Internet

What is a high-end entertainment system? That question can be answered in a variety of ways. For some people, "high-end" means systems bought at a specialty retailer, e.g., Bang & Olufsen, Tweeter or Ultimate Electronics. For others, price determines a high-end entertainment system -- $5,000, $1...

In a demonstration of its efforts to bridge the chasm between Web-based applications and client, or native, applications, Google announced changes to its Google Earth 3-D mapping software as well as Google Gears Wednesday at its annual I/O software developer's conference in San Francisco. For webmas...

Facebook is introducing a tabbed interface as part of its ongoing effort to keep its profile page fresh-looking and streamlined, in contrast with many other social networking sites. This latest change, which is currently in beta, will introduce separate tabs for a personal news feed, photos, applica...

Netflix has launched a new set-top TV box that may usher in a new generation for the company's movie distribution model -- online streaming downloads directly to a consumer's television. To get the job done, Netflix has teamed with Roku to build the new box, called "The Netflix Player by Roku." The ...

It's heartening to see that Mark Zuckerberg is following my advice and seeking a sit-down with Google to hammer out their differences over this Friend Connect thing. It would be heartening as well to see Facebook coming to the defense of my private data as forcefully as it has been -- if only it act...

OPINION

Avoiding Death by Merger

I used to run a post-merger clean-up team for IBM years ago, and have since spent a great deal of time thinking about and dealing with major mergers that clients have undertaken. In a market like this, consolidation and acquisition are inevitable, and knowing how to play in what will likely be the k...

TECH BLOG

Who Is Facebook Trying to Protect?

Google and Facebook have been at each other's throats in recent days over Friend Connect, Google's platform for mirroring your social networking data around the Web. Apparently, Facebook doesn't like the fact that Friend Connect does exactly what it's designed to do. This from a blog post by Faceboo...

Fighting the animated powers of evil may be a reward unto itself for some gamers, but it can't hold a candle to finding a cure for cancer. A new game from scientists at the University of Washington, however, aims to tap gamers' brain power to make medical discoveries, with the potential even to win ...

At last week's UCLA Technology & Aging Conference, representatives from Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Toyota and other big-name firms discussed how technology is reshaping lifestyles for older individuals. However, important policy implications directly connected to these new tools went unspoken.

IBM has released additional Lotus software for Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry platform, taking the set of applications further beyond the realm of simple e-mail and into the wild world of Web 2.0 social networking applications. Yes, that's social networking for the enterprise. While IBM alr...

Star gazers and astronomers now have a powerful new tool that will allow them to surf the skies from their desktop. Microsoft unveiled the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope Web application Monday. The software creates an experience that users of all ages will find captivating, said Frank Reddy,...

It seems as though everyone wants to be both social and portable these days. Google, Yahoo, Facebook and MySpace all have recently trumpeted their latest efforts at openness. Are they really the same? In some cases -- Yahoo and Google, primarily -- the OpenSocial framework is providing a set of stan...

Powerset, a new Internet search engine company, has launched a proof-of-concept salvo in the search engine war -- a natural language processing engine that attempts to understand the meaning behind a search phrase and the text it's searching against. Instead of returning a long list of results that ...

Long before social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook set up shop online, there was a social element to playing video games. Gamers have always congregated together, extolling or deriding the merits of one game over another, participating in tournaments and broadcasting their gaming explo...

I'm often fascinated by mergers, or I should say I'm fascinated by how often they are attempted and how rarely they succeed. While it may appear that smaller mergers are more successful than larger ones, the reality is smaller merger failures are vastly easier to cover up. Very few mergers actually ...

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