Business

French search company 1plusV has stepped up its battle with Google over how its algorithms rank sites, filing suit against the search engine giant in the French Commercial Court. It is seeking $423 million in damages from business it claims it lost due to alleged antitrust practices by Google. At $4...

E-reader ownership jumped to 12 percent of adult U.S. consumers in May, doubling from 6 percent in the past six months, the first time sales have been in double digits, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. The growth spurt is outpacing that o...

Competing for federal contracts is tough -- and protesting the award of a federal contract may be even tougher. But a ruling by a federal agency appears to have improved the ability of all vendors -- not just IT firms -- to utilize key legal channels for protesting the award of federal contracts. On...

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the video game industry on Monday, striking down the California law forbidding the sale of violent games to minors. In its decision on Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the court says that the act does not comport with the First Amendment of the U...

The average American credit cardholder carries 3.5 credit cards, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's 2010 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice. Today, consumers use credit cards to pay for more than just large-ticket items. Everything from household items and utilities to insurance premiu...

Google was notified by the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday that a broad formal investigation will be launched. Google respects the FTC's process, it said in a blog post, and will be working with the agency over the coming months. The FTC's Bureau of Competition reportedly will issue subpoenas t...

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and company board members addressed investors Thursday at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Despite majority support for Bartz and other board members, a certain level of discontent was palpable among investors, and one particular shareholder called for an end to Bartz'...

Electronic Arts could be on the verge of closing a deal to acquire casual game creator PopCap for a sum exceeding $1 billion. The high price tag on the deal represents a big wager for EA -- the cost is 13 percent of the company's market cap. The move is viewed by some as a "hail mary" attempt by E...

One way or another, change is clearly coming for the online television website Hulu. Either it will be acquired by Yahoo, or it will put itself out on the market to be snapped up by another deep-pocketed company. Yahoo apparently has made an unsolicited offer for the company, according to news repor...

It's beginning to look like 1999 all over again. Ten to 15 years ago, the IPO craze was amazing. As I said in many speeches, a great time was had by all. Everyone seemed to win -- workers, investors, executives, even customers. Over the years, these waves rise and fall, and a new wave is beginning t...

With a market cap that has fallen from $83 billion in 2008 to $13 billion currently -- an 82 percent decline -- rumors are popping up that RIM is ripe for takeover, possibly by Microsoft or Dell. A potential buyer would get a smartphone maker that is still dominant among corporate clients at a barga...

The Federal Communications Commission has declared war on the practice of telecom carriers surreptitiously nickel-and-diming their customers through a practice called "cramming." This refers to those nagging mystery charges that pop up on many consumers' telephone bills -- some 20 million people all...

For obvious reasons, this author hopes that a hyperlink, on its own, cannot be defamatory. Yet this is precisely the question before Canada's Supreme Court in Crookes v. Newton. The defendant, who operates P2PNet.net, authored an article entitled "Free Speech in Canada," including hyperlinks to fu...

IBM is promising to deliver a solution that will enable companies to include information from social media platforms in their regulatory compliance reports. Compliance capability is "fundamental to reducing a barrier that many companies have encountered as they look more closely at using social medi...

Amazon's self-publishing e-book platform appears to be overrun by spam or low-quality e-books. Of the thousands of digital books being published through Amazon's self-publishing system each month, many are spam, either developed via Private Label Rights or even using toolkits that help people produc...