Articles by Renay San Miguel

The management organizational chart at Yahoo suddenly has fewer brackets on it, and the lines from those brackets now lead toward one name: New CEO Carol Bartz, who Thursday announced the first steps in realigning the company's executive structure As many analysts and tech bloggers expected, Bartz's moves are designed to help push Yahoo back to its...

Still smarting from a long-ago Best Picture snub for "A Few Good Men," I chose not to watch the Oscars this year because -- well, I can't handle the truth. So I got my Oscar news and views from various live blogging efforts that delivered their own snarkified take on Hollywood's idea of honoring truth in art It was more enjoyable, saved me the trou...

Follow a mail carrier around sometime; provided you don't get arrested for stalking a civil service worker, you'll likely notice a proliferation of bright-red Netflix envelopes containing the latest DVDs being shoved into mailboxes. But a statement by a company executive in New York Wednesday may signal the beginning of the end of such colorful real-world distribution of movies...

It can be argued that Yahoo doesn't need to engage in a lot of executive housecleaning and downsizing during a reorganization expected this week from new CEO Carol Bartz. The turmoil at Sunnyvale over the last year has achieved that goal for her "They've already had a pretty significant exodus of top talent over the last six months," Tim Bajarin, p...

What Hulu giveth, Hulu taketh away. At first applauded for its openness in providing its content to other distributors, the online streaming video company -- a joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. -- this week pulled back that content from Web-to-TV software provider Boxee and TV.com, CBS's digital video service. However, CBS is now pushing back at Hulu, and those rumblings you hear on the digital horizon may be the first shots fired in a new round of major media company battles over the right to watch TV shows on your computer...

Note: This is part of an occasional series of columns profiling former members of the traditional media who are now working in the digital arena It's June 1991, and I'm starting a new job as a reporter for the ABC affiliate in Dallas, WFAA-TV. It's intimidating as hell because the station's reputation in the industry is stellar, and I'm not sure I ...

If Alec Baldwin wants to help the free Web video service Hulu turn its users' brains into mush -- as per its new TV commercial unveiled during the Super Bowl -- he will have to do so without the help of Web-to-TV application Boxee Boxee announced Wednesday that Hulu, co-owned by NBC and Fox, had asked it to remove its content from its lineup. The m...

In advertising, the focus is on getting across a clear message to consumers. The Federal Trade Commission's message to advertisers in its staff report released Thursday regarding online consumer data collection was laser-like in its clarity: Get busy with protecting privacy, or the government will do it for you While the FTC will continue to back s...

I hadn't intended to write about Sirius XM so soon after last week's column, but the satellite radio company's financial woes were sending me a clear signal -- one uninterrupted by tunnels, mountains, sunspots and more than US$3 billion in debt I mentioned Sirius XM last week in reference to Congress' vote to delay the digital TV transition to June...

Apple's iPhone App Store can seem just as crowded as the real-world Apple Stores can get during the holiday shopping season at your nearest mall. Developers are racing to provide applications that bring more multimedia and data to your phone of choice, and it's that kind of growth that is prompting Sun Microsystems to introduce a new mobile version of its trailblazing Java programming language...

You know Amazon's Kindle has arrived as a consumer electronics product -- and pop culture talking-point -- when Stephen King makes the electronic book reader a major character in one of his forthcoming works King was on stage at New York's Morgan Library on Monday when Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos turned the page on Kindle 2, the newest version of its ele...

Can the wide-open vistas of the imagination that were unlocked by famed authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens really be enjoyed on a 3.5-inch smartphone screen? Will the wit of Mark Twain's Roughing It or the subtle comedy of manners found in Jane Austen's Emma come across well when the device you're reading those books on interrupts you for a phone call?...

With apologies to Oliver Stone, I have a conspiracy theory of my own regarding the real reason for the recent delay in the transition from analog to digital television Those endless public service announcements reminding us all of the previous February switchover date have become just so darn popular with TV viewers that the government and broadcas...

It's not "Star Trek" and Dr. "Bones" McCoy's tricorder sensor, but it is one step closer to where no medical patient has gone before; the ability to stream his or her vital signs from a health monitoring device to a computer, thanks to a partnership announced Thursday by IBM and Google IBM's new software will work with Google Health, the search gia...

Anyone using Google between 9:30 and 10:30 a.m. EST on Saturday saw an interesting message pop up alongside nearly all their search results: "This site may harm your computer." Users may indeed know that Web sites sometimes harbor suspicious computer code that can dump spyware or worse on their computers, and that Google will raise a red flag for its customers when it finds such a Web site in search results...

The government-backed mortgage bank Fannie Mae has already had its share of negative headlines over the past year, but officials there were close to suffering another major setback: a case of computer sabotage that would have resulted in millions of dollars in damage and wiped out customer mortgage data on the lender's 4,000 computer servers Rajend...

Another week, another round of bad news for those who bring you the bad news. Some California newspapers tell their employees to take a week off -- without pay. A 24-hour news channel run by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune is signing off due to a lack of investors. The Washington Post's Book World stand-alone section is stand-alone no more. The CBS station in the nation's top television market guts its on-air sports department. And speaking of sports, when was the last time the number of media passes handed out for a Super Bowl actually declined from the previous year?...

Michael Arrington helped make the technology blogosphere a must-read for many. Now, the influential TechCrunch blog founder says the blogosphere is showing its appreciation by encouraging some to abuse him Arrington announced Wednesday he will take some time off after he was spat on earlier this week as he was leaving a Munich conference. The incid...

It was supposed to be a legal showdown between the people who bring you The New York Times and the people who bring you community news; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists at the Gray Lady covering wars, presidential campaigns and Wall Street corporate meltdowns vs. low-paid reporters telling you about neighborhood zoning disputes, school district elections and reviews of new local restaurants...

Candidate Barack Obama promised to lift Bush Administration restrictions on embryonic stem cell research. Two days after he became President Obama, the government gave its approval for the first-ever human trials using therapies derived from this controversial area of science Geron, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based biotechnology firm, was given the go-ah...