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In the age of online entertainment, consumers get virtually unlimited choice of content and unlimited means to entertain themselves. They can stream their favorite episode of "Lost" from ABC.com, watch full-length movies on Hulu or even download episodes of shows like the "The Office" from NBCDirect, and they can do it all for free These choices of...

Gartner's CRM conference is always a big event for the industry. The 2008 gathering, which just wrapped, was no different, with attendees leaving the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Oxon Hill, Md., in a thoughtful mood over the direction CRM is heading. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of buzz around social networking, Heidi Cere...

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix. Unlike newcomers MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and -- gasp -- even Twitter, the gaming communities are solid and stable, the camaraderie real and rooted deep, and the cash flow is, well, flowing.

The computer attacks Russia allegedly orchestrated against Georgia in Augusthave raised the cyber warfare bar to a new threat level. The cyber assaultthat accompanied Russia's armed maneuver into its former territory of Georgia escalated to an international event The concept of hurting a nation's technological infrastructure as part of a wider conf...

Players in the fragmented and crowded ad platform space just lost a little more elbow room with the entrance of LinkedIn's Audience Network Not surprisingly, given its strong reach into business networks in almost every community, LinkedIn is offering up its job-related data to advertisers that seek to place ads targeting categories of professional...

For those social networking phenoms posting their every thought, drunken photo, tale of debauchery, and brush with the law on your MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter pages, a word of warning: You might want to tone yourself down if you're looking for a job. There's a 20 percent chance that your next employer is reading, judging and possibly rejecting your professional persona based on the private one you tout online...

Takeover talks between Electronic Arts (EA) and Take-Two have come to an end, the two video game software companies announced Sunday. The news comes some seven months after EA made its initial unsolicited offer to purchase the "Grand Theft Auto" developer for US$26 per share, a deal that would have brought Take-Two's shareholders about $2 billion....

It reads like another Hollywood sequel. In fact, please try to imagine the late, great movie trailer voice-over artist Don LaFontaine intoning the following copy: In a world gone digital, now comes another tale of big companies joining forces to take on media pirates and a giant named Apple. From some of the same people who brought you the Digital ...

Best Buy has announced it will acquire troubled online music store Napster for US$121 million The deal includes $67 million of cash on Napster's balance sheet and values the Los Angeles-based Internet music store at roughly twice its Sept. 12 closing stock price....

VMware is working to move past its internal shakeups with the revelation of a new operating system for virtual server and storage management. The Virtual Datacenter Operating System (VDC-OS), announced Monday at the start of the company's VMworld annual conference in Las Vegas, will offer an all-around solution to bring multiple resources onto a single cloud and make resource sharing significantly easier for customers...

GlassHouse Technologies announced on Monday the releaseof Managed Services for Virtual Environments, a first-of-its-kindsuite of managed services. The company broke the news atthe VMworld 2008 Solution Exchange in Las Vegas GlassHouse, an independent IT infrastructure consulting and servicesfirm, launched its advanced management interface in conjun...

Imagine going to Amazon.com, finding the book you want and being asked for your phone number and told to wait for a call from your local bookstore with the price of the book. Sounds ridiculous, right? You want the price in the moment, while you're online, while you're still anonymous. But that's exactly what happens to many people shopping online ...

Get beyond the fascination and addictive tendency of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking apps, and underscoring all of these new approaches to connecting, communicating and collaborating with others is a revolutionary new way of communicating with your channel partners as well. Social networking is making channel management more about wa...

This last week I've watched Apple's stock drop sharply as the market was disappointed with Apple's announcements, but I thought it was being unfair because the disappointment was largely due to overset expectations In addition, Apple's move with the iPod nano was a very hard decision to make. Few companies would have the guts to make it, suggesting...

Research In Motion, maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry handheld e-mail device, is moving deeper into the consumer market, where it is sure to run up against tough competition from Apple's iPhone Earlier this year, RIM forged a partnership with social networking site Facebook that lets BlackBerry device owners access information from their Facebook ...

Jeremy Jaynes -- said to be one of the world's most prolific spammers -- had his nine-year prison sentence vacated after the Virginia state Supreme Court ruled that the law under which he was prosecuted violated the First Amendment. The state's antispam law, the Court found, did not adequately differentiate between commercial and noncommercial spe...

The gains that have made 2008 a blockbuster year for the video game market continued in August; however, the rate of sales showed signs of slowing down for the month. Overall sales growth was held to single digits for the first time since 2006, according to numbers released Friday from market research firm NPD August industry sales remained strong ...

A day before Americans bowed their heads to remember the victims of Sept. 11, YouTube bowed to pressure concerning online terrorist propaganda from Sen. Joe Lieberman and decided it will no longer allow videos that encourage or teach people to hurt other people "While it might not seem fair to say you can't show something because of what viewers th...

Search engine giant Yahoo is moving ahead with plans to open up its home page and e-mail services to third-party content The move comes at a difficult time for the beleaguered company -- earlier this year, Yahoo spurned an acquisition attempt by Internet rival Microsoft, triggering vitriolic infighting among its shareholders over the future of the ...

Bill and Jerry are back, and the dynamic duo's second Microsoft ad is already bringing as much divided opinion as its much-analyzed predecessor. The spot, which first appeared on YouTube Thursday night, shows Seinfeld and Gates staying with "average family" in an effort to reconnect with the common American. As far as connections to Microsoft, it inches a little closer to direct talk about the company -- but still stays eccentric enough to leave many scratching their heads...