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The U.S. still has relatively low-cost electricity compared to other countries, but consistent rate increases and an aging, inefficient electrical distribution system are prompting demands to update the country's utility grids. IBM's chief executive Samuel J. Palmisano recently estimated that 67 percent of electrical energy is lost because of inef...

Liberty Media has thrown struggling Sirius XM Radio a lifeline that will keep it from falling into bankruptcy The owner of satellite television service DirecTV has loaned Sirius US$530 million, which it will use to pay off $171.6 million in debt that came due Tuesday. The remainder of the funds will go toward general corporate purposes....

Swedish prosecutors have dismissed about half the charges brought against defendants accused of copyright violations through their operation of a P2P (peer-to-peer) Web site that connectsusers to content -- mainly music and movies -- on other users' PCs Last year, the owners of The Pirate Bay -- a Sweden-based Web site that's reportedly one of the...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took the opportunity at the Mobile World Congress to announce three new ventures the company will take in the smartphone space. Microsoft will offer a new, upgraded Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, a new Windows Mobile application store, and a Web-based service for accessing, transferring and backing up smartphone-based information.

What may have seemed to Facebook execs like a run-of-the-mill revision to the company's Terms of Service (TOS) agreement grew into controversy over the weekend, and on Monday CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to scramble to reassure users that the content that they post -- photos, videos and text -- belongs to and is controlled by them, not the social networking Web site...

Part 1 of this two-part series took an overall look at the challenges facing green IT. Part 2 zooms in on Orange County, Calif., an emerging innovator in green IT and green technology in general California's Orange County (OC) is known famously worldwide as the home of Disneyland and Knotts Berry Farm, John Wayne and Richard Nixon, citrus crops and...

Software as a Service has become the business and software delivery model of choice among new vendors -- not to mention companies seeking to invest in IT. Surprisingly, considering the model's growing market share, few companies have sprung up to offer SaaS applications for the providers themselves. Enter Zuora. Not quite a year old, it can count ...

Brain Genius Deluxe, a brain training game by Glu Mobile, is available free from the Android Market.When I first spotted Brain Genius, I figured it would be a fun way to while away some extra minutes and maybe beef up my brain cells a bit....

Have you heard the one about the beaver and the lumberjack? I remember it from when I was a kid: A beaver sees a lumberjack working in the forest. The beaver says to the lumberjack, "How can you cut down in one day what would take me months? At this rate you'll clear the forest before I can finish my dam." ...

Part 1 of this four-part series details the steps to acquire and install the beta edition of Windows 7. Part 2 takes a closer look at the OS's new features. Part 3 assesses the pros and cons of Windows 7 based on several weeks of experience using it. Microsoft released to the public last month a well-polished beta version of Windows 7. After three...

Sales are down. You don't even need to add a qualifier to that sentence -- such as industry or name of company. Across the board, corporate and consumer sales are down. Enter firms like Demandbase, which promises the latest in lead generation functionality. The company debuted last year with Demandbase Central, a Software as a Service platform tha...

It's hard not to look at the stimulus package announced last week and not be disappointed. About 35 percent of it is tax cuts that will be so small for the majority of us that it simply won't have an impact other than to put the country in deeper debt Intel announced its own stimulus package in the form of a massive investment in new fabs; the diff...

After weeks of combating the relentless spread of the Conficker worm -- also known as "Downadup" -- Microsoft announced a US$250,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the hackers behind the troublesome malware In addition to posting the reward, Microsoft revealed Thursday that it has formed a partnership with technology...

In advertising, the focus is on getting across a clear message to consumers. The Federal Trade Commission's message to advertisers in its staff report released Thursday regarding online consumer data collection was laser-like in its clarity: Get busy with protecting privacy, or the government will do it for you While the FTC will continue to back s...

Search engine giants Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all announced on their respective official search engine blogs that they would begin utilizing a new so-called canonical tag that will help their search engines cut through the clutter of the Web. More specifically, the announcements are a signal to webmasters to start using the specialized tag to help the big search engines do a better job of indexing Web sites that have duplicate URLs (uniform resource locators) that all point to the same content.

Just a month after saying it had no intention of opening a chain of retail stores, Microsoft has announced plans to do just that The software giant announced Thursday that it has hired Wal-Mart veteran David Porter to lead the retail effort. Porter will report directly to Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer. Porter, whose most recent ...

It just goes to show how perplexing the gathering cloud marketplace is that the punditry are hesitant to meaningfully analyze this important development But Amazon -- with a history of bold and long-term bets -- and IBM -- with a history of making markets whether it's right about the future or not -- have made the best of bedfellows in the deal ann...

One of the common misconceptions about Software as a Service (SaaS) is that this new approach to software distribution and user adoption is at odds with the preferences and best practices of the IT organization. The reality is that SaaS is increasingly being viewed as a savior for IT A longstanding goal of most CIOs is better aligning IT with the b...

It should come as no surprise that Maurice Ramirez -- an emergency room attending physician with Florida Hospital's Flagler division -- is in favor of widespread adoption of automated personal health records, or PHRs. Ramirez was once chief medical officer for a company that was developing such an application, but that's not his only reference poi...

Not many years ago, the open source software ecosystem and proprietary models might have been thought of as incompatible About 10 years ago, though, the two systems began converging. IBM began to support Linux, providing what many analysts described as "legitimacy" to the fledging operating system among enterprise customers and developers.