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My first impression of Expedia -- a site that I used to frequent but haven't visited in at least a year -- is that its design is refreshingly straightforward: a three-column layout relatively uncluttered with self-promotion. Not that it's completely devoid of such ads. (Note to Web designers: Most p...

Sprint on Thursday announced a new calling plan featuring unrestricted wireless calling to any mobile phone on any U.S. wireless carrier. Sprint describes its Any Mobile, Anytime plan as a new feature to the carrier's Everything Data plan. The Any Mobile, Anytime plan's price starts at $69.99 per mo...

Today's volatile economy is pushing more companies to consider the merits of a virtual workplace for some or all of their employees. Often, however, the idea fails to go anywhere because neither managers nor their workers are sure how to get started. Also, attitudes among some old-school managers po...

September is shaping up to be a crucial time for the future of Google's much-vaunted digital library. The month has already seen a flood of briefs on a proposed settlement in the lawsuit filed by authors and publishers over Google's effort to digitize the world's books. Next week, the U.S. Justice D...

It is rather challenging to hit a moving target when it keeps changing directions. That's a bit like how Cameron Brain, CEO of Open Box Technologies, felt when he set his sights on a particular business market while still in college. In 2006, Brain and a group of classmates at Rensselaer Polytechnic...

Google has proposed modifying its proposed digital books deal with publishers and authors in an effort to tamp down growing opposition to the project. The changes would limit the number of out-of-print books it places online. Industry groups were given a venue to complain about the proposed agreemen...

A rose by any other name can raise quite the stink, making the act of localizing Web sites to fit foreign cultures all the more thorny. Even if the product is as sweet as ice cream, it's possible to leave a bitter taste in consumer's mouths. "Ben and Jerry launched their 'black and tan' flavor of ic...

On Facebook, most people make friends the old-fashioned way -- by sending a request to be added to someone's posse of pals. Now, an Australian marketing company hopes to save you time and energy by simply buying you a few thousand buddies. The service from uSocial is mostly meant for businesses, cel...

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has temporarily stayed an injunction against the sale of Microsoft Word that had been set to go into effect next month. Microsoft will be able to continue selling copies of its ubiquitous word processing software -- at least until the appeal of the o...

Several telephone companies have suggested to the FCC that it change its definition of broadband. Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are asking the government to define broadband transmissions as anything over 768 Kbps downstream and 200 Kbps upstream. They were responding to an FCC call seeking definiti...

Travel Web sites were among the first category of e-commerce ventures to actually make a buck a decade or so ago. It is astounding, therefore, that recent industry reports show a deep dissatisfaction among many users of these portals. In particular, Forrester Research recently reported on the failin...

The European Commission on Thursday expanded its investigation into Oracle's plans to purchase Sun Microsystems. The EC wants to study the potential antitrust issues arising from proprietary database vendor Oracle's takeover of Sun's open source MySQL database application. It will issue its ruling o...

If you ask anyone today to define "cloud computing," there is slim chance you will get agreement on an exact definition. It is one of those emerging technologies that everyone knows they want to get into, but no one seems to know why or what the real benefit is. There is a lot of promise, but very ...

Congress should enact strict controls on how online advertisers can monitor and track consumers' behavior, according to 10 privacy groups that formed a coalition to lobby for the cause. The group has sent letters to six members of the U.S. House of Representatives describing the extent to which pers...

Gmail's 100-minute outage Tuesday was the result of a cascading series of router failures caused by a combination of hardware maintenance and traffic policies, Google said. The failure of the third-most popular Web mail service left users around the world who access the system online instead of thro...