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Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla have a lot in common with Apple, Google, HTC, Motorola, and Research In Motion. They are all warriors in the ongoing war to see who can amass the largest number of the most lucrative technology patents. Edison and Tesla waged their battle from the late 1860s through t...

U.S. government agencies will be moving quickly to implement contracting reforms for the procurement of information technology in the wake of policy changes revealed last week by the Office of Management and Budget. For IT vendors competing for a share of the $80 billion annual federal IT market, ke...

The U.S. General Services Administration selected more than a dozen companies to provide cloud-based information technology products for federal agencies last month, signaling a concrete investment in the cloud environment and underscoring the federal commitment to using the technology. GSA said it ...

Yahoo is planning to cut its workforce by about 650 employees Tuesday, according to numerous press reports, in response to pressure from investors who want the company to inject some life into its lackluster stock performance. The Web portal has been struggling in the face of stellar growth by compe...

Apple, Google and others reportedly have entered into a bidding war for the patents held by Nortel Networks, which is liquidating its assets in bankruptcy. Nortel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2009 but failed to emerge successfully and began selling assets in mid-2009. Nortel...

By any measure, IBM Connect, the annual IT analyst summit hosted by the company's Software Group (SWG), should have been a walk in the park. After all, the event followed close on the heels of IBM's System and Technology (STG) analyst briefing, and the central purpose of both events was to punctuate...

The U.S. government has largely failed to achieve the same productivity gains that private sector firms have experienced from utilizing IT -- despite spending $600 billion on information technology over the last decade or so. As a result, the federal Office of Management and Budget has initiated a n...

A federal judge on Friday dismissed a patent lawsuit Interval Licensing -- Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's company -- filed last August in Seattle against 11 firms, including Apple and Google. Interval claims the defendants violated four patents owned by Paul Allen's company Interval Research on te...

With holiday online shopping numbers at an all-time high, retailers understand that the Web is a critical sales channel. What they might be overlooking, however, is just how influential social networks have become in the shopping process -- both online and off. As more consumers turn to the Web and...

In what looks like a poke in the eye at Microsoft, Google has introduced Google Message Continuity, a service designed to safeguard Exchange messages through Gmail. The Postini-based service targets those who run Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007. It is designed to make sure users never lose access to...

As the year winds to an end, it is incumbent on all industry pundits to make predictions about what they envision for the coming year. Since I'm often lumped into this category, I'm obliged to offer my views about how the world will evolve over the next 12 months from a cloud computing perspective.

Dell announced Thursday it has entered into merger talks with Compellent Technologies, offering $27.50 per share for a total of nearly $900 million. The offer is below Compellent's stock price on Wednesday of $33.65 a share. While acquisition bids are typically slightly above stock price, Dell may s...

Netflix is spending big time to become the dominant video streaming player in the nascent Web-TV world. On Wednesday, Netflix announced it has reached an agreement with Walt Disney to stream ABC programs through its online service. The deal reportedly will last one year with an option to extend for ...

Every opportunity has a life span. Think about its course like a line or a wave that goes up then it comes down again. Fortunes are created, then lost, then created again. New technologies replace old technologies, and then they are replaced by newer technologies. If you know what's coming next, and...

At Google's Chrome OS event and demo on Tuesday, one of the participants was Amazon. The company chose this venue -- a competitor's product strategy launch -- to introduce an upgrade to its own go-to-market approach: the Kindle Web app. Now users can buy and read entire books from their browser with...