E-Commerce

There you are, strolling down the coffee and tea aisle at the supermarket when you get an alert on your smartphone that you can get extra points in the store's reward program if you purchase a certain brand of coffee. Are you annoyed -- or perhaps really vexed -- that you have been tracked with such...

Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music on Thursday filed legal proceedings against VK, charging that the Russian social network operates a music service that deliberately facilitates widespread copyright infringement. VK operates an unlicensed music service involving a large collection of copy...

The European Parliament on Thursday approved new Net neutrality rules. Net neutrality, both in the EU and in the U.S., refers to the concept of requiring ISPs to treat all traffic the same regardless of its source. In Europe, that means ISPs such as Vodafone can't deliver content from competitive pr...

BlackBerry CEO John Chen is trying to turn the company's fortunes around, and something it has in common with Coca-Cola could help. This is something very important, if BlackBerry realizes it. It's something that if done correctly could help the company succeed once again. I have followed BlackBerry...

Twitter has bolstered its photo-sharing capabilities with the addition of two new features: the option to add up to four photos per tweet, and a function allowing users to tag up to 10 other people in a photo. Both features are designed to make photos more social. When a user shares multiple photos ...

Cloud computing has ushered in an emphasis on service-oriented, on-demand IT in the federal market. The shift from acquiring hard assets, such as computers, servers and even mobile devices, as well as software packages installed on those assets, has been gradual. However, the process has reached a p...

The United States will tax bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property, the IRS announced on Tuesday. Virtual currency will be treated as property for U.S. federal tax purposes, and transactions in virtual currency will be subject to general tax principles. Taxpayers who receive virtual currenc...

eBay's board of directors this week urged shareholders to reject Carl Icahn's plan to spin off PayPal as a separate company. "Our shareholders and our customers are best served by keeping PayPal and eBay together," the board said in a letter to investors. "No other payments competitor has achieved P...

HTC this week announced the HTC One M8, a new model of its flagship smartphone. When the HTC One made its debut last year, AT&T Mobility sent me one to test drive. I thought it was very well designed. However, what it had in substance, the HTC One lacked in brand recognition, marketing, advertis...

Facebook has agreed to acquire Oculus VR, maker of the Oculus Rift virtual reality gaming hardware. Facebook will pay around $2 billion for the company. That figure includes $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares of Facebook common stock, valued at $1.6 billion based on recent average trading ...

Disney this week announced it would acquire Maker Studios, a provider of short-form videos, for at least $500 million -- a number that could go up if Maker meets performance targets. Maker's videos account for more than 5.5 billion monthly views on YouTube -- it has 380 million subscribers. Among it...

Bogus web traffic is creating a crisis for advertisers on the Web. Advertisers pay for page views. They assume that those views are tied to living eyeballs. When those views aren't tied to eyeballs -- as when they're generated by automated means -- advertisers can get testy. That's what's starting t...

Apple and Comcast reportedly are discussing a streaming-TV service that will go through an Apple set-top box. Apple apparently wants the service to be treated as a managed service, meaning it will run on cabling separate from that used for public Internet access. "I seriously doubt Comcast will agre...

Pandora last week said it would increase its monthly charge for new users who sign on to its ad-free service by US$1 a month. Starting in May, the price for users who want to pay month by month will be $4.99. Existing Pandora One monthly subscribers will not experience a price increase at this time ...

IBM on Thursday launched a set of software and consulting services to help fight fraud and financial crime. The so-called smarter counterfraud initiative draws from more than 500 fraud consulting experts, 290 fraud-related research patents, and the $24 billion IBM has invested in its Big Data and an...