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It looks like the Kindle Fire is a loss leader for Amazon product sales. IHS iSuppli tore apart a Kindle Fire to assess the cost of the tablet's bill of materials. The research firm announced on Friday that the Fire's BOM adds up to $185.60. The cost drifts up to $201.70 when manufacturing services ...

Yelp filed for an initial public offering Thursday, joining a cadre of social websites that have either made the leap into public trading recently or are aiming for it in the near future. In going public, Yelp hopes to raise as much as $100 million. The San Francisco-based company has gained popular...

In an effort to compete in the digital music market against giants Apple and Amazon, Google debuted its online music store Wednesday, where users can purchase and stream songs through the search giant's Android market. It also opened its free online music locker service to all users. Google Music w...

The starting gun has just been fired. The new Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet have entered the tablet space, preparded to compete with the Apple iPad. That means this new industry segment will quickly change and evolve into a completely new and different model. The problem is, ...

The TV world may soon go the way of the phone and the music industry: a complete deconstruction thanks to the Internet. The next step may come from Sony. The company is experimenting with an online TV service, according to a recent report. Sony has reportedly reached out to several large media compa...

The board was re-elected, company executives were questioned about corporate strategy, a proposal to create a sustainability committee was killed. All in all, it was business as usual at Microsoft's annual shareholders' meeting Tuesday, except for some uncomfortable talk -- uncomfortable from Micros...

Turkey hotlines revolutionized the way home cooks dealt with kitchen emergencies during Thanksgiving. Now, hotlines are being joined by social media, videos, apps and other twenty-first century ways of solving bird problems. The Butterball Turkey Talk-Line women -- and they are all women -- have bee...

Tech heavyweights such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga are lining up in opposition to a copyright enforcement bill that will be the subject of a hearing in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee on Wednesday: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. The companies sent a letter to key me...

Google is adding 24/7 phone support for its Google Apps for Business product line -- the first time since the apps launched in 2007. It is a major step forward for Google, which has been pushing to place these apps on the desktop alongside -- or even, hopefully, in place of -- Microsoft's productivi...

For U.S.-based retailers, running a successful global e-commerce business takes the right balance of strong local marketing and effective operations. While it is essential that retailers cater to local customer experience expectations, it is also critically important to abide by local laws and regu...

Microsoft's Windows Phone platform is gaining more interest from application developers. In fact, it's captured more developer mindshare than Research In Motion's older and more widespread BlackBerry platform, according to a recent study. The third-quarter 2011 results of a survey by Appcelerator an...

The industry roils with definitions and explanations of cloud. These definitions come from product vendors cloud-washing their products, cloud providers positioning their cloud infrastructure, IT teams attempting to cloud-paint their efforts in virtualization, and even from consultants writing artic...

Citigroup has reached an agreement to sell its music label, EMI Group, in two parts for a total of $4.1 billion. Universal Music Group has announced it is buying EMI's recorded music division for $1.9 billion. Sony/ATV, according to news reports, has nabbed -- or is poised to nab shortly -- EMI's pu...

Google has acquired a startup called Apture that provides a new type of search functionality beneficial to publishers -- or anyone, that is, who hates to see Web users leave a page's content to search out related information. Apture has developed technology that displays links to related information...

Oracle's recent acquisition of RightNow raises a question: Can multiple cloud companies be merged together to form a tightly coupled suite of solutions like those which were promised but never delivered during the client-server era? On the face of things, it would appear that merging cloud companies...