boxes and Chinese takeout cartons to the trash bin every night...

Growing up in a world immersed in digital technologies, members of Generation Y have the highest of expectations on how they want to interact with their banks online. Born at the dawn of the digital age in the early 1980s, the oldest among Generation Y have never known a world without personal computers and video games. The youngest of these so-called Millennials are still in their early teens, using their cell phones for texting more than talking and counting their "friends" on MySpace.

On Jan. 26, Lucid Imagination opened for business as the commercial entity for the Apache Lucene-Solr ecosystem. The new company hopes to unite both the Lucene and the open source developer communities under its wing by offering product support, training, consulting services and value-added software for enterprises using Lucene- and Solr-based search solutions...

In an effort to tackle New York's nearly US$15 billion budget deficit, Governor David Paterson has proposed taxing downloads of software, music and other content, including pornography. This proposal comes at a time when the economy is in freefall and the so-called "stimulus" package is going to cost taxpayers much more than they expect. Gov. Pate...

The federal judge overseeing a lawsuit against Microsoft over marketing claims for its Vista operating system has reversed an earlier decision to certify the suit as a class action designation. She also deniedMicrosoft's motion for summary judgment U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman allowed the case, Dianne Kelley, et al. v. Microsoft Corp, to be c...

IBM and Internet service provider International Broadband Electric Communications announced plans Wednesday to begin deploying broadband over power line (BPL) networks in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia. The two companies are establishing the BPL networks for nearly 200,000 rural residents currently served by seven electrical cooperatives.

If Alec Baldwin wants to help the free Web video service Hulu turn its users' brains into mush -- as per its new TV commercial unveiled during the Super Bowl -- he will have to do so without the help of Web-to-TV application Boxee Boxee announced Wednesday that Hulu, co-owned by NBC and Fox, had asked it to remove its content from its lineup. The m...

Sprint Nextel's stock jumped 27.3 percent to US$3.46 per share in mid-day trading Thursday after the struggling telecom delivered a lower-than-expected churn rate The company lost 1.3 million wireless subscribers during the quarter, but that wasn't as bad as some Wall Street analysts had expected....

We have now arrived right in the middle of that second half of the hyper-accelerated phase, where Western brands start to fall like dominoes. In the U.S. alone, hundreds of its world-class brands are being erased. From monster banking to mega manufacturing, some 73,000 stores alone will be closed in the first half of 2009, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. Overall a trillion dollars worth of branding imagery that took decades of image building is getting scrubbed out worldwide. The damage is so huge it can possibly be seen from space, as streets are less bright and the cities are dimmer.

The gaming industry was the recipient of news both good and bad this past week. On the up side, the monthly NPD Group sales report for January indicated gaming continues to be relatively recession-resistant. Gamers also have something to cheer now that Nintendo has announced the U.S. release date for its Nintendo DSi handheld gaming machine Activis...

A computer company's research team puts their latest video up on Facebook rather than presenting it during a technical conference. A video game developer turns to Twitter to first break the news of a new release to the masses. A salesperson stays in touch with all professional relationships -- colleagues, mentors, proteges, former bosses, even friendly rivals -- through LinkedIn...

As the handheld mobile device has evolved from pager to cell phone to smartphone to mobile computing asset, enterprise mobility has become increasingly vital to conducting tactical, operational, and strategic business transactions On top of this, the growth in enterprise mobile adoption, combined with increased device complexity, demands greater IT...

This is the sixth in an ongoing series on buiding 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...

Facing an outcry from its subscribers, Facebook has backtracked and replaced its new terms of service (TOS) agreement instituted Feb. 4 with the previous version. Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's chief executive officer, announced the change in a blog post on the company's site Tuesday night "A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use ...

Verizon Wireless has picked Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson as its main contractors in its planned deployment of its forthcoming Long Term Evolution network LTE, reputed to be so fast that users can download a song in mere seconds, is considered the next industry benchmark for carriers to meet. Verizon's project -- which it outlined at the industry tra...

The year-long U.S. recession hasn't brought spending on advertising to a screeching halt, but it has forced a shift in the way advertisers engage their audiences With marketing budgets shrinking by the day, advertisers are turning to the Internet as an alternative to more traditional media such as television, radio and print advertising....

The recession is ahead of our thinking about how to sell around it. Our first response is a tried and true strategy that is not right for all occasions. People will disagree with me, but so far we've seen a steady stream of one idea -- staying close to the customer and attending to the customer experience There is nothing wrong with this customer-c...

Several years ago, I helped develop some software that integrates and monitors certain business processes. We chose to use Linux-based systems because of some key free and open source software that allowed us to put together a sophisticated and comprehensive software platform So often, the defense of Linux involves a price argument. More important ...