Business

College students at one of the universities partnered with Napster for free access to its subscription-style music offering give the service high marks, but more than seven out of every 10 still buy music from Apple's market-leading iTunes Music Store. The University of Rochester released results of...

In the late 1990s, Peter Relan was working as a software executive at Oracle when his neighbor, Louis Borders, the founder of Borders Books and Music, offered him a chance to join his new startup. Relan was intrigued enough to make the leap to the dot-com world, where he helped develop much of the t...

In a move that could signal Google's designs on entire new areas of the Web industry, Google has taken a stake in a startup seeking to integrate broadband communications into existing electrical power lines. Google joined Wall Street banking house Goldman Sachs & Co. and media giant Hearst in pr...

An aggressive investment advisor or stockbroker might not agree with this article. You see, it takes a rather simplistic but safe approach to investing. What I am advocating is mutual funds -- not just any mutual funds, but mutual funds that have produced a steady stream of income and have consisten...

Today, for the first time, China has 100 million people on the Internet, 30 percent of whom are on broadband. Within a few years, a billion people in Asia will be playing with e-commerce. All that power and all that technology replicating at a phenomenal rate will create global shockwaves both in tr...

Escalating a long-running battle over current and future wireless technology, Broadcom has filed suit against cell phone technology rival Qualcomm, saying that company engaged in anti-competitive behavior in order to help its mobile voice and data standard gain traction. Broadcom said in the federal...

Continuing its practice of settling lawsuits in order to focus on the competitive threats it faces, Microsoft has agreed to pay IBM US$775 million to settle a long-simmering antitrust lawsuit. The action was a private suit that was brought in conjunction with the government action that resulted in a...

Reversing a course that had it on track to cede control of the Internet's main pipelines, the U.S. government now says it will not cede oversight of the computers that control most Web traffic. The U.S. had been weighing whether to turn over control of the 13 so-called "root" servers, the source whe...

Pop-up advertising on the Web might be annoying, but not as annoying as what would happen if trademark law were used to squash them, according to a federal appellate court in New York. The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals this week upended a decision by a lower court that used trademark law to bloc...

Hard on the heels of a partial victory for music and movie studios before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has continued to pressure consumers who it says illegally swap music, filing a new batch of more than 700 copyright infringement la...

Today it's all about search-ability and search engines. Spelling and cognitive associations control corporate names. Business listings have gone through the roof: A two-inch directory of the past is now a two-mile thick book. Has pure memorability of the precise name become more critical then the en...

European consumers are being driven away from online banking and commerce by fears that their identities will be stolen and their financial resources raided by information highwaymen. Survey results released yesterday by Entrust, a publicly traded digital identity security firm located in Addison, T...

Challenges facing new offshore call centers can spill over and impact clients and customers of those clients. Driven by cost considerations and the availability of personnel, U.S. firms are increasingly turning to offshore call centers -- but are often doing so without fully understanding the constr...

Serving a victory to the entertainment industry and a potentially damaging blow to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing firms, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that P2P firms can be sued if they encourage the use of their products to illegally swap copyrighted music and movies. The unanimous court ruli...

MCI has launched a test of a consumer-focused voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service, in a move that has puzzled some analysts because of the company's pending merger with Verizon. MCI,which Verizon is in the process of buying for US$8.6 billion, has launched a test with about 5,000 customers o...