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This article was originally published on July 7, 2008, and is brought to you as part of our Best of ECT News series The Internet is the greatest technical development of the 20th century, and its open competition model has been the envy of other market sectors. Internet advances are being crushed by monopolistic carriers who are more concerned with...

This article was originally published on July 17, 2008, and is brought to you as part of our Best of ECT News series In Internet time, it's been an eon since "smart appliances" were said to be stocked on the near horizon, but many sunsets later (eight years, actually), the futuristic devices are still, well, in the future. One would think the green...

This story was originally published on Oct. 2, 2008, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. D-day -- the day television broadcast signals switch from analog to digital -- is less than five months away. While the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and broadcasters like ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX have spent recent months...

Dell, the No. 2 PC maker in the U.S., has fired two top executives as part of a major restructuring designed to help close the gap with its largest competitor, HP Chief Marketing Officer Mark Jarvis has stepped down; President of Global Operations Mike Cannon will retire, effective Jan. 31. Cannon will be replaced by Jeff Clarke, currently head of ...

The legions of online activists who mobilized to help Barack Obama win the White House were expected to return to their normal routines after the election, but they apparently did not get the memo. Rather, this group seems intent on remaining active as the new administration takes shape,for the most part using the same networking techniques that l...

At the stroke of midnight -- the first second of Dec. 31 in the Pacific time zone -- 30 GB Microsoft Zunes started spontaneously dying. The Microsoft Zune support site discussion boards started filling up with posts, in addition to others on ZuneScene and ZuneBoards, the latter of which may have experienced a server crash In any event, Zune users s...

Online retail saw a 3 percent year-over-year drop in sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 23, according to research firm comScore, as economic hardships combined with a calendar that shortened consumers' usual buying period The decline marked the first dip in online sales since comScore began tracking the figures in 2001. One year ago, online retailers br...

Legend has it that the inventor of chess was so wise that when the king asked him to name his reward, he replied that he only wanted one grain of wheat for the first square, two grains for the second, four grains for the third, eight grains for the fourth and so on up to the sixty-four squares on the board. The king readily agreed, thinking it a ridiculously low reward for such an amazing invention, but then was later advised by his treasurer that he owed the inventor more grain than could be produced by the kingdom in 10,000 years!...

For many e-tailers, online chat is a closer. Packaged and offered up to site visitors as a service, it provides an opportunity to close a sale when an uncertain customer wavers. Retailers were early adopters of this technology precisely because of the distinct return on investment, Conversive CEO Robert Williams told CRM Buyer. There are signs tha...

Part 1 of this two-part series examines the virtues of virtual worlds as research environments. This final part looks at some of the types of experiments that are being conducted in the metaverse Universities and government agencies, even a few private corporations, are going all "mad scientist" on us in the realm of virtual worlds. But why are the...

Part 1 of this three-part series looks at the growth of 3-D movies and electronic distribution. Part 2 focuses on the technology found in the projection booth of a high-end 3-D movie theater. Part 3 explores the technology involved in adding a third dimension to regular 2-D films Despite all the attention being paid to the creation of 3-D films, th...

Advanced Micro Devices said Monday that it cut 600 jobs in the third quarter -- 100 more than it indicated in the guidance provided to Wall Street early last fall, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission The 100 extra job cuts resulted in US$70 million in restructuring costs, rather than the $50 million the struggling chip...

An international group of independent security researchers announced Tuesday that they have found a significant weakness in the Internet digital certificate infrastructure used by many Internet businesses. The flaw could conceivably allow cybercriminals to create fake certificates that would then be accepted and trusted by many widely used Internet browsers.

E-commerce has certainly not been immune from the recession battering the U.S. economy, but for reasons that can only be guessed at, most of the leading e-tailers have not stepped up their efforts to retain customers by providing improved service, according to a recent customer satisfaction survey Only two e-retailers scored above 80 on a 100-point...

Acer unveiled its latest notebook PC Tuesday -- the Aspire 8930G-7665, featuring Intel's new powerhouse mobile chip. The chip, the Core 2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000, makes Acer's new laptop one of the first notebooks to offer users four processing cores The Core 2 Quad processor offers 6 MB of shard L2 cache, 4 GB DDR3 1066 MHz Dual Channel Memory...

Sony has drastically reduced the production costs associated with its PlayStation 3 video game console by 35 percent, according to information technology researcher iSuppli The latest generation of the PS3 costs just under US$450 per unit to produce, down 35 percent from the prior generation's production cost of nearly $700 per unit, iSuppli said....

In a world where "man boobs" are allowed to flop freely at football games, the strict scrutiny of photos of breastfeeding mothers reflects a double standard that has riled many Facebook users. By curbing the posting of such content -- the implication being that the nursing mother's bare breast could possibly be construed as "obscene" -- Facebook has exposed itself to a public relations nightmare...

For those who like to feel like they've gotten a bargain whenever they make a purchase, 4Sale4Now.com could be a dream come true. The site lets retailers discount their products and services regularly, and it lets buyers to monitor these discounts and buy when they're deep enough to suit their fancy It's akin to an auction model, but unlike sites l...

Memo to telecom service providers: "We never thanked you, but you did a great job offering us consolidated billing. It is hard to remember now, as for the last few years you have been so aggressive in promoting bundled services, but five years ago, this was a major pain point. Three bills for ISP, cable and telephone, and usually three different due dates as well...

Universities and government agencies are conducting all kinds of research, both scientific and sociological, in virtual worlds -- but is this merely a newfangled boondoggle or is the research really real? "My general perspective is that virtual worlds are at least as real as many parts of the so-called real world," William Sims Bainbridge, program ...