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Research In Motion continued to score victories at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this week, with another disputed patent held by NTP ruled to be invalid -- but the BlackBerry service faces a critical courtroom showdown on Friday. That's when a judge will hold a long-awaited hearing on whether...

Sun Microsystems on Thursday said it has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Aduva. Aduva's solution attempts to ease the management of open- and mixed-source server stacks. Aduva's technology competes with products from Levanta, Red Hat, PatchLink and BigFix. Sun was particularly attrac...

Despite some chest beating by the entertainment industry Wednesday over the shutdown of one of the biggest index servers on the eDonkey network, a raid by Belgian and Swiss police seems to have had little impact on file-sharing traffic. "We have seen no effect on the eDonkey traffic levels," Andrew ...

U.S. advertisers have turned the practice of "product placement" into a lucrative market. This advertising phenomenon makes possible the insertion of an advertiser's product into a film, television program or video game. The estimated value of the total product-placement industry in 2005 -- when you...

Sprint Nextel posted sharply lower profits in its first full quarter as a merged company, saying the cost of combining the wireless powerhouse with the traditional long-distance company kept profits down even while the company added subscribers. Sprint Nextel said it earned US$197 million, or 7 cent...

Microsoft's rivals on Wednesday banded together to bring a new charge against the software giant to the European Commission: unfair competition. Microsoft "threatens to deny enterprises and individual consumers real choice," the European Committee for Interoperable Systems argued. The ECIS was forme...

Somewhere between no-frills Craigslist and intricate eBay lies the new e-commerce offering introduced by Santa Monica, Calif.-based TagWorld last week. TagWorld, a high-energy social networking space launched last November, is combining the new service of free online classifieds, which includes imag...

Online retailers and service providers improved their customer satisfaction ratings during 2005 and Web-based retailers continued to do a better job of making buyers happy than their off-line counterparts, according to a new report. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Commerce Report c...

Symantec on Tuesday announced that it has completed the acquisition of Relicore, a provider of data center change and configuration management solutions. Relicore's flagship product, Relicore Clarity, automatically discovers, maps and tracks changes to application and server components in real time...

Sony's highly anticipated PlayStation 3 gaming console may not reach the market on schedule, an analyst firm says, leading to speculation that the company could lose ground in the video game war brewing among Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft. PS3 is slated to debut this spring in Japan with later launch...

Can reviewing the path of a cab ride shared by quarrelling inventors be a better solution to a patent dispute than years-long litigation that could otherwise reach up to the U.S. Supreme Court? Jorge Goldstein, managing director at the firm of Sterne, Kessler, Goldstein and Fox, based in Washington,...

In the never-ending quest to differentiate themselves from competitors, online retailers often turn to content to set themselves apart and enhance the quality of their Web contact with customers and would-be customers. The need to automate the distribution of content has given rise to a fast-growing...

Sirius Satellite Radio's fourth quarter sales more than tripled over the previous year, beating analyst estimates, despite higher quarterly losses tied to heavy promotional efforts aimed at boosting its subscriber base, the company reported. Sirius, which is locked in a battle for market share with...

Most electronics consumers had never heard of rootkits before last year's Sony BMG debacle. Now, rootkits have the attention of the U.S. public -- and the U.S. government. The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday suggested that a measure outlawing the controversial software may be in order. A...

So much has been written of late about emerging foreign markets. Most of us realize that, by and large, these markets are located in the Far East. For example, Japan has been an economic powerhouse for quite a while now, followed in time by South Korea and China. Recently, India has been making grea...