Trends

China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce on Tuesday launched the latest in a series of investigations against Microsoft for possible violations of the country's antimonopoly law. Back in July 2014, about 100 SAIC officials burst into four Microsoft offices in various parts of China and...

Before the Internet, messages were spread by television and newspaper ads and highway billboards. Today that is done through social media. Virtually everyone knows about it, and many people use it. Does it make any sense that a U.S. government agency could violate any laws for using social media to ...

Will 2016 be a breakaway year for virtual reality technology? Exhibitors at CES 2016 this week seem to think so. More than three dozen of them will be flogging their VR wares at the show, more than double the number from last year. "2016 will be the year of VR," said Brian Blau, a research director ...

Microsoft on Monday announced that its Windows 10 operating system is now active on more than 200 million devices. Windows 10 adoption accelerated at the end of 2015, with more than 40 percent of new devices activated since Black Friday, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of the online audience...

A recent Pew Research Center study found that adoption of traditional high-speed Internet in the U.S. has fallen to 67 percent, the lowest level since 2012. More consumers were using mobile phones, the study found. Thirteen percent of respondents said they were smartphone-only customers, compared wi...

Several factors have contributed to the sudden expansion of connected car services available or coming to the market, notably the expansion of mobile broadband networks, high penetration of smartphones in the consumer market, and auto manufacturers' re-evaluation of connected services as a competiti...

Amazon on Monday reported a record competition-shattering performance during the Christmas holiday, adding more than 3 million Amazon Prime members last week alone. Holiday sales of Prime devices more than doubled last year's record number, the company said. The Prime Now program, which offers free ...

Target, Walmart and other large U.S. retailers have extended their hours on Christmas Eve in an effort to snag last-minute holiday shoppers. It's a wider net for consumers during a season in which about 17 percent of shoppers last week said they hadn't starting buying gifts, in a Reuters/Ipsos poll....

Sales of video games via downloads may surpass physical copies for the first time this holiday season. However, games in physical formats continue to dominate sales overall. "While it is clear that digital downloading is growing, ... we see that within consoles and portables, new physical software r...

A Brazilian judge on Thursday lifted the ban a different judge had imposed on WhatsApp hours earlier, according to reports. It did not seem reasonable to affect millions of users to penalize Facebook, WhatsApp's owner, for failing to cooperate with judicial rulings, the judge reportedly said, sugges...

Two Yahoo investors, acting independently, have publicly called for radical changes or a potential sale of the firm. Both Canyon Capital Advisors and SpringOwl Asset Management apparently were unappeased by last week's announcement that Yahoo would spin off its core Internet business. Canyon Capital...

Alibaba Group last week announced that it has entered an agreement to buy the South China Morning Post and other media assets of SCMP Group. Alibaba, which claims to be the world's largest online and mobile commerce company, said its vision was to provide objective coverage of China to readers aroun...