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Buzz is building over Facebook's rumored plan to launch a mobile video app for Instagram at an event on Thursday. Video functionality in Instagram, the company Facebook purchased for $1 billion in April of last year, would be a direct challenge to Twitter's Vine app. Vine lets users take 6-second vi...

Google has settled the class-action shareholder lawsuit that had been blocking a stock split it originally announced last year, the company said Monday, paving the way for it to move forward with the split as planned. The suit's settlement was an eleventh-hour development in this 14-month storyline,...

The GAO earlier this month found two key deficiencies in a cloud contract that the CIA intended to award to AWS. The GAO decision was prompted by a protest against the contract filed by IBM. GAO is the designated federal agency for handling challenges to federal contracts. The proposed contract prov...

Video streaming service Netflix on Monday announced a new, multiyear partnership with DreamWorks Animation whereby it will bring many of the studio's beloved characters to the TV market via a branded collection of shows. Marking the largest deal for original first-run content in Netflix's history, t...

In the wake of recent revelations that the government has been tapping their networks to monitor users, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft in recent days have all published more information about those monitoring requests. Facebook, for example, on Friday reported that for the six months ending December ...

Movie studios and TV networks increasingly are turning to social media for help with generating buzz about their upcoming releases and programming. Communities are building around favorite movie franchises like the Twilight and Avengers series and TV shows like Downton Abbey and The Walking Dead. Ha...

With nearly every market forecast and growing anecdotal evidence pointing to escalating demand for cloud-based alternatives to traditional on-premises systems and software, the challenges of integrating the new on-demand solutions with existing applications and data sources are becoming even more cr...

Microsoft is the latest product manufacturer to follow the retail trend of setting up shop within a big box store. Best Buy and Microsoft on Thursday announced plans to open the Windows Store only at Best Buy in 500 retail locations in the U.S. and more than 100 in Canada. The stores will range in s...

Mobile technologies may tend to focus on life's present and future, but Foursquare this week launched a feature that gives users new insight into the past. Specifically, the location-based social networking service on Thursday introduced the Foursquare Time Machine, a tool that allows users to retra...

TECHNOLOGY LAW CORNER

Patenting Future Cures - or Not

In a hotly contested case, the Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously decided that some of Myriad Genetics' patent claims were invalid for claiming products of nature. However, the Court also held that other Myriad patent claims were perfectly valid. In short, Myriad discovered the location and DNA s...

Verizon is on the hot seat. It is at the center of the story about releasing customer information to the U.S. National Security Agency. While Verizon does make information about every call available to the NSA, the actual conversation is still private -- for now, at least. To date, Verizon has been ...

Time Warner Cable appears to have come up with a strategy to help stem the flow of cord-cutters: offering incentives to content providers to withhold certain properties from online entertainment platforms. Limited distribution is clearly an entrenched practice in the entertainment industry, but it s...

Former Palm CEO and webOS creator Jon Rubinstein is apparently still brooding over Palm's acquisition by HP. Two years later, he looks back at what HP did with webOS -- or rather what it didn't do -- and he is very disappointed, he said in a recent interview. When HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion i...

In an effort to manage acquisition fees, Pandora Radio has acquired a terrestrial radio station based in Rapid City, S.D. The move enables Pandora to be subject to licensing fees and royalties for broadcast radio stations rather than streaming stations. Internet radio companies such as Pandora, Spot...

Comcast this week announced new software for its set-top boxes, opening a window into how cable TV companies hope to retain customers tempted to move their eyeballs to online-only alternatives. Comcast X2 blends cable offerings like on-demand movies, program guides and digital video recording with o...

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