Business

The cocreators of the blockbuster "Call of Duty" series are back in the game. Jason West and Vince Zampella, who formed Infinity Ward in 2002, are launching a new development studio, Respawn Entertainment, and the duo signed an exclusive publishing agreement with Electronic Arts, which will distribu...

In today's economic environment, the last thing a CIO wants to hear is that the IT security product his or her organization purchased last year isn't going to make the cut moving forward. Sometimes the product simply doesn't work with existing infrastructure or doesn't integrate well with establish...

Now that rumors of Palm putting itself up for sale are being substantiated left and right, speculation turns to suitors. Which companies would most enliven the smartphone market by purchasing the company that nearly single-handedly developed the PDA space lo those many years ago? Prospective acquire...

Twitter has made a number of moves in the past few days that have jangled the nerves of third-party developers who fear the micro-blogging site is about to make a big push into their territory. For starters, Twitter has acquired Atebits, the maker of Tweetie, a Twitter client for the iPhone. Twitter...

Angel investing groups are still going strong despite the economic downturn. Although private equity financing dates back to the Sumerians, the current incarnation really began after World War II. The trend has accelerated since the first whirlwind of dot-com businesses in the 1990s sought private f...

Palm's share prices rallied Friday, boosted by rumors that the troubled handset maker was being pursued by prospective buyers. At press time, its shares stood at $5.16, up almost 11 percent over the previous day's close of $4.65. Palm's shares have been on the uptick all week due to buyout rumors, w...

A year ago, I suggested that the Software as a Service and cloud computing industry was entering a new stage in which vendors would begin putting greater emphasis on expanding their sales channels to broaden the addressable market for their solutions. Anyone following the SaaS/cloud computing indu...

Comcast's federal circuit court victory over the Federal Communications Commission this week appears to have thrown a wide range of federal-level Internet plans into question. Only three weeks ago, the FCC announced its National Broadband Plan, with ambitious initiatives aimed at making high-speed ...

Google has become the target of another lawsuit alleging privacy violations in connection with the February rollout of Buzz, its social networking application. The suit, Feldman v. Google, was filed in a federal court in San Jose, Calif., by New York resident Barry Feldman, who is seeking class acti...

Photographers and illustrators claim that they are not being fairly compensated by Google. Seeking what the visual artists assert is their fair share, James J. McGuire, lead counsel for the group, filed a class action copyright infringement suit against Google Wednesday morning in the U.S. District ...

Cloud computing and SaaS are on the rise in a big way, but for some companies, there's an issue that is starting to come up in a lot of conversations with their service providers: the geographical location of their data. While it may not seem a big deal to some, conflicts with national privacy laws ...

Egged on by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, the Federal Trade Commission may be considering an effort to block Google's $750 million purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMob. The FTC reportedly is assembling a team of attorneys to h...

The expected spinoff of subscription music service Rhapsody from parent company RealNetworks has arrived, and it could be a good thing for both parent and child. The formal decoupling, announced in February, was completed March 31 but announced in a regulatory filing released on Tuesday. Real, which...

A group of 47 companies and organizations, including Google and AT&;T, have sent a letter to President Obama urging him to help provide consumers with more information about their energy use. "Studies and experience show that when people have access to direct feedback on their electricity use, t...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has issued a ruling that could spell the end of Net neutrality -- or merely redefine the battle terms a little. It's a matter of perspective. The court ruled that the FCC did not prove it had the authority to order Comcast to change it network m...