Business

Microsoft has launched a US$500 million marketing campaign aimed at using its new products, including Windows Vista and Office 2007, to wrest enterprise customers away from rival IBM. Microsoft said Vista and the new version of Office will enable desktop computers to become control stations for hard...

It's interesting to observe, over time, the changing business fortunes of various countries. If we look back a couple of hundred years, we see that the dominant country worldwide, politically and economically, was Great Britain. In fact, it maintained its dominance until shortly after World War I. S...

Continuing its aggressive campaign to cut down on piracy of its products, Microsoft has filed eight lawsuits against eBay sellers, accusing them of distributing counterfeit versions of the software giant's programs. The suits were filed against individuals in Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, M...

Shining new light on the issue of wireless privacy, the state of California has filed a US$10 million lawsuit against a firm that sells cell phone numbers. State officials filed suit Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court against Florida-based Data Trace USA, claiming the company misrepresented how it ...

VeriSign on Monday declared its entrance into the broadband content services market, announcing its US$62 million acquisition of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Kontiki to help establish its presence in the field. VeriSign plans to provide rich digital media over IP networks and has signed a definitive agre...

With the timeframe for its PlayStation 3 release already being questioned by some, Sony was dealt another setback this week when it lost a bid to appeal a ruling that it violated a smaller firm's gaming patent. Sony had hoped to be able to appeal the ruling that found it had infringed on the patent ...

The showdown between Google and the Department of Justice (DoJ) over the search engine's refusal to turn over search records heads to court on Tuesday, with Google planning to argue that the right to privacy outweighs the government's need for the information. The two sides were scheduled to make ar...

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has agreed to a US$1.1 million settlement from an interactive marketing firm that he said reused e-mail addresses and other consumer information without authorization. Spitzer described the case involving Datran Media as being possibly "the largest breach of p...

Japan's Livedoor, the company that took the country's Internet sector by storm only to have its business practices called into question, is facing new threats to its survival this week. The Tokyo Stock Exchange said Monday it would delist the stocks of both Livedoor and its subsidiary Livedoor Marke...

Nortel Networks, which had appeared to be on a strong turnaround course after purging its executive ranks, settling lawsuits and restating past earnings, said it will delay filing its annual report and again restate results after discovering more accounting irregularities. Nortel was quick to make a...

Potentially reopening a chapter from the earlier days of the wireless telecommunications boom, the U.S. Justice Department said it intends to pursue a civil fraud case against Wall Street money manager Mario Gabelli. The DoJ is seeking permission to directly sue Gabelli, who runs Gamco Investors, cl...

Google is moving to settle a class action lawsuit alleging widespread click fraud on its paid search network, setting aside US$90 million to repay advertisers who can prove they fell victim to the practice during a four-year period starting in 2002. The payouts would take the form of account credits...

Last Friday -- essentially the eleventh hour of a years-long lawsuit -- Research In Motion reached a US$612.5 million settlement with NTP, relieving legions of customers who have come to feel they cannot possibly last very long without their BlackBerries. In this suit, NTP successfully challenged RI...

For the second time in as many weeks, Google caused its own stock to fall, with shares sent lower this time by the search company's admission that it inadvertently posted financial projections on the Web before pulling them back. Google shares were down as much as US$10 or about 3 percent to $353.56...

Microsoft said it has been granted its 5,000th U.S. patent, securing protection for a technology that enables multi-player and spectator online gaming and achieving a milestone that underscores a significant shift in strategy for the software giant. Microsoft said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offic...