Articles by

Beleaguered Internet portal Yahoo is about to wrap up its search for a CEO to replace cofounder Jerry Yang. An announcement could come as soon as this week Two candidates have emerged as the company's probable next leader: Carol Bartz, who is former CEO of AutoDesk; and Susan Decker, Yahoo's current president. Former Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin h...

Data centers and headquarters have made up approximately 90 percent of the value in many recent asset sales on Wall Street. For example, Lehman Brothers sold its assets to Barclays for US$1.75 billion, 86 percent of which was for the data centers and headquarters alone. The fact is that a company's headquarters generate no revenue, and maintaining them can be a financial drain...

This was the first chance since Steve Jobs returned to Apple that Microsoft had to slam-dunk Apple. The biggest thing at Macworld was Tony Bennett. Windows 7 was releasing in Beta and reports have been glowing, with a number of the folks I travel with actually living on the pre-beta code and raving about it so this should have been like shooting ducks in a barrel. Palm was bringing out a new phone and a lot of folks thought they were simply done and not worth seeing, good lesson in the dangers of preconceptions here. Cisco was going to take a run at the gold standard in home music -- Sonos -- and the PC vendors went to war.

As Google continues to overwhelmingly dominate the search space, and with the Department of Justice just looking for a reason to file antitrust lawsuits, it is safe to say that any serious competition to Google would be widely accepted. Serious competition to Google would have to come in the form of a consolidation among competitors. Google is just far too dominant for a startup to come out of nowhere and compete.

The incoming Obama administration wants to clear the air regarding the switchover from analog to digital television, so it has sent a letter to Congress asking for an extension of the Feb. 17 conversion date in order to address "weaknesses" that it says are hurting consumers Neither the government agency distributing the coupons nor the trade assoc...

Ford got into the act at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas with the debut of the next-generation of Sync, its voice-activated, in-car technology Alan Mulally, chief executive officer at Ford, presented new features for the current version of Sync and described upcoming changes set to roll out by 2010. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer ...

Just days after microblogging company Twitter was hacked, a group of entrepreneurs and policy activists gathered at Facebook's Palo Alto headquarters to discuss "Privacy 2009: The Year Ahead." The discussion, cohosted by Tech Policy Central, demonstrated that the privacy debate is starting to mature Instead of inflexible government dictates for da...

The doors to the Las Vegas convention center opened Thursday, and theConsumer Electronics Show is now officially in full swing. I'm in no position to do an official head count, of course, but the crowd seems just a little thinner than it did last time I was here. Sure, there are the occasional bottlenecks with the crowding and the elbows and the c...

TomTom has announced a new GPS navigation device, the Go 740 Live, which includes a built-in SIM card and GPRS modem for connectivity that can deliver real-time traffic information and a variety of other services, including TomTom's Fuel Price Service, Local Search powered by Google, TomTom Weather, QuickGPSfix, and TomTom Buddies All of the TomTom...

While television remains the most popular consumer device for viewing video content, it's fast falling before the march of alternatives, according to a report released Thursday by Deloitte. About half (49 percent) of U.S. consumers want the freedom to view their content on any platform they choose -- be it television, media center software, smartp...

A television station in San Francisco invites the authors of a new book that's highly critical of TV news, the blogosphere and the "menace of media speed" for a Jan. 3 interview. Then, in a speedy development that turns out to be menacing for the authors, the TV station cancels the invitation, claiming a sudden change in format It was a lie. The st...

Microsoft will be providing mobile search to Verizon's huge customer base under a new partnership agreement that Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have publicly confirmed -- Seidenberg in remarks at a Citigroup conference and Ballmer at the Consumer Electronics Show. The deal is a coup for Microsoft, given that Verizon is...

Let's say a Slingbox and a set-top digital video recorder meet during a very wild weekend in Vegas. After many drinks and much lascivious talk they decide to get married at 3 a.m. at the First Church of Elvis. Nine months later, you might end up with something like the ViP 922, which is being billed as the world's first "placeshifting" high-definition DVR...

Samsung, like a whole lot of other TV makers displaying their wares at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, is emphasizing the Web capabilities of its new TVs. Among those features is what Yahoo calls the "cinematic Internet," which allows television viewers to use the remote control, rather than something like a wireless mouse an...

Chinese PC maker Lenovo will cut 2,500 jobs, or about 11 percent of its workforce, during the first quarter, the company said Wednesday The cuts will include management and executive positions. In addition, Lenovo will cut executive compensation by 30 percent to 50 percent, and trim bonuses....

Sony introduced its latest entrant to the ultra mobile PC (UMPC) class of computers on Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas. Billed as the world's lightest 8-inch notebook, the Vaio P Series Lifestyle PC is roughly the size of a business envelope and about as thin as a cell phone. However, unlike most systems in the UMPC category, Sony said the Vaio P is not a netbook PC...

Steve Ballmer's presentation Wednesday evening at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was free of the dancing, screaming, sweaty antics he's sometimes known for when he takes the stage at conferences and conventions. Instead, the Microsoft CEO's first CES opening keynote speech laid out his company's vision for the year ahead as Microsoft and its many hardware partners gird for a bleak consumer spending landscape.

Toshiba kicked off its CES press conference by reminding the audience of the ad space it bought right underneath the ball at last week's New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square. Perhaps the company liked the idea of kissing 2008 good-bye -- it was around this time a year ago that Warner Bros. decamped from Toshiba's HD-DVD format, and a month later HD-DVD crumbled completely. CES 2008 couldn't have been the happiest of times...

When Microsoft kicked off its second annual business intelligence (BI) summit in Seattle, it did so with the announcement of enhancing end-user BI capabilities with Gemini, an Excel-based interface that will enable on-the-fly pivot table functionality with point-and-click ease of use. Organizations continue facing pressures to deliver timely infor...

Without a doubt, major brand name identities will be arriving at the precipice where they will be lined up for a freefall from grace; some will fall, and some will have a parachute. This scene will be repeated all over the world, with new ultra-modern-cyber-age-branding-platforms being structured as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) introduces new policies that will dramatically change the old-fashioned thinking of global branding...