Business

The European Commission on Thursday expanded its investigation into Oracle's plans to purchase Sun Microsystems. The EC wants to study the potential antitrust issues arising from proprietary database vendor Oracle's takeover of Sun's open source MySQL database application. It will issue its ruling o...

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause. The group has sent letters to six members of the U.S. House of Representatives describing the extent to which pers...

Online auction site eBay has finally managed to divest itself of Skype, the VoIP company it bought back in 2005 for $2.6 billion. A group of venture capitalists led by Silver Lake Partners has purchased 65 percent of Skype for $2.1 billion in cash and a note, eBay announced on Tuesday. The transacti...

VMworld, VMware's signature annual user and partner event, is kicking off this week in San Francisco, so it seems worth reconsidering the company's recent acquisition of SpringSource. Along with critical human assets, the deal brings a host of tested technologies to VMware, including the Spring Fram...

Korean electronics giant Samsung on Monday announced that it will launch a mobile application store in Europe on Sept. 14. This follows the release of its mobile widget software development kit around mid-August and its unveiling in July of the Samsung Application Seller Site, a portal geared toward...

Intel has boosted its sales forecast for Q3, providing an injection of confidence to the tech sector, where it's viewed as an industry bellwether. Intel now expects revenue for the third quarter to be $9 billion, plus or minus $200 million, compared with the previous range of $8.5 billion, plus or m...

With a seemingly endless supply of expert consultants and solutions on the market, many IT departments in critical infrastructure industries have made significant inroads in the past few years into becoming compliant, striking a balance between rigorous attention to regulatory chapter and verse, whi...

Twitter's blue bird may be the social media darling of the moment, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says his company still has plenty to crow about. In an interview with Bloomberg published Monday, Zuckerberg said his company plans to boost its hiring by 50 percent this year, thanks to technology wo...

Personalized Internet radio stations got a boost Friday when a federal appeals court ruled that Yahoo's LAUNCHcast music service was not interactive enough to be forced to pay hundreds of millions of US dollars in licensing fees. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said LAUNCHcast did...

A coalition of firms that oppose a settlement reached last year between Google and some representatives of the publishing industry over its Google Books project is growing. New members now reportedly include a troika of Web giants: Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. The coalition, called the "Open Book Al...

The growing demand for digital content products and value-added services is turning communications companies into super-enablers of all things digitally delivered. The many promising new revenue opportunities available are creating a mediacosm -- or a new market of converged communications, media a...

If LinkedIn is for professionals and Facebook is for friends, then MySpace is still the social network destination for teens/young adults to sing the praises of the rock bands that they love. To that end, MySpace announced Wednesday that it would build on that relationship by acquiring Seattle-based...

Microsoft has asked an appeals court to stay an injunction that Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas issued against the sale of Microsoft Word. The judge made the ruling after a jury found that Microsoft had infringed on a patent held by Toronto-based i4i. It is set to go...

Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy summed up the American policy on the disclosure of corporate and personal information when he said, "You already have zero privacy -- get over it." Corporate America has widely accepted the erosion of data privacy and the fact that electronic data residing within a...

Bert Nordberg, a 14-year veteran of telecom system provider Ericsson, has been named president of Sony Ericsson, the firm's joint cellphone venture with the Japanese consumer electronics giant. He'll be succeeding Hideki "Dick" Komiyama, a Sony executive who has led Sony Ericsson since 2007 and is n...