Business

By and large, IT favors grand pronouncements and overheated rhetoric, and the industry abounds with "unprecedented" efforts firmly rooted in precedent and "unique" solutions fashioned from the commonest clay. Is that the case with Cisco, EMC and VMware's new Virtual Computing Environment coalition? ...

There have been several suggestions by China, Brazil, Russia and other countries, and by a U.N. Commission headed by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, as well as by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development for a new global reserve currency to replace the U.S. dollar. Increasingly, the me...

Sometime between now and the year 2019, Comcast will start going after botnets and will stop sending malicious Web traffic to its customers. Google will send up more alarms if your search results include possibly infectious links. Microsoft and Apple will get better at plugging holes in their softwa...

Social networking site Facebook has been awarded US$711 million in damages from prolific spammer and social network scammer Sanford Wallace for bombarding its users with spam, Facebook attorney Sam O'Rourke reported in a blog post. Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court in Northern California...

"The connected home" is a term used frequently but often defined ambiguously. Consumer electronics manufacturers, the PC industry, pay-television service providers and broadband providers are driving the development of the connected home, for obvious reasons, as the interplay of these elements expan...

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 on Tuesday to adopt Google Apps, which include Gmail and other office software tools, for its 30,000 employees. The deal places Los Angeles among the vanguard of public sector operations relying on cloud-based productivity software. Plans call for installation...

Google announced on Monday that Google Voice users can retain their existing mobile phone numbers when setting up an account instead of having to receive a new phone number for the service. "Google Voice is all about enabling choice," product manager Pierre Lebeau said in a post on the Google Voice ...

So you've sought intellectual property protection for your patentable invention, or you've trademarked your logo. Do you think your startup is now protected? This alone may not be enough. Technology entrepreneurs may understand the importance of protecting their intellectual property, such as tradem...

Coming soon to a Sony PlayStation 3 near you: the ability to shoot aliens and bad guys in a video game, then watch your favorite action movie star shoot aliens and bad guys in a videogame-like blockbuster film streamed via Netflix. The movie rental service announced Monday that it had partnered with...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has introduced the Internet Freedom Act of 2009, legislation that would negate many of the principles underlying the concept of Net neutrality, which aims to ensure that Internet users have equal and unfettered access to all services available on the Web. The McCain bill c...

Facebook and Twitter must have felt like the belles of the social media ball Wednesday. Both companies announced agreements with search engine suitors Google and Microsoft's Bing to integrate their status updates and tweets into search results, bringing with them the likelihood of more real-time res...

Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems appears threatened by recent developments, starting with difficulties in gaining regulatory approval in the EU and ending with a startlingly decline at Sun Microsystems -- a company that was on a downward trajectory long before Oracle made its pl...

Enterprises worldwide will begin spending a little more on IT in 2010, according to market analyst firm Gartner. However, businesses will hold off on hardware purchases, instead spending money on software, telecommunications and IT service, according to Gartner's predictions. IT spending growth wil...

Almost overnight, it seems that Apple and its products, led by the iPhone, the iPod and the Mac, are everywhere -- including in the corporate enterprise. Apple's presence as a favorite staple in the consumer market segment is accepted, expected and taken for granted. The corporate enterprise is anot...

On October 30, 2008, the Court of Appeals that handles all appeals of patent cases in the U.S. issued a landmark decision. The Federal Circuit's opinion in In re Bilski, sent shockwaves through the high-tech legal community. The court held that in order to be patentable, a method must either be "t...