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The Senate defeated a Republican bid to overturn Net neutrality rules on Thursday, thus paving the way for the regulations to take effect on Nov. 20. In a 52-to-46 vote along party lines, senators rejected S.J. Res. 6, the resolution proposed earlier this year by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison under the ...

Amazon has purchased Yap, a voice recognition startup, according to an SEC filing. The move added to speculation that Amazon is preparing a voice-command service similar to Apple's Siri or Google Android's Voice Actions. The transaction was apparently completed in September, but a public statement h...

Seven members of a massive alleged Internet fraud ring have been charged by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The ring infected more than 4 million computers worldwide with malware and rerouted online searches fraudulently to websites and ads, which then paid the ring's member...

Rumblefish and APM Music are teaming up to offer an online catalog of popular music and soundtracks to consumers looking to legally add sound to personal video content such as YouTube videos, slideshows or presentations. The partnership, announced Thursday, combines Rumblefish's experience with soci...

Several cable companies and the U.S. FCC have launched a program that will assist low-income families in getting access to broadband and low-cost computers. The initiative is part of the FCC's push to increase broadband adoption across the U.S. This particular program, in which such companies as Com...

A bipartisan trio of Senators has introduced a bill that gives states the authority to collect online sales taxes. The measure, cosponsored by Senators Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Dick Durbin, (D-Ill., and Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., carves out an exception for small businesses, one of the main objections to t...

Apple's iPhone is showing up everywhere this year. Most major competitors have it, and Apple has also knocked on the doors of some of the Tier 2 players. In an interesting twist, C Spire said yes, and U.S. Cellular said no thanks. Why? I thought everyone wanted the iPhone -- but they have their reas...

As an observer of the IT and Internet industries for several decades, I watch with great amusement as new buzzwords surface for old concepts. Not too long ago, the term "cloud computing" appeared on the scene. The technology concept behind cloud computing has been around for more than 50 years, and ...

AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo are joining forces to sell unused online ads to each other, a position designed to combat the growing market dominance of Google and Facebook. The partnership will allow the companies to buy and sell each other's online inventory of ads. The companies are interested in uppin...

Accel Partners is launching a $100 million fund to identify -- and fund -- entrepreneurs at every layer of the big data stack, in particular, those developing projects for the Apache Hadoop platform. The Accel Big Data Fund is aligned with Cloudera, which is pushing development in Hadoop. These pro...

American Express is extending its financial reach to the wild world of tech startups through a new multiyear digital commerce initiative. The $100 million program is designed to help identify and develop innovative technologies to aid the company's digital transformation and strengthen connections ...

Google has introduced Google+ Pages, an element of its Google+ social network that has been much anticipated by corporate brands. Pages provides a public placeholder on the Google+ network for any entity -- not just companies. A sports club like FC Barcelona, for example, could have its own page. Or...

The countdown to Cyber Monday has begun. Is your online business ready for the holiday shopping spree? We're all too familiar with sluggish online shopping experiences that have left us frustrated or caused us to leave the site altogether before we've completed a transaction. As the holiday shopping...

Last week, Calxeda launched its ARM-based "EnergyCore" Server on a Chip, which the company said consumes as little as 1.5 watts -- the first server CPU to achieve this milestone. This makes EnergyCore ideal for workloads such as Web serving, Big Data applications, scalable analytics such as Apache ...

Best Buy said Monday it would buy out Carphone Warehouse's interest in its North American Best Buy Mobile business for $1.3 billion. By purchasing the CPW stake, Best Buy is trying to shift more of its focus to mobile devices. Best Buy has asked CPW to stay on in a consultancy capacity for up to fiv...