Business

Yahoo has acquired Blink, a mobile app that destroys messages at a predetermined time set by the user. Yahoo intends to shut down both the iOS and Android versions of the app in the coming weeks. Blink made its debut just a year ago. The conventional thinking is that Yahoo acquired Blink largely for...

The European Court of Justice, which is the highest court for matters of European Law, has handed down a preliminary ruling that indicates Google may have to remove links to consumers' names on request -- if appropriate. The case was referred to the ECJ by Spain's Audiencia Nacional, or National Hig...

AT&T has been negotiating to buy DirecTV for close to $50 billion, based on reports that surfaced Monday. The deal, which has not been confirmed by the companies, could close within a few weeks. The current option on the table, according to anonymous sources, would be largely a stock trade but i...

AT&T has been negotiating to buy DirecTV for close to $50 billion, based on reports that surfaced Monday. The deal, which has not been confirmed by the companies, could close within a few weeks. The current option on the table, according to anonymous sources, would be largely a stock trade but i...

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission reportedly is changing a proposal for regulating Internet traffic in response to a wave of dissension against the idea. Chairman Tom Wheeler had proposed a new "Net neutrality" plan that would allow Internet service providers to negotiate with ...

Google last week acquired restaurant website builder Appetas, a move that could strengthen its relationships with small businesses and ratchet up competition with Yelp, which currently dominates the restaurant review scene. Appetas helps restaurants increase their online presence by building out pro...

Aiming in part to counteract losses sustained on its Wii U gaming device, Nintendo reportedly is setting its sights on emerging markets and planning a brand-new console and games with those markets in mind. Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata last week cited higher entertainment budgets among many emerging na...

More than 100 companies in the tech industry have come together to battle a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission that they say could irreparably harm the open Internet. Firms including Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Kickstarter, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo signed a...

A California jury on Tuesday reached a decision in a long-running courtroom dispute between Apple and Samsung over their respective claims of patent infringement. The jury's findings were mixed, with both Apple and Samsung able to claim some sort of victory but neither emerging as the decisive winne...

Small businesses have been an elusive market for sellers of online advertising. That's because the value proposition of those ads is a tough sell. Facebook hopes to reduce some of the resistance in the small business community to advertising online with a series of summer boot camps, dubbed "Faceboo...

The market is waiting with bated breath to see the exact size of Alibaba's IPO, but investors in Yahoo, which owns about 23 percent of Alibaba's stock, don't seem impressed. Yahoo's shares closed Wednesday at $34.07, down 6.6 percent. Yahoo's stake is worth about $26 billion based on the fair value ...

Six major ISPs providing residential broadband services are refusing to augment their networks unless content providers pay more, according to Level3. Five of them are in the United States and the last in Europe. While Level3 has not named them, it has repeatedly mentioned writing to AT&T about ...

The Internet of Things, or IoT, consists of "uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure," according to Wikipedia. The IoT is "the network of physical objects accessed through the Internet," according to Cisco Systems. In addition to there being no c...

EMC World -- the company's annual customer, user and partner conference -- kicks off this week in Las Vegas. So it seems like a good time to compare and contrast EMC's current position in the marketplace to its competitors' positions -- and even to its own history. In fact, those points were clarifi...

AT&T just announced it will be getting into and improving the in-flight WiFi business. It will be next year before this service is available, but if it's better than the current GoGo WiFi service, I think it will be a big success. Back in the days before in-flight WiFi, stepping onto an airplane...