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Telecommunications infrastructure giant Alcatel-Lucent has shaken up the top ranks of its management team Seasoned telecom veteran Ben Verwaayen has taken over the CEO spot at the ailing company from Patricia Russo. The company's board also appointed a new chairman, Philippe Camus, who will take over for Serge Tchuruk on Oct. 1....

So far, no mobile phone company has been able to make subscribers dance to its tune with a wildly popular, downloadable-to-handset music service. Yet Nokia, the world's biggest maker of mobile phones, still wants in on the action, so it's announcing that the first handset preloaded with its Comes with Music service will be sold in the United Kingdom in October...

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulation changes that take affect Oct. 1 will mean some additional work by IT departments -- and some new spending But the PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) version 1.2 will allow the Payment Card Industry a phase-in period to meet the new rules, according to two security firms that provide compliance tools....

Less than a decade ago, it seemed touch-screen had the touch In the years after the 2000 Florida general election controversy, election officials worried about public confidence in voting and, fueled by US$3 billion in federal funding for election improvements, presided over a swift transformation of the American voting experience....

When HD-DVD maker Toshiba conceded the high-definition DVD format war in February, Blu-ray's backers may have hoped that sales of the Sony-championed format would see a big boost. However, while Blu-ray may have triumphed over HD-DVD, sales for the device have not exactly skyrocketed An April 30 report from The NPD Group, a U.S. sales tracking firm...

The hottest gadgets of today will look old and tired a year from now. Sellers of mobile handsets, smartphones, MP3 players, gaming consoles, camcorders, digital cameras and laptops constantly push the latest and greatest technology, leaving yesterday's choice items in the dust Then there's the fact that this stuff is pretty easily broken....

For the past five years, the Recording Industry Association of America has been prosecuting people -- and threatening to prosecute many more -- for sharing copyrighted content online without authorization. Its lawsuits have been based primarily on two legal arguments: downloading copyrighted content from unauthorized sources such as peer-to-peer (...

After Best Buy lost the laptop Raelyn Campbell had brought in for repair, the D.C. residentfiled a lawsuit demanding US$54 million from the company. That eye-popping claim -- and the publicity it engendered -- was the culmination of a long blog campaign during which Campbellrelated her frustration with Best Buy's evasive behavior and enlisted friends and family to contact the retailer on her behalf...

Two of my favorite attractions at Disneyland when I was growing up and working at the park, and which are no longer there, were the Carousel of Progress and the House of the Future Both showcased a future based on the thinking that was going on when I was born. They did this by creating models, miniatures of cities and full-sized representations of...

Internet radio station operators are concerned that skyrocketing royalty fees could zap an industry that's still in its infancy However, technology may be bringing some solutions to the vexing problem of paying artists a royalty fee each time a listener hears a song....

Comcast has announced that it will impose a monthly cap of 250 GB on customers' Internet usage. The company acknowledged it has been evaluating a specific monthly data usage or bandwidth threshold for its Comcast High-Speed Internet residential customers for some time....

Google is gearing up to launch its Android Market -- the open source phone software's answer to Apple's iPhone App Store. Staying true to the open model, the platform will allow more instant developer access compared to Apple's approval-based system and will also offer a set of tools for developers to track their business progress. Perhaps most si...

In a move that's left some observers scratching their heads, Microsoft has acquired a German comparison shopping site, Ciao for US$486 million in cash Ciao, which is owned by Wilton, Conn.-based Greenfield Online, provides consumer reviews and ratings as well as comparative prices from e-commerce companies. Ciao gets more than 26 million unique vis...

Rumors of a second-generation Kindle from Amazon.com before 2009 have been greatly exaggerated, Amazon said Friday Although many fans of the e-book reader have been abuzz this week with rumors that Amazon.com planned to release an updated version of its Kindle, the retail giant will not, in fact, have a new device out before the new year, according...

RedTag.com, a discount online retail site, launches today with a US$1.95 shipping charge on all orders, one of the lowest such rates in the industry RedTag.com joins the likes of discount retail sites such as Overstock.com, which sells retailers' excess inventory at a fraction of the price that other sites do....

"Smart" shopping carts have been around for a while, but until recently, they haven't managed to gain much traction. Now, some momentum is building, according to proponents of the computer-rigged market baskets that -- with a swipe of a card -- can flash an alert that a customer's favorite brand of ice cream is on sale, display nutritional values ...

Aberdeen's benchmark report, "Optimizing WAN for Application Acceleration" (see also the latest research, "Managed Network Services: Beyond Cost Savings and Uptime"), found that Best-in-Class organizations are 69 percent more likely to outsource optimization of their WANs (wide area networks) to third parties as compared to Laggards. This research also reveals that these organizations realize that the effectiveness of different WAN optimization initiatives varies based on the types of applications being managed and the internal capabilities that organizations have in place...

No one can say what 27-year-old Kevin Cogill expected when he apparently posted nine songs from an unreleased and long-awaited Guns N' Roses album called "Chinese Democracy" to his Web site earlier this summer. It could have been anything from monetary gain to a desire to be the first to distribute the long-anticipated songs. However, he likely di...

Microsoft rolled out the second beta of its upcoming Web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), Wednesday. When finalized, IE8 will be the first new version of the browser the software maker has released since 2006. While the browser looks much the same, Microsoft has been tinkering under the hood to bring IE users new features and functionality....

A federal judge in San Jose, Calif., has thrown out a copyright infringement lawsuit launched by Io Group against Veoh Networks Io Group, which also does business under the name Titan Media, produces adult video content. Veoh is a site similar to YouTube where users can upload and watch user-generated videos as well as television show and movie cli...