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I hadn't intended to write about Sirius XM so soon after last week's column, but the satellite radio company's financial woes were sending me a clear signal -- one uninterrupted by tunnels, mountains, sunspots and more than US$3 billion in debt I mentioned Sirius XM last week in reference to Congress' vote to delay the digital TV transition to June...

Struggling Sirius XM Radio stock shot up nearly 30 percent to 7 US cents per share in mid-day trading Thursday on rumors that a bidding war was about to ensue between rival satellite television players EchoStar and Liberty Media EchoStar owns the Dish Network and Liberty Media owns a controlling interest in DirecTV....

IBM and Amazon Web Services have inked an agreement to offer Big Blue's software through Amazon's cloud offering. Over the next few months, software images for full production of some of IBM's most popular software will launch in beta IBM, of course, has a well-established footprint in the cloud and regularly rolls out new initiatives -- most recen...

Apple's iPhone App Store can seem just as crowded as the real-world Apple Stores can get during the holiday shopping season at your nearest mall. Developers are racing to provide applications that bring more multimedia and data to your phone of choice, and it's that kind of growth that is prompting Sun Microsystems to introduce a new mobile version of its trailblazing Java programming language...

Part 1 of this two-part series on search engine marketing for small businesses explains how low or no-cost technology tools are breaking down barriers to a strong Internet presence Small businesses have been reluctant to spend precious resources on a marketing medium that traditionally has not delivered -- at least to them -- on its promise. That m...

Society's expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions between its employees and customers. Speech analytic...

They are the next ballyhooed storage technology: Solid state drives (SSDs) are faster and more energy efficient than their popular siblings, hard disk drives (HDDs). Consequently, many vendors have been touting SSDs as potential replacements for HDDs in laptop systems However, reports of the death of HDDs may be a bit premature. While SSDs offer ma...

What happens when Apple and Palm representatives vaguely mention the ability to use and defend their patents, and then one anonymous source from Google vaguely states that Apple asked Google to not implement a certain technology in a recently release product? You get a whole lot of blog headlines keying off of a single publication's unnamed source....

Just days after Amazon released the second edition of its Kindle e-book reader, a potential challenger has emerged from the north and appears set to enter the market. Shortcovers plans to bring e-books to a variety of smartphones and handheld devices, ridding readers of the need to carry an additional dedicated e-book reader. Expected to launch by...

IBM has rolled out new products and services -- along with a joint network offering with partner Juniper Networks -- that solidifies its foothold in the enterprise cloud computing space The IBM-Juniper offering is an infrastructure play targeting IBM's private cloud clients. Specifically, it's a hybrid cloud service that allows users to extend thei...

Shares of Sirius XM Radio plummeted by nearly 50 percent in mid-day trading Wednesday on rumors that the troubled Internet radio company is preparing to file for bankruptcy Sirius is best known for offering subscribers commercial-free music, sports, news and talk radio programming, including Major League Baseball, the National Football League, shoc...

For a long time, small businesses were reluctant to embrace the latest in search engine marketing and other online advertising tactics. The SEM industry was unable to deliver to this group of typically local-interest, cost-conscious companies what they wanted the most: a means to assess how their investments were performing "Small businesses are a ...

Late last week Salesforce laid off three executives, or so the story went. Actually two senior sales execs were let go and venerable president and former CFO, Steve Cakebread, just left. Immediately the knowledge-sphere (and I am tempted to write that word without the 'K') started rumbling about what dire straits Salesforce must be in I write a l...

Desktop virtualization is entering into the corporate limelight, after many years of existence as a consumer toy. Recently, for example, Citrix and Intel announced a partnership that will deliver an embedded bare-metal client hypervisor by the second half of 2009 Startup contender Virtual Computer, founded by server virtualization guru and Virtual ...

Home computer users and small-business entrepreneurs usually know enough about broadband Internet security to protect their data with a firewall. In most of these cases, a single firewall at a point of entry to the computers or network is sufficient Sometimes, though, using multiple firewalls is the smarter option. The bigger the business, the more...

A team of hackers exploited a SQL injection vulnerability to gain access to a customer database protected by security company Kaspersky. It appears the attack did not compromise any data, according to Roel Schouwenberg, a Kaspersky senior antivirus researcher. However, it certainly dealt a blow to the company's reputation "A Romanian hacker team fo...

Deciphering a utility bill can be just as difficult for some consumers as reading and understanding the U.S. tax code. The scant details included in the monthly statements provide little or no detailed information about how much electricity consumers' appliances consume on a daily basis. So Google is developing an application that will shed light into the murky sphere of electrical usage...

In a bold move, chip giant Intel announced Tuesday that it will invest US$7 billion in its U.S. manufacturing facilities even as the semiconductor industry and the overall economy continue to spiral downward Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini made the announcement in a speech before the Economy Club in Washington, D.C.

Google has announced a new beta version of Google Sync that lets iPhone and Windows Mobile users synchronize their Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar events with the Web, PCs, Macs and, of course, their mobile phones. The key innovation with the new Google Sync is that it will let users transfer data to and from their devices to Google's servers i...

Green's got the blues "Dark Days for Green Energy," declared a headline in the Feb. 4 issue of The New York Times. "(B)ecause of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn ... installation of wind and solar power is plummeting," reported the Times....