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It is the dream for consumers who are tired of lusting after shiny new smartphones that belong to somebody else's carrier; the ability to buy any feature-rich phone from any device maker and tie it to any wireless provider they choose -- exclusivity be damned. Frustrated consumers in some rural area...

Though the video game industry weathered several months of relatively healthy sales despite a troubled overall economic climate, declarations that the sector is recession proof may have been premature. Video game industry sales fell 31 percent year-over-year for the month of June, totaling $1.17 bil...

Microsoft and Yahoo may be close to finalizing details on the elusive search and online advertising deal that the two have been flirting with for more than a year. Microsoft executives reportedly have flown from their Redmond headquarters to Silicon Valley to finalize details relating to the deploym...

Macrovision, a company that has a number of operations under its roof but is best known for its digital rights management software, has issued a spate of announcements. Two major developments head the list: It is changing its name, and it is embarking on a new product path -- namely the launch of a ...

When e-commerce was hatched back in the '90s, it would have lived for a while without Web analytics, but not for long. It would have died a cruel death in its nest, hungrily watching as bigger, more traditional channels ate up all the nurturing dollars brought to the nest by its parent company -- ex...

A hack into Twitter's back-end productivity applications earlier this month is raising some serious questions -- not only about password system security itself, but also about some consequences of network intrusion that may have been unforeseen. About a month ago, a hacker was able to access a Twitt...

On June 10, Antenna Software completed the acquisition of Dexterra for an undisclosed amount, solidifying its position as a key player in the mobile middleware/platform space, with a sharpened focus on field force enablement. This market grab comes on the heels of Antenna's acquisition of Vettro's s...

An unhappy Kindle customer is taking his grievance to court. Seattle resident Matthew Geise bought the second-generation model of Amazon.com's popular e-reader device, the Kindle 2 -- along with the $29.99 Kindle Cover -- only to find that this protective covering was anything but. Geise made the pu...

There was a day not that long ago when companies actually controlled their brands. Their marketing teams decided which messages their consumers were going to see and hear. Companies decided which publications, television shows and Web sites they wanted their ads to appear in, and they limited their ...

Worldwide PC shipments will fall on a year-over-year basis for the first time in nearly a decade, but all signs still point to a late-year tech sector recovery, according to research firm iSuppli. Shipments will fall 4 percent from 2008 sales, to 287.3 million units, the firm predicted. This is the ...

Seeking to supplement the dramatic falloff in demand from the world's retail and wholesale giants in the wake of the global recession, more manufacturers than ever before are turning to international e-commerce to find and attract new buyers. As more and more China-based manufacturers raise their o...

Microsoft is taking a new pricing approach with its upcoming Windows Azure cloud operating system: It will allow customers to pay on a per-use basis rather than calculating license fees according to number of processors or some other traditional measure. Microsoft reportedly will charge for the serv...

Roughly six weeks after launching its Bing search engine, Microsoft proudly announced the number of unique hits to the site grew by 8 percent in June. This shows users are trying Bing and the word is spreading, said Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online audience business group, wh...

Blockbuster and Samsung announced Tuesday that they are partnering to bring the movie-rental chain's digital streaming library to the electronics giant's televisions, home theater systems and Blu-ray disc players. The service should be available by this fall. The owners of some existing 2009 model t...

Pay per click advertising is a huge market. The model is especially attractive to new companies that have not yet established themselves in the organic search engine rankings. The downside is that making PPC pay can be quite an exhausting and overwhelming task. There's much more to it than choosin...