Trends

The banking industry is up in arms over the United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's plan to publish consumer complaint narratives about financial institutions on the Web. Consumers would have to opt in to have their complaints published. The CFPB would strip out all personally identifia...

Google is planning to allow kids under 13 to have their own personal accounts on services such as YouTube and Gmail, according to reports. Under the new system, parents would be able to set up accounts for their children, control their use of those accounts, and regulate the information collected ab...

Ironically, the greater IT accomplishments become, the harder they are to see. Consider Intel's latest achievement: the new Broadwell architecture that shrank microprocessor manufacturing from the previous generation 22nm Haswell process to 14nm. Since a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter -- a...

Twitter's its latest tinkering with its members' timelines appears to be ticking off more than a few tweeters. The experiment opens timelines to tweets members' followers have tagged as favorites, as well as to some popular tweets gleaned from their followers' timelines. "Changing the rules of engag...

The perception that the United States lags behind other countries, especially Asian nations, in exporting information technology deserves another look, according to a recent market report. The U.S. actually recorded a trade surplus in IT in 2011, partly as the result of international trade agreement...

Over the top, or OTT, video-streaming service Netflix has been doing something right. Netflix snagged 15 prime-time Emmy nominations for its original series, including best drama for House of Cards and best comedy for Orange Is the New Black. The company, which launched in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail se...

Big Data's legend has reached mythical proportions. Increasingly, it is described as a powerful solution that could resolve some of the world's most complex challenges, from terrorist strikes to curing cancer. It is still early days for Big Data implementation, however. Every industry and category i...

A recent proposal in the U.S. Senate to curb the impact of electronic surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency could enhance privacy for citizens and benefit businesses as well. However, major information technology companies that help the government collect telecom and Internet data s...

California is poised to enact a consumer-friendly law requiring smartphone manufacturers to install "kill switches" -- that is, antitheft technology that would be activated by the carrier when a consumer alerts it that a device has been stolen or lost. The technology not only wipes the device of per...

There's a New Sprint in town. Last week the earth shook twice in Kansas City -- once when Sprint decided to end its pursuit of T-Mobile, and then again when it replaced CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure. What can we expect next? The first thing is this: Sprint is going to be a very different kind of...

Amazon, which has for some time been locked in a battle with publishing giant Hachette over the pricing of e-books, has broadened the battlefield to take on Disney. It has stopped taking preorders of Disney DVD and Blu-ray discs. Amazon earlier this year stopped taking preorders for Hachette books.

U.S. government agencies are struggling to manage the huge amount of data they generate or process, despite the goals of a program designed to operate thousands of data centers more efficiently. The idea behind the FDCCI was to save space, energy and IT costs by consolidating woefully underutilized ...

A rising tide of interest has sparked a series of competitive moves among the widening array of software and technology providers vying for a share of the rapidly expanding IoT market. The enormous promise has driven a growing number of large and small players to rebrand and reposition their product...

Some Barnes & Noble customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day delivery of their purchases through Google Shopping Express, according to media reports that surfaced Thursday. Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby described the teamup as ...

Some Barnes & Noble customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day delivery of their purchases through Google Shopping Express, according to media reports that surfaced Thursday. Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby described the teamup as ...