Business

The FCC has approved AT&T's purchase of spectrum from Aloha Partners in a deal worth $2.5 billion. It comes with a rider -- Aloha qualified for 35 percent bidding credits for most of its licenses, while AT&T does not, so Aloha has to reimburse the FCC the amount of the bidding credit plus in...

Graphics card maker Nvidia announced Monday it has agreed to acquire Ageia, creator of PhysX, technology that adds a higher level of real-world physics realism to video games. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. All major consoles -- the Sony PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii, and the Mi...

AOL has reached a deal to purchase affiliate marketing network Buy.at in an effort to expand its online advertising platform. Buy.at, which operates affiliate networks in the U.S. and the UK, will become part of AOL's New York-based Advertising.com and Platform A online marketing organizations. The ...

Private, personally identifying information is everywhere, from portable computers and digital devices, to the Internet and private networks. This data can be obtained so easily -- either through technology or more mundane means -- and its theft is so often glamorized on film, that it is starting to...

The Industry Standard, one of the dot-com era's most prominent magazines, re-launched on Monday as a Web-only, community-driven Web site. The property, originally owned by Standard Media, is now run by the Boston-based IDC, a 44-year old information technology research firm. The site will consist of...

The online video distribution sweepstakes gained another entrant Monday, with Cablevision throwing its resources behind a joint venture with Popcorn that will offer movie downloads the same day they are released on DVD. The service will enable subscribers to Cablevision's iO TV digital cable service...

As Yahoo continues to overhaul the focus of its music business, the company will migrate its online music subscription customers in the coming months to Rhapsody America. Yahoo will shut down its Music Unlimited service and divert subscribers to Rhapsody, a digital music venture of MTV Networks and ...

"Get it in writing" is a quaint concept in the electronic information age -- especially in B2B e-commerce, where a more suitable direction may be: "get in it cXML." Every industry has major players moving back-office functions from sourcing and procurement to invoicing and payment to the Web. Suppli...

Swedish prosecutors are charging owners of The Pirate Bay, a peer-to-peer Web site, with "promoting other people's infringements of copyright laws." Hans Fredrik Neij, Per Svartholm Warg, Peter Kolmisoppi and Carl Lundstroem operate what is reportedly the world's largest BitTorrent tracker, connecti...

For weeks, the war between Motorola and maverick investor and corporate raider Carl Icahn, who owns nearly 3 percent of the company's shares and last year waged a proxy war against its board of directors, has been escalating. On Thursday, Motorola announced that it would explore structural and strat...

Search giant Google missed analyst forecasts for fourth-quarter profit -- even as it slowed its hiring growth to curb expenses -- and executives cited the difficulties of making social networking advertising work as one of the factors for the miss. The longtime Wall Street darling joined a long list...

Seeking to reshape the online landscape and create a serious challenger to Google with a single bold stroke, Microsoft has made a $44.6 billion unsolicited bid to buy struggling portal Yahoo. The offer -- shareholders can choose either cash or the equivalent amount of Microsoft stock -- valued Yahoo...

Software as a Service, service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 technology are fundamentally changing the way people and organizations work, enabling greater degrees of collaboration and restructuring everything from business and operational processes to the way software is licensed and priced, acc...

Sprint will write down nearly $31 billion worth of goodwill value it has carried on its books since it purchased Nextel Communications in a deal that has failed to help the No. 3 telecom firm compete with its larger rivals. In a filing with the SEC, Sprint said that an annual internal review of the ...

The Federal Communications Commission received a $4.7 billion bid for Block C, a swatch of spectrum being auctioned that is mandated to operate as a national wireless network that works with any mobile device. The auction started on Jan. 24, but the FCC won't announce which company submitted the bid...